New on the Book Table
Perhaps the most cherished and coddled of all my vices is the buying of many books. In these straitened times, however, I have had to apply some much-needed discipline to my excessive book-purchasing. The rule I try to hold is this: I keep what I am currently reading on a side table next to my favorite chair, and I do not purchase new books until the table top is emptied. I recently passed that milestone when I finally finished up with History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (skimming over the battlefield maneuverings and savoring the speeches.)
The previous reading list is now off the table and on the shelves. I found some good bargains online, and Eighth Day Books' annual 15% off sale came along at just the right time, bringing a couple of volumes within the arc of affordability. So, the books I will be reading for the foreseeable future--in no particular order--are as follows:
1. Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse by Roger Kimball
2. Early England and the Saxon English: With Some Notes on the Father Stock of the Saxon-English, the Frisians by William Barnes
3. Christianity and Culture by T. S. Eliot
4. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other by Walker Percy
5. Orthodox Psychotherapy: The Science of the Fathers by Metropolitan Hierotheos
6. When Church Became Theater: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America by Jeanne Halgren Kilde
7. The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain by Scott Cairns
8. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters by Pavel Florensky
9. The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church, Volume Three (January, February) by Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra
10. The Lives of the Monastery Builders of Soumela: Saints Barnabas and Sophronios of Athens and Christopher of Trebizon
11. Nights of the Red Moon by Milton T. Burton
These books will keep me occupied and out of trouble in the days ahead. If I hold to my discipline, Florensky's volume alone will keep me out of the book-buying loop for quite some time to come.