My present reading list

Someone wrote to ask what I am reading these days.   A while back all my sidebar widgets mysteriously disappeared and I haven’t gotten around to rebuilding the widget that had links to a few books and movies I have been into.  (Last night I settled back and watched The Avengers.  Fun and a real diversion.

I have been traveling and therefore have been using my Kindle for reading.   Some of you have sent books from my wish list, which is deeply appreciated and encouraging. If you don’t have a Kindle, get one!  They are great, especially for books that may soon be “dated”: get the Kindle version and the book doesn’t gather dust and it is cheaper.  There are different versions of the Kindle.  You can find one that will suit your needs.  If you are a reader, and you need to save money (and don’ we all), between the library and Kindle you can get into just about anything.

These days I have been reading the nautical “Kydd” series by Julian Stockwin.  It starts with Kydd.  I am up to Quarterdeck.

Also, I have started to look at the hardback edition of John Allen’s book on the persecution of Christians: The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution

Allen is passionate about this topic and he deserves some kudos for tackling it.

Since my trip to Florence, I have also slated for re-reading Ross King’s Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture.

This is a great book along the lines of Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.  If you haven’t read Longitude, stop everything, click and buy it!

Along the art history line, I have also slated for re-reading a useful and utterly fascinating book on the rivalry and accomplishments of Bernini and Borromini The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini, and the Rivalry That Transformed Rome by Jake Morrissey.

And still in the line of art history, but also about Rome of the period, the best book in English on the painter Caravaggio is Caravaggio: A Life.  This book goes into what Rome was like culturally and spiritually during that period and how Caravaggio’s checkered, short life and his works reflected and shaped art of the time.   I warmly recommend it to anyone interested in art.

I also just finished listening to, through Kindle with Audible, Glen Beck’s Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns.  There are some pretty loopy arguments from liberals – which are often founded on ridiculously flawed studies and even more flawed reasoning.  Beck drills into some of them.

In the queue is the next book in the “Patriots” sage by James Wesley Rawles, called Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse.

And I brought along a book that is not yet out, but was sent to me by he publisher, by a certain Jorge Maria Bergoglio: Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus.  It is available for PRE-ORDER.

I still have to get through Samuel Gregg’s Tea Party Catholic: The Catholic Case for Limited Government, a Free Economy, and Human Flourishing which, remarkably, has very little to do with the Tea Party as such.   This promises to be an interesting and useful read.

So.   That lips keeps my lips moving (along with my office, of course).

If you are from the UK, please use my search box for Amazon at the bottom of the page.  Just copy and paste titles into the search box.   And of course all you in the USA could use the search box on my right sidebar.  I get a small percentage of each purchase, no matter what it is after you surf around shopping within Amazon.  Amazon “remembers” that you came in through my links and I, again, get a small percentage.  (This is how I budget to pay for my health insurance.)