What I’m Reading

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about what’s on my iPad Kindle app, though I have mentioned various books I’ve been reading along the way. I will say that I think for 2012 Amazon was quite happy with me as a Kindle books customer.

I have spent the last number of weeks delving into serious nonfiction. I read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which describes the quest for the manuscript of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, and its influence on the early modern period. I followed that with The Misunderstood Jew, which describes Jesus’ Jewish roots and how interpretations of gospel stories often fail to take into account the Jewish context. Next I read, in part simultaneously, Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire and The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life. The former is a fascinating and well-documented discussion about the highly divergent and contradictory teachings in the Bible on sex and sexuality. The latter is by Joan Chittister, one of my favorite authors in the realm of spirituality. It is a marvelous meditation of the importance of the liturgical calendar in our lives. In amongst those books, I enjoyed Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which was highly enjoyable, but of course made some very serious points about the importance of proper punctuation.

I thought I was going a bit overboard with religion and serious, well-footnoted nonfiction, so as I was finishing Unprotected Texts, I started 360 Sound, The Columbia Records Story as an iBook, given that it’s not available in Kindle format. Upon completing Texts I decided it was now time for something completely different, and downloaded the Kindle edition of George Takei’s Oh Myyy!, the story of how the septuagenarian actor’s presence in social media has gone viral.

As for what’s next, we’ll see. I have plenty of samples on my iPad of books I may want to read. And, of course, there’s always something new coming along. Fortunately, my Christmas present from Terry was a pair of very generous Amazon gift cards.

Those will keep me going for a while.