Jane Eyre's Natural Theology

http://www.film-intel.com/2011/09/jane-eyre-cinema-review.html

"Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night: too serene for the companionship of fear.  We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence...  Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky Way.  Remembering what it was - what countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light - I felt the might and strength of God.  Sure was I of His efficiency to save what He had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured.  I turned my prayer to thanksgiving: the Source of Life was also the Saviour of spirits."

- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2006, pp. 324-5)

A Literary Meme

I found this meme on Ali's blog, and decided to do it even though I wasn't tagged.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog. The premise of this exercise is that the (American) National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling. I've been resisting, because whenever someone tells me that I have to do something, I usually refuse! But I'm thinking about reading the series after the PhD!
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee.
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. Hated it!
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman. Well, I've read the first one. The others - maybe after the thesis.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens. It's on my shelf.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare. I think I've read 5, but one day I'd like to be able to say I've read them all.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell. I have a vague feeling I read this once, but I can't really remember...
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald. I'm not absolutely sure I finished it, though...
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens. It's on my shelf. And I'd like to see the BBC series.
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy. It's been on the shelf since the end of 1998 when I bought it for $4.95 - bargain! One day I'll read it. I hope.
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams. The first one was hilarious, the second quite amusing, but the third just got too silly. Mattresses flollopping in swamps?!
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh. I really wanted to see the movie, but didn't get around to it.
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy. I've tried a couple of times - maybe after the thesis? (That's becoming a theme!)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens. On my shelf...
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen. Probably my favourite Jane Austen!
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis. I read this many times when I was a kid, but couldn't get into the others. When I re-read the series in the first year of my PhD, I loved it!
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown. Twice. Ouch!
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins.
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery. I read all her books, but unlike many girls, I didn't LOVE Anne of Green Gables. And Gilbert Blythe? Meh.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding. My goodness, that was a disturbing book!
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan. Still want to see the movie!
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen. Although I confess, I don't think I've ever finished it...
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens. Very depressing! The Scarlet Pimpernel was much more upbeat!
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy.
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - I own it.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker. It's on my shelf...
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett. One of my favourite books as a child!
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce. I've probably read about half of it. Maybe I'll aim to finish it on Bloomsday?
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray. On my shelf, in a beautiful illustrated edition. Loved the movie.
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens. All this Dickens, but where's Our Mutual Friend? I've read that twice!
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton. Another childhood favourite.
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad. I didn't get it.
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery. In French and English! "Dessine moi un mouton!"
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams. I don't think I've read it, but I hear it's sad.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare. My favourite Shakespeare! I saw an awesome production at Oxford Castle a couple of years back. Love it!
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo. I remember getting near the end of this when I was on my way home from work at DJs years ago. I was sitting on the train bawling my eyes out, it was so sad!

I tag Duncan, Nick, Byron, Jessica, Chris, and Doug. I'll be impressed if anyone still reads this blog frequently enough to find the tag...

Page 56

Picked this game up from Bec, who picked it up from Gordo, who picked it up from Facebook.

Give it a go for yourself:

Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall/blog
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Mine is:

"'The Ocean,' 'The Phoenix,' 'The Consort,' 'The Dolphin,' were passed in turns; but 'The Vivid' was my ship, and it seemed she lay further down."

From Villette by Charlotte Bronte - a book I've given up on once or twice, but I'm trying once more to get through it. I haven't yet reached the point I gave up last time (at least, I don't think I have), but I am enjoying it so far.

I thought about doing this twice earlier in the day (when I read Gordo's post and then when I read Bec's) but I didn't have any books close by. The bookshelves were the closest, and then I would have to choose one. I'm in bed now, and although there are two piles of books on my bedside table, Villette was the top book on the closest pile.

Getting my hopes up

Received this email this morning:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Cambridge Platonist Spirituality (Classics of Western Spirituality) by Charles Taliaferro have also purchased The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics and Religion (International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées) by G.A. Rogers. For this reason, you might like to know that The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics and Religion (International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées) is now available. You can order yours for just $230.00 by following the link below.

