Tolstoy on marriage

Recently I’ve been savoring Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina — his vivid descriptive ability makes late-nineteenth–century Russia come alive. It’s in his semi-autobiographical character Levin, however, that Tolstoy really speaks to me… in my favorite passage, Levin is coming to grips with his new life as a husband and with his wife’s seeming lack of “real” interests: [...]

Anathem

After reading his three-thousand-page Baroque Cycle in its entirety — twice — I’ve been eagerly anticipating Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem. It was a very, very fun read… I was initially concerned at how simple Stephenson’s prose was, but everything looks simple after spelunking through Ulysses. The novel is very much in the vein of [...]

Ulysses

I recently had the pleasure of ploughing though James Joyce’s Ulysses — a wonderful experience that I’d certainly recommend. Challenging though it is to read, it seems to me that Ulysses fully embodies everything that prose is capable of… no literary device left unused, no word carelessly chosen, no concept not fully developed. Parsing the [...]

Two good reads

The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst. This book opened my eyes to how little I really know about typography, both letterforms and page layout. Every page was like drinking from a firehose of new information… Bringhurst covers a lot of ground but without wasting a page. I find myself looking for ligatures when [...]

Books that change lives

Recently I’ve had the great pleasure of reading two books that have had a profound effect on my faith. The first is Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict… written in outline form, it’s essentially lecture notes on things like the historicity of Biblical records, Jesus’ claim to be God, and the like. Typical apologetics [...]