July and August have been really busy, not with teaching (it’s the summer
teaching break), but with research and research supervision, a little bit of
holiday travel, and various life things taking up my time and attention. I
have had time to read, but not so much time to write paragraphs about each
book. Instead of skipping the books-of-the-month post entirely, here’s a
stripped back version with a link and a sentence for each book.
July was Kierkegaard month.
I enjoyed reading through: Fear and
Trembling,
which I’d known of for many years, but never read through. He’s a striking
prose stylist, as well as a thoughtful reader of the biblical Abraham and Isaac
story. Alongside, I read Jeffrey
Hanson’s Kierkegaard and the
Life of
Faith,
which is not only a commentary and analysis of Fear and Trembling, but an
extensive treatment of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical,
and a thoughtful and sympathetic treatment of Kierkegaard’s account of the life
of faith.
The other non-fiction in July was Walter
Wink’s Naming the
Powers—again,
a classic that had been looming in the background of a lot of the theology I’ve
read over the years; Ivan Illich’s
Tools for Conviviality,
which reminded me of Weil’s The Need for
Roots,
in that it’s a presecription for a radically reconfigured human polity, taking
seriously the premise that human flourishing involves life together; and, for
a complete change of pace, Classical Mechanics: The Theoretical
Minimum
from Leonard Susskind and
George Hrabovsky—I’ve not
seriously thought through any physics in a systematic way since high school
(and I think it wasn’t systematic then, either), so getting a gentle
introduction to the basics of classical mechanics was fun.
The only fiction for July was Orbital: A
Novel
by Samantha Harvey, a gentle meditative story
that takes in the perspective of a team of astronauts on the International
Space Station. You get to imagine the astronauts experiencing the overview
effect, each in their own way,
during 16 orbits of the earth over a 24 hour period. Delightful.