The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics and Religion (International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées)
G.A. Rogers
Price: $230.00

Just $230? And I was getting all excited when I saw "Cambridge Platonists" in the subject line of an email from Amazon...

A Woman's World

This sounds like a fascinating book.

Perhaps I'll buy a copy when classes start and I'm earning money again!

Darn. I just looked at a blurb for the book on Amazon, and I think it gave away the big twist! Grr.

How to talk about books you haven't read

At the risk of sounding like the fusty old crank everyone does impressions of in the faculty lounge, I still believe in the private ecstasy of reading. It’s one thing to jockey for social position by saying that Dostoyevsky introduced psychology into the novel, or that Chaucer had a fuller grasp of humanity than Shakespeare. It’s another thing to experience, with your full attention, Raskolnikov wandering feverishly around St. Petersburg, or the young scholar farting in the face of his romantic rival in “The Miller’s Tale.” Real reading is not just hoarding fodder for cocktail chatter, it’s crawling, phrase by phrase, through a text and finding yourself surprised or disappointed or ruined or bored with every other line. This direct connection—the voice that enters your brain and mingles with your own internal voice—is the only way books really matter, and experiencing it requires a kind of deep surprise at the words in front of you. If anything, we’re already too good at talking about books we haven’t read. The challenge now is to preserve our ignorance.

Click here.

I wish I had a spare couple of grand...

Click here.

Oxford atheist ridiculed by Anglican theologian?

A short article on a debate between Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath.

It doesn't seem to me that McGrath ridiculed Dawkins, and I would have been surprised if he had. McGrath's book, Dawkins' God, is incredibly generous towards Dawkins, though I haven't read his latest, The Dawkins Delusion.

My response to The God Delusion was to want to throw it across the room (although I refrained, since the book cost me $31.50 and I like to keep my books in pristine condition!), and to write a review outlining all the places where Dawkins shows himself to be incredibly ignorant of Christianity and deliberately distorting the arguments to make his points. I was going to title this review "Liar, Lunatic or 'Honestly Mistaken'? The Dawkins Delusion," in honour of Dawkins' response to C.S. Lewis' classic Liar, Lunatic or Lord illustration in which Dawkins suggests that Jesus might have been 'honestly mistaken' about being God. (By the by, I think Dawkins misunderstood the argument Lewis was making - he wasn't arguing that Jesus had to be either liar, lunatic or Lord, and that there weren't any other possibilities; rather, Lewis was arguing that it is not possible to claim that Jesus was just a good teacher.)

Anyway, it's probably a good thing that I haven't had time to write this article. It's also fortunate that the Christian community has people like Greg Clarke to provide much more loving responses. Previously, Greg has occupied himself with presenting talks and seminars about The Da Vinci Code all over the country. Perhaps the distinguishing feature of his response to Dan Brown was that he wasn't concerned primarily with pointing out all the errors that Brown makes, but with trying to understand why people are so receptive to conspiracy theories about the church. With Dawkins, Greg is extremely diligent to avoid responding in kind, and in attempting to appreciate what legitimate concerns Dawkins might have with religion.

You can find a lecture Greg gave at CASE a couple of weeks ago here. I am sure he will be in demand for this kind of talk, as he was for The Da Vinci Code, and he is speaking at my church (Narwee Baptist Church) on May 20.

March 2007

Books bought:

1. Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans Parts 1 & 2
2. N.T. Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives
3. Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans
4. Susanna Gregory, A Conspiracy of Violence
5. Christopher Priest, The Prestige
6. Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

Books read:

1. Tom Wright, Paul For Everyone: Romans Part 1
2. Susanna Gregory, A Conspiracy of Violence
3. Christopher Priest, The Prestige
4. Alan Wall, The Lightning Cage
5. Al Hsu, The Single Issue
6. Jim A. Talley and Bobbie Reed, Too Close Too Soon
7. Michael and Amy Smalley, Don't Date Naked

More reading, less books?

What a horrible thought!

