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Share your current reading list, your impressions of the books, and whether you'd recommend them to fellow community members. Authors, please do NOT post in this forum.
Gigila wrote:On Monday I will start listening to "The Women" by T.C. Boyle. Sometime this weekend I will begin reading "The Most They Ever Had" by Rick Brag.
I will be starting 'Loving Frank' by Nancy Horan soon (our book club selection) & I believe it's similar to 'The Woman'
Finished 'The Guernsey Literature & Potato Peel Pie Society' last week...loved it!
I just finished reading Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution, by Randall Keynes, who is a descendent of Charles Darwin. That fact turns out to be significant for me, because in the book he gives a great deal of detail about the daily lives of the Darwin household, especially concerning the fatal illness of the 10-year-old Annie. I felt that much of this information had more significance for him, as a relative who prizes this family history, than it did for me as a reader. The title promises to link the daughter with the theory somehow, and though it does do this to some degree, it could have been achieved in many fewer pages, I felt. It becomes clear quickly that Darwin was kind and wise and an ideal father to his many children, but as I said, this is illustrated at too much length.
I would still recommend the book, however. Some of it can be skimmed. What I didn't appreciate before this book is the realtionship between Darwin's theory and his religious beliefs, that is the struggle that went on between the two. I had just assumed that he collected the evidence for his theory, and under this influence gradually moved away from belief in a benevolent, overseeing, creator God. But Keynes showed that he was just as actively interested in the question of faith as he was in the science of his theory, and that more importantly, he became an ever-stronger advocate for the theory as he became convinced that the faith he had held as a younger man did not have a factual basis. The influence of 'natural theology' was strong in Darwin's day. It was the liberal, enlightened view that science showed the fullness of God's purpose and benevolent design. To go against this already liberal understanding was not easy for anybody, and especially not for Darwin, who wasn't a natural boat-rocker and who suffered for 40 years from various and serious, stress-related psychosomatic illnesses.
Other scientists who could just as easily have arrived at Darwin's position did not, because they were unwilling to make the leap to a fully naturalistic explanation for the existence of species and particularly for the development of man. Though Darwin mentioned humans only twice in The Origin he had been thinking about human development from early on and was to continue throughout his life. The connection with Annie, his daughter who died at age 10, is that the event pushed him to a more tragic view of life in which we suffer without any apparent purpose other than that natural selection requires it. He came to believe that we are just as much a part of the natural stuggle as any animal with whom we share the planet.
I am waiting for my mother to bring me her copy of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brian (the non-fiction BookTalk book for April-May). I will probably also read a fiction book, since I don't consider non-fiction to be the same kind of read, but I (still) haven't figured out which book that will be. I'm considering rereading His Dark Materials trilogy or Good Omens, but the jury is still out.
I'll be back when I finally know what I want to read next.
Currently, Im reading Ocean's End by Woodard. It is a non-fictional account of one mans journey around the world te view and report the sad state that most of our oceans and seas are in. It's pretty interesting but does make a good pre-sleep read.
I'm reading Musicophilia and Don Quixote (Edith Grossman translation), both being discussed right here at BookTalk! Yay!
I haven't tried to tackle two books at once since I graduated from college, so this should be interesting. I'm hopeful that because one is fiction and one is non-fiction that reading one will seem like taking a break from the other. Or something like that, so long as it works out that I'm reading both at once!
I picked up the recent book Bible Babel, by Kristen Swenson (who teaches at one of my several alma maters, Virginia Commonwealth U). Oblivion read this and recommended it. So far, I'm liking it. Swenson summarizes and digests all the complicated matters of compostion, translation, and others. She's also objective and accepting of some of the crazy-sounding stuff that inevitably comes up in discussion of the Bible, such as creationism. I expect to be more Bible-savvy after finishing this.
