Lately, I’ve been keeping track of my book reading, and to help focus my
reflection (and as an aid to my own memory), I have taken to writing a few
lines for each book I complete. March was a particularly good book-reading
month, and since I’ve not posted anything on this website for more than year, I
thought I’d share last month’s reading notes.
First, over March I read a few books that are broadly philosophical:
The Lies that Bind: Rethinking
Identity
(Kwame Anthony Appiah) — this is an accessible discussion of contemporary
identity markers — creed, country, colour, class, culture — taking into account
their history, how they function, and the grip they have on us in our
contemporary world. Appiah, with who has mixed heritage (Ghana and England),
weaves carefully selected examples into an extended argument to the effect that
we would do well to understand how these identities are historically
contingent, and open to change.
The Philosophy of Hope: Beatitude in
Spinoza
(Alexander Douglas) — Alex is a colleague of mine in
Philosophy at St Andrews,
and this is a lovely short book on Spinoza’s account of what we can ultimately
hope for. Spinoza’s concept of beatitude—of how it is that we can escape from
the conditions of death and this fallen world—is provocative, and Alex shows
how this radical conclusion follows naturally from Spinoza’s account of what is
ultimately real.
The Force of
Non-Violence
(Judith Butler) — I’ve long been sympathetic to pacifism and the power of
non-violent struggle, so I was interested to see what Judith Butler, a
philosopher working from a very different background and tradition to my own,
has to say. Although a lot of Butler’s writing can be hard going for those not
at home in contemporary critical theory, this book is more accessible. Like
many good books on non-violence, the account turns away from the purely
negative characterisation in terms of avoiding violence, toward an
expansive account of widening the circle of whose lives ultimately count, or in
Butler’s telling (which is less actuarial and more human), whose lives are
grievable.
March’s fiction was all science fiction, though these three books were all
very different from each other:
This is How You Lose The Time
War
(Amal El-Mohta, Max Gladstone) — this is a delightful novella with two
protagonists, initially working on opposite sides of an epoch spanning
time-travelling conflict between a force of order and force of chaos, only to
find that they form a bond that literally transcends time and space. Told
through letters, it’s a delightful and touching way to spend a windy weekend
afternoon.
Dune
(Frank Herbert) — I’d never made it more than 10 pages through Dune, but having
seen the conclusion of Villeneuve’s two-part movie spanning the novel, I
thought I’d try to revisit it. I got through the whole thing, and I enjoyed
getting some perspective on what Villeneuve kept in and what he left out.
Having read the synposis of what happens in the rest of the Dune novels, I have
no desire to spend more time in that world, but it was enjoyable enough to get
through this one story.
The Inheritors (Jill Dobson) —
Jill is an Australian friend who now lives in
Glasgow, and this novel is a recent update of a Young Adult dystopian future
story she wrote in her late teens. It’s a coming-of-age story set in a highly
controlled society, under a dome, in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic
wasteland in the second half of the 21st century. It was a fun read, and the
story went in directions I wasn’t expecting.
In March I read two books that advertise themselves as “self-help” writing.
Again these books share a genre, but otherwise, differ greatly:
Slow
Productivity
(Cal Newport) — Newport is a theoretical computer
scientist, more famous for his work on “deep work”, “digital minimalism” and
other ideas that are expressible in two-word slogans. Slow Productivity is his
latest. Newport is a thoughtful person, who works in academia and is aware of
the pressures involved in the daily grind of what people call “knowledge work.”
He’s also not obsessed with “productivity” in the sense of directing all your
energy toward making yourself an efficient worker in the contemporary economy.
In this latest book, he describes and argues for taking a slower and more
reflective pace for your work, and that lesson seems worth heeding.
How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of
Distraction
(John Cassian, selected, translated and introduced by Jamie Kreiner) — This “how
to” book, from Princeton University Press, is a selection of passages from the
fifth-century CE monk John Cassian’s Conferences, a large work where Cassian
and his friend Germanus travel around Egypt, conferring with more experienced
monks about how they go about the business of meditating. I’ve been interested
in the Christian mediation tradition for many years, and the
Conferences has been on my list to read. These extracts were an
enjoyable start, though I am not sure that if you were interested in learning
to focus your attention for reasons other than sitting quietly in meditation,
this would be the place I’d start. Still, I enjoyed this one, and reading these
extracts has placed the whole unexpurgated Conferences higher on my
to-read-sometime list.
Finally, I read two other theology books over March:
Reading Romans
Backwards
(Scot McKnight) — this is a commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, and it
takes the provocative and helpful line of reading the book backwards, taking
special account of the audience of the letter, and all we learn from the big
list of greetings and exhortations to various people at the letter’s end. Once
we realise that the nascent Christian community in Rome is a mixed group of
Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus, with its own tensions over Torah
observance, we can see that the letter is not a context-free statement of
Paul’s theology, but is addressed to a specific community. Read in that light,
the beginning chapters of Romans read very differently, and I learned a lot
from McKnight’s text.
Living with the
Psalms
(John Bell) — we spent this Easter on Iona, and I picked this slim volume from
John Bell up at the Iona Community Bookshop. John Bell has been active in the
church in Scotland and in the Iona Community for many years, and he has
reflected long and hard about the use of words in song and worship, and so, he
has lived with the Psalms for a long time. Unlike the McKnight book, this isn’t
a commentary, but is a poet-priest’s reflection on these words and how they
can function in the life of the individual and the community.