I've just read a review of the Sony Reader - a handheld device for reading e-books. The author of the review suggests that while the Reader is no more portable than the average paperback,

The Sony Reader has other selling points; above all, its potential to reduce the clutter of books. For me, the perfect advertisement for this device would be a picture of my bedstand without its ever-present leaning tower of literature. More reading, the tagline would say, fewer books.

Further down, he writes

If, today, I threw out all the books in my house that could be uploaded for free onto a Sony Reader, at least one of my bookcases (out of five or six) could be retired. What I'd really like is to keep only as many books as could be squeezed into one or two bookcases.

What on earth for? I love books! I've been thinking about selling some of my novels because I'm running out of space, but I wouldn't want to get rid of many of my books. I have 4 tall Ikea bookshelves stuffed full of books, as well as a smaller bookshelf under my window. I love lying in bed looking at my books, thinking about what I'll read next, or remembering what I enjoyed in each book (the ones that I've read, anyway...) I love the feel of books. I love to run my hands over the covers, particularly if the book has a groovy cover with embossed lettering or the like. Why would anyone want to give that up? And sure, my bookshelves take up nearly all the wallspace in my bedroom, but what would I put there instead? I dream of having a dedicated library in my home, with high ceilings, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder!

I love this quote from Matthew Barker's Natural Theology (1674):

I have always thought that good Books are the best part of a man's Furniture in his House, and the best Ornaments for Ladies Closets.

Amen, brother!

Entering Jane Austen's World

A review of The Annotated Pride and Prejudice - an edition of Austen's great novel, being published this month, which contains more than 2,300 explanatory notes on every possible aspect of Jane Austen's world. Sounds fantastic to me!

But is it necessary? William Grimes writes:

The reader who does not know a farthing from a guinea, it’s safe to say, will nonetheless grasp the great drama of attraction and repulsion that plays out between Darcy and Elizabeth. The cut and thrust of their conversation is timeless. Generations of young women who do not know the first thing about an entailed estate or a quadrille will recognize in Austen’s heroine a kindred spirit, a contemporary, a valued ally in the eternal war between the sexes.

Grimes also writes:

Certain writers create worlds that readers do not want to leave, ever. Extreme devotees of Austen do not simply enjoy the novels, they want to sit in the living room at Longbourn with the Bennet sisters, drinking tea and analyzing Darcy’s behavior.

For me, I think I'd prefer to hang out with Lizzie and Jane, walking the grounds or cutting and drying flowers. After all, Lydia, Kitty, Mary and Mrs Bennet would all be in the living room...

January 2007

This was a bad month in terms of self-control around book stores. I feel compelled to point out, however, that many of these books were bought at bargain prices at one of Canberra's fantastic second-hand or seconds book stores! It's such a long list that I also felt compelled to divide it up into categories:

Vaguely PhD-related books:

• Jason Bardi, The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time
• Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: Our Chief of Men
• Justin S. Holcomb (ed.), Christian Theologies of Scripture
• Margaret J. Osler (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific Revolution
• Simon Schama, A History of Britain 2: 1603-1776, The British Wars
• Margo Todd (ed.), Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England
• David Tylden-Wright, John Aubrey: A Life

For somewhat scholarly interest:

• Amir D. Azcel, Descartes' Secret Notebook
• Veronica Buckley, Christina, Queen of Sweden
• Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague
• Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World
• Michael Ruse, Darwinism and Its Discontents

Just for fun:

• Matthew Pearl, The Poe Shadow
• Alan Wall, The Lightning Cage
• Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest And Other Plays
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Books read:

• Susanna Gregory, A Masterly Murder
• Amir D. Azcel, Descartes' Secret Notebook
• Most of Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion - I haven't managed to finish it yet because I keep wanting to throw it across the room...

Most likely there were more books I read in January, but I've forgotten them now...

Looking at the moon, thinking of the universe

About this time I started to read an article in a magazine, on the subject of the basic difference between the male and female habits of thought, relating chiefly to their experience of sex (the title of the article made you think it would tell a great deal more about sex than it actually did). The author was a famous New York psychiatrist, a disciple of Freud. He said that the difference between the male and female modes of through were easily illustrated by the thoughts of a boy and girl, sitting on a park bench, looking at the full moon. The boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks, "I must wash my hair." When I read this I was frantically upset; I had to put the magazine down. It was clear to me at once that I was not thinking as the girl thought; the full moon would never as long as I lived remind me to wash my hair... I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon.

