Everything at once

Books I currently have on the go:

The Habit of Being - Flannery O'Connor
The Story of a Soul: the Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux
Paul and the Gift - John MG Barclay
The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor
Mystery and Manners - Flannery O'Connor
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (w/Owen) - Roald Dahl

This is actually a bit on the low side for me. From one of O'Connor's letters: "My trouble is wanting to read everything at once."

Ten years on...

It's been ten years since I used this blog, and even then I did it poorly. But blog sites these days all seem to want to charge money to sign you up, so I thought the easiest thing was to jump back onto this one. Besides, the title about sums up my intentions for any personal blogging I might do anyway.

I'm reading Flannery O'Connor's collected letters, The Habit of Being. My life is being made better in the process. I think I'm learning more about the communion of saints--at least in terms of dead ones--through this book than I could have learned in any other way. Her being Catholic means she likely would have thought of that communion differently than I do, but I think I'm getting a hint, through the friendship with her that her letters create in the reader, of what she might have meant by it. In any case, it probably means more than the superficial connections I felt reading the following paragraph, but since the last book I mentioned reading in a draft for a post (never published) on this site was Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, I'll quote it here:

I've read Swann's Way but not other Proust. I feel this is very uncultured of me but I don't see the day when I am going to rectify it. I feel I ought to do something about this lack of a classical education so I am currently reading Cicero. I aim to read Cicero, Caesar, Tacitus and any other of them boys that I can think of. Then I will at least have a classical veneer. (Letter to "A", 24 March 56, The Habit of Being, 150)