Update on the Status of My Reading

At some point I am going to publish a harangue against Charles Dickens, in hopes that someone will convince me that I shouldn't give up on him entirely just yet. I've just read an essay about him that I didn't care for for a number of reasons. Again, that's another post.

In the meantime I'll make a couple of notes concerning the status of my reading. I'm still working on Orthodoxy and have a couple of chapters in it to go. The last couple of nights I haven't had the presence of mind to tackle it. It requires too much concentration.

I've lain aside The Last Eyewitness once again. That book just doesn't engage me the way my other reading has, which makes me think about the occasional inaccessibility of scripture--by which I mean to say that scripture reads differently at different times. Sometimes it is alive and engaging to the extent that you can feel it working within you. Other times it seems almost indecipherable. The words and phrases seem to be strung together in a way that makes no sense at all. I felt this way during a study of II Corinthians I was recently involved in (at no fault of the study's leader), and again when Jesus's words to his diciples were recounted in The Last Eyewitness. In both cases I couldn't figure out how once sentence was related to another. Yet other times the scripture transports you to your childhood when the stories became so familiar that they seemed to lose all meaning, and you find your mind disengaging from large parts of the text all together. This is certainly a troubling phenomenon.

I'm still enjoying More Than Words, although I was a little disappointed in the Madeliene L'Engle essay on MacDonald, and strongly disliked the one I just read on Dicken's by Tim Stafford. Again, more on that later.

Yesterday I picked up Don Quixote which I have planned to read ever since enjoying Monseinor Quixote by Graham Greene.