Reading Life--Part 1

I have been a reading machine this year, but unfortunately not a blogging one. I considered not blogging about my reads, but frankly, I use the blog regularly to remind me of what I've read. So, this post is for me. If you'd like to come along, great!

Thrush Green--This book is the first in a series that was recommended to me as an English version of the Mitford books. Pleasant enough, but I prefer Mitford. I doubt I will seek out the other books in the series, but I won't avoid them if they stumble onto my path.

If only people would realize that light-hearted and gay things were not any less significant than the violent and brutish, what a step forward it would be. Because a song, a book, a play, a picture or anything created was gay it did not necessarily follow that it was trivial. 47

The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon--Another book by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. I snatched it up from the New Books shelf at the library. I am not a fan of Paul, and I doubted that Borg and Crossan could change my mind. They argue that some of the letters attributed to Paul were not in fact written by him.

The post-Pauline, pseudo-Pauline letters are anti-Pauline with regard to major aspects of his theology. They represent, as we argue in the next chapter, a taming of Paul, a domestication of Paul's passion to the normalcy of the Roman imperial world in which he and his followers lived. 15

They also made explicit one of the things that bothers me about much of the religious discourse in our country:

For Luther, Paul's message was about the end of requirements as the basis of our relationship with God.
For other Protestants, including even many descendants of Luther, Paul's theology has been understood not as the abolitions of requirements, but as the new requirement--namely, believing his theology is what we must do in order to be saved. 8

I wouldn't say I'm a fan of Paul yet, but I am willing to consider that I might have misunderstood him under the influence of writings falsely attributed to him. I look forward to doing more reading and research.

100 Cupboards and Dandelion Fire--I asked the kids for recommendations, and NB recommended Dandelion Fire. Since it was the second book in the series, I had to read the first book first. These were good enough that I stayed up late reading to see what happened next, but not so great that I picked up the third book. Of course, the author also wrapped things up nicely at the end of the second book. Had there been a thread dangling, I might have read on.

Scarlet Feather--My first Maeve Binchy. I was supposed to read this in Ireland, but didn't get to it. Instead, it became my elliptical machine reading. Pleasant. I might read the other books with these same characters. Some day.

Brunelleschi's Dome--I checked out this book to prepare for my trip to Italy in April. I feel too lazy to learn Italian (really, if I'm going to study a foreign language, I should work on my pathetic Spanish), so the least I can do is supply the background trivia and human-interest stories. This is the story of the construction of the dome on Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral in Florence.

For the past fifty years the south aisle of the unfinished cathedral had housed a thirty-foot-long scale model of the structure, in effect an artist's impression of what the cathedral should look like once finished. The problem was that the model included an enormous dome--a dome that, if built, would be the highest and widest vault ever raised. And for fifty years it had been obvious that no one in Florence--or anywhere in Italy, for that matter--had any clear idea how to construct it. The unbuilt dome of Santa Maria del Fiore had therefore become the greatest architectural puzzle of the age. Many experts considered its erection an impossible feat. Even the original planners of the dome had been unable to advise how their project might be completed: they merely expressed a touching faith that at some point in the future God might provide a solution, and architects with a more advanced knowledge would be found. 3-5

Not only did Brunelleschi solve the puzzle, he built the dome without any scaffolding support during construction. I loved this book. The descriptions were so clear that I got dizzy at times. My only small suggestion would be to add a few more diagrams toward the end.