10 June, 2006

Books, of course.

I'm not doing much better on the book-reading front...I finished five books in May, and I still haven't finished Lorna Doone. But it's a new month, and I'll try to read more so I can catch up to last year.

Last month I read St. Ives, by R.L. Stevenson, which was a very good story about a French prisoner of war held in Edinburgh; Hannah Coulter, by Wendell Berry; Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, which our ladies' book club will be reading; Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe, about a harlot who repents, kinda; and The Hermit of Eyton Forest (a Cadfael mystery), by Edith Pargeter.

This month I would like to finish reading Lorna Doone and The Marble Faun (Hawthorne), and work pretty hard on the books on my lists in the sidebar. We'll see how that works out.

I leave you with a quote from The Way of Ignorance, a collection of essays by Wendell Berry:

'The rugged individualism of the left believes that an individual's body is a property belonging to that individual absolutely: the owners of bodies may, by right, use them as they please, as if there were no God, no legitimate government, no community, no neighbors, and no posterity. This supposed right is manifested in the democratizing of "sexual liberation"; in the popular assumption that marriage has been "privatized" and so made subordinate to the wishes of individuals; in the proposition that the individual is "autonomous"; in the legitimation of abortion as birth control--in the denial, that is to say, that the community, the family, one's spouse, or even one's own soul might exercise a legitimate proprietary interest in the use one makes of one's body.'

2 comments:

Kelly said...

Okay, I need to start reading Wendell Berry, only I don't know which Port William story he wrote first. Do you have a list of the right order to read them in? "Right order" for Port William being the same as "right order" for Narnia, of course. ;-)

Thanks!

Miss Puritan Chickie said...

Well...there's a book that has all of the short stories in it according to chronological order. It's called That Distant Land, and tells you where the various novels fit in. But I think he actually wrote the novel Nathan Coulter first.

I read That Distant Land first because I didn't know any of his other works. And our library doesn't have Nathan Coulter, so I still haven't read it.