Recent reading: Ulysses

Ulysses by James Joyce
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is one of the books that appears on lists of “books you ought to read before you die”, and “greatest novels of the 20th century”.
I can’t remember where and how I acquired my copy; I’ve had it for years, and it’s been on my “to [...]

Recent reading: To dream of the dead

To Dream of the Dead by Phil Rickman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is more of a “what I learned from this book” than a review.
It was about ten or twelve years ago that I picked up one of Phil Rickman’s books (it was Crybbe or Candlenight), concluded from the blurb that Rickman was [...]

Mutual influence among the Inklings

The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Pavlac Glyer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Several books and articles have been written about the literary group known as the Inklings, but this is one of the best and most informative.
The Inklings were a group of [...]

Reading: The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett

The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett by S.E. Gontarski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Currently reading” is a misnomer in this case — it is not a book one reads, but a book one refers to, a kind of concordance of Samuel Beckett’s works, with explanations of obscure allusions and such.
My first introduction to Beckett [...]

Reading: The man in the moss

Man in the Moss: Crybbe by Phil Rickman

My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Phil Rickman’s books are difficult to find, and one buys them when one can. This was one of his earlier ones, which we hadn’t read. Many of his other books have characters that appear again, but this one is in a different [...]

Reading: The Concise Pepys

The Concise Pepys by Samuel Pepys

My review
rating: 3 of 5 stars
It’ts taken me two and a half years to read the concise version, I hate to think how long it would take to read the full version!
One of the drawbacks of the concise version is that it doesn’t really say what the basis for [...]

Keeping track of your reading on the web

I enjoy reading, and try to keep track of books I’ve read or am reading, if only to prevent my taking books out of the library that I’ve already read, or, even worse, buying books in bookshops that I already own.
There are quite a lot of web sites that claim to help you do that, [...]

Orthodoxy and science fiction

Excellent article by Father Stephen on Orthodoxy and science fiction.
I have long thought of science fiction as a form of modern theology – or at least of modern theological thought. It is a sad tragedy that a science fiction writer, in at least one case, was so bold as to create his own religion – [...]

Church and Empire

Some months ago I was reading things about the emerging church movement being concerned about the abandoned places of empire. I wasn’t sure what the “abandoned places of empire” meant, and I’m still not sure what it means. But today I came across a blog post from a Mule in the chapter house that makes [...]

Again and again

No, not “Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord” but again and again we keep hearing of the atrocities of the Brewer brothers in destroying Christian bookshops.
Hat-tip to Phil Groom for this link to an article in the Northern Echo:
AN unholy row has broken out over the running of a cathedral [...]