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Woman

Baptism

He pushed me down again but this time I was expecting it. I held my breath and fought him. I fought strongly and naturally, as anybody does, held down in the water, and without thinking much about who was holding me. But when he let me come up just long enough to hear him say, "Now say you'll do it," I saw his face streaming with water I had splashed over him and I felt amazement, not that I was fighting with Garnet but that anybody could have made such a mistake, to think he had real power over me. I was too amazed to be angry, I forgot to be frightened, it seemed to me impossible that he should not understand that all the powers I granted him were in play.

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

Do you like butterflies?

Grown-ups love figures. When you describe a new friend to them, they never ask you about the important things. They never say: 'What's his voice like? What are his favourite games? Does he collect butterflies?' Instead they demand: 'How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much does his father earn?' Only then do they feel they know him. If you say to the grown-ups: 'I've seen a lovely house made of pink brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof', they are unable to picture such a house. You must say: 'I saw a house that cost a hundred thousand francs.' Then they cry out: 'Oh, how pretty!'

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

I am deeply indebted to my dear brother Tim for reminding me of this passage at Christmas.

See also Byron's post on Dickens on Butterflies.

November and December 2006

Books bought:

• Nick Hornby, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree
• Mark Tredennick, The Little Red Writing Book
• Jasper Fforde, The Big Over Easy
• Robert Harris, Enigma
• Robert Harris, Imperium
• Susanna Gregory, A Masterly Murder
• Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism
• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
• Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain
• Katharine McMahon, The Alchemist's Daughter
• Edward O. Wilson (ed.), From So Simple A Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin
• Janet Browne, Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography

Books read:

• Nick Hornby, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree
• Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism
• Jasper Fforde, The Big Over Easy
• Katharine McMahon, The Alchemist's Daughter
• Emily Maguire, The Gospel According to Luke
• Vashti Farrer, Plagues and Federation: The Diary of Kitty Barnes

After reading Hornby's The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, I was inspired to change slightly the format of these posts. I've enjoyed Hornby's novels (I've read all except Fever Pitch), and I'm also interested in reading what other people say about the books they've read. Last Christmas, my parents bought me a book called Classics: Books for Life, by Jane Gleeson-White. It contains short essays on 62 classic books, from Homer's Iliad to Ulysses by James Joyce to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. I'm aiming to read them all (well, unless there are any that sound particularly unenjoyable) at some point. I've also thought about buying 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, but 62 books seems much more achieveable.

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is a month-by-month account of what Hornby has bought and read, with a few complaints about his fictionalised editorial team (the Polysyllabic Spree) along the way. I was encouraged to know that I am not the only person who buys more books than I read. I don't buy books to read straight away. I like building up my personal library. I love lying in bed looking at my overpacked bookshelves, thinking about the books I've enjoyed in the past and wondering what to read next. I enjoy not needing to go out to buy a new book when I've just finished one - I just need to peruse my bookshelves and choose something.

My postgraduate study involves so much reading that once I get home of an evening, all I really have enough mental energy to do is flake out in front of the tv. So, I'm relishing being on holidays and being able to read as much as I want to - and to read books that are not related to my PhD! I'm also loving Borders' email updates - "The Shortlist" - and especially the "buy four books, get 40% off" vouchers that appear from time to time. Last week I decided to stock up on novels for my holiday - the next in Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholemew books, and a couple of Robert Harris novels - Enigma, because I enjoyed the movie, and Imperium, because it has Cicero in it. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the third Thursday Next book, so I got The Big Over Easy instead.

I spotted The Alchemist's Daughter in Berkelouw's, and was convinced by the phrase "natural philosophy" and the year 1725 on the back cover. It was going well for 50 pages or so, took a down turn, but then picked up again, and I ended up really enjoying it. I had a nice reading binge last week. I started The Alchemist's Daughter on Wednesday night before bed, and finished it on Thursday afternoon. Thursday evening I picked up The Gospel According to Luke, given to me for Christmas by my parents, at around 8:30pm. I couldn't put it down, and I finished it by midnight. Quite an amazing book - the central theme I guess was the difficulties of being attracted to someone who has completely contrary beliefs. Or maybe loving someone you know you cant have because your beliefs forbid it. Putting it like that reminds me of Jane Eyre, one of my favourite books and characters, though her response was much different.

At the moment I'm also about half-way through Dawkins' The God Delusion. Amazingly, it wasn't until page 5 that I wanted to throw the book across the room. I've already thought up the title for my critique... but I'm not going to reveal that yet!! I mentioned previously that I'd read Alister McGrath's critique of Dawkins. So far, everything he said has seemed very reasonable! Dawkins makes a brief mention of McGrath in The God Delusion, and shows that he hasn't understood the critique. McGrath is a fantastic writer. I also enjoyed The Twilight of Atheism. He traces the history of atheism from the Enlightenment, considering its connections with various social and political events and movements. It's intriguing to read alongside Dawkins. Dawkins wants to eliminate religion all together, but he doesn't say how (except that he things all thinking people should be convinced by his book). McGrath shows that any attempts at wholescale conversion to atheism have been accompanied by violence, which is just the thing Dawkins criticises religion for. I wonder what his plan is?

Plagues and Federation is a kids book that my mum suggested I read. I suppose my education was very poor in that I didn't know there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in The Rocks in 1900. It was a decent enough book, but not that exciting. It was written as a diary of a teenage girl growing up in The Rocks, dealing with the plague, financial hardship, her brother going to war and falling for the boy next door. Cute, and I suppose it would give kids some idea of what it was like to live in Sydney 100 years ago, but I'm not sure it would do much else. Oh well. I suppose books are for entertainment and don't always have to educate, but I get irritated reading people who can't write, even if it's intentional!

At the moment I'm in the middle of an Amir Aczel book about Descartes' Secret Notebook, a Susannah Gregory novel, Tom Wright's Simply Christian and Robert Harris' Imperium. Also on the list for the near future are more Michael Ruse, some books about history and finishing off Dawkins.

Books I read in October 2006

1. Neil Hanson, The Dreadful Judgement: The True Story of the Great Fire of London

True story? Hmm. It's a narrative of the events of the great fire of London based on manuscripts, letters and other archival material. I'm always uneasy about these kinds of claims to "Truth". However, it was quite an entertaining read, though the description of what happened to the man suspected of starting the fire was rather gruesome.


2. Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science.

I don't think a chapter each night before bed is the best way to read Fuller... I did enjoy the anecdotes, and I was inspired to read all of Fuller's Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times - a book in which he compares Kuhn to the main character in Being There (I didn't realise how insulting that was until I saw the movie!) I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that Fuller came down on the side of Popper, though I was a little struck by his support for Popperian philosophy of science. This is the kind of book I generally need to read twice to fully grasp!

3. Alister McGrath, Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life.

I haven't read much of McGrath's work, which is perhaps surprising. After reading this book, I am certainly compelled to read more. McGrath's critique of Dawkins is gracious but direct. He takes on Dawkins on his own ground - rational argument - and I think McGrath comes out on top. I'll let you know for sure once I've read Dawkins' latest! McGrath primarily challenges Dawkins' view of religion, arguing that it is nothing like what most religious people subscribe to, and whether atheism necessarily follows from Darwinian Evolution (a resounding 'no', in case you were wondering!) I'm fascinated by this quote from Dawkins in the Times Literary Supplement:

Alister McGrath's book Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life does a fair and sophisticated job of summarising my position.

I should try to seek out the entire article - it would be interesting to read Dawkins' detailed responses to McGrath's critique. In the meantime, I can fully recommend McGrath's book - it is absolutely excellent.

Next on the reading list:

• Michael Ruse, Can A Darwinian Be A Christian?
• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
• Patrick Dillon, The Last Revolution: 1688 and the Creation of the Modern World