As to more than these, my son, beware. Of the making of many books there is no end, and in much study there is weariness for the flesh.
— Ecc 12:12

Exactly as described above. Scribblings.

You are notified in advance that I blog chiefly to organize my thoughts around books that I’m reading. Semi-regular writing is a way of holding myself accountable to the material. This is my polite way of saying that the bulk of the material on this site has an intended audience of precisely one. Well, maybe two. In other words, there’s going to be very little here that’s work-related. Current reading activity is as follows.

In progress:
The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy
The Spiritual Life, Adolphe Tanquerey

On Deck:
The Conferences, St. John Cassian
Natures Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants, Samuel Thayer

Books I’m using these days as an RCIA Catechist:

With Christ Through The Year: The Liturgical Year in Word and Symbols, Fr. Bernard Strasser, OSB
Fundamentals of the Faith, Peter Kreeft
One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic, Kenneth Whitehead
The Catholic Sourcebook, Fr. Peter Klein
Catechism of the Catholic Church
Male and Female He Made Them: A Theology of the Body, Pope John Paul II
The Theology of the Body Explained, Christopher West
Readings in Church History, ed. Colman Barry OSB

Completed, most recent at the top:

Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy
The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor
Selected Works, St. Bernard of Clairvaux (trans G.R. Evans)
Light in August, William Faulkner
The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie
The Dialogue, St. Catherine of Siena (trans. Suzanne Noffke, OP)
The Day is Now Far Spent, Cardinal Robert Sarah (incomplete)
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman
The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, Cardinal Robert Sarah
The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages, François-Xavier Fauvelle
Gardening with the Native Plants of Tennessee, Margie Hunter
The Noonday Devil, Dom Jean-Charles Nault, OSB
Doors in the Walls of the World, Peter Kreeft
Blue at the Mizzen, Patrick O’Brian
The Incarnate Lord, Thomas Joseph White, OP
How to Lead Small Groups, Neal McBride
Readings in Church History, ed. Colman Barry OSB
Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer
Borne, Jeff VanderMeer
The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Alan Mandelbaum
Maus, Art Spiegelman
Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver
From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, Jean Daniélou, SJ
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
The Authority of Mystery, ed. Scott Hahn
The Conservative Sensibility, George Will
A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, Jacob Neusner
Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI
The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle
Symbol or Substance?: A Dialogue on the Eucharist, Peter Kreeft
The Spiritual Life: Eight Essential Titles, Henri Nouwen (mostly complete)
The Lonely Man of Faith, Joseph Soloveitchik
The Genesee Diary, Henri Nouwen
Essays on Ethics, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Vatican II: The Essential Texts, ed. Norman Tanner, SJ (about half)
Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing, Peter Kreeft
The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis
Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
An Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman
The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr
Technology-as-a-Service Playbook, Thomas Lah & J.B. Wood
The Reality of God, Steven R. Hemler
Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disuption, Geoffrey Moore
Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, John Henry Newman
Inside the Psalms: Reflections for Novices, Maureen McCabe, OCSO
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, John Henry Newman (halfway)
Mysterium Paschale, Hans Urs Von Balthasar
Temple and Contemplation: God’s Presence in the Cosmos, Church, and Human Heart, Various
The original Dune series, Frank Herbert
The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists, Robin Wakefield
The Southern Reach trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer
Compendium on the Diaconate, USSCB, ed. Enzo Petrolino
Theology of the Body Explained, Christopher West (mostly completed)
The Old Testament in the Light of the New, Stephen B. Clark
Conjectures of Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton
The Bible and The Liturgy, Jean Daniélou, SJ
The Wisdom of the Desert, Thomas Merton
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller
Human Life, Action and Ethics, G.E.M. Anscombe
Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Henry Newman
Collected Short Stories, Graham Greene
The Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Kenneth Whitehead (sections)
Theology of the Body 101 iTunes lecture series, Prof. Mary Stanford, Christendom College
Adam and Eve After The Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, Mary Eberstadt
Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, Pope John Paul II
Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Cathy O’Neil
The Marx-Engels Reader ed, Robert C. Tucker
The Hundred Days, Patrick O’Brian
Theology and Sanity, Frank Sheed
The Four Cardinal Virtues, Josef Pieper
Theology for Beginners, Frank Sheed
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance
The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis
Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas (mostly complete, revisiting as needed)
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Janisse Ray
A Man in Full, Thomas Wolfe
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Charles Murray
The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson
Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, Henri de Lubac
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, T.S. Eliot
Death on a Friday Afternoon, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus
Silence, Shūsaku Endō
An Introduction to Philosophy, Jacques Maritain
Deliverance, James Dickey
Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism, Robert P. George
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Thomas Wolfe
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers, Thomas Wolfe
The Honourable Schoolboy, John Le Carré
Smiley’s People, John Le Carré
Open Letters: Selected Writings, Václav Havel
Thirteen Days, Robert F. Kennedy
It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, Mary Eberstadt
Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, R.R. Reno
The Nicomachean Ethics (abridged), Aristotle
Living the Gospel of Life, USCCB
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre
Witness, Whittaker Chambers
Various lectures on Aquinas and Boethius from Christendom College
The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Russell Kirk
Summa of the Summa, Peter Kreeft
The Dark Tower series, Stephen King
Aristotle For Everybody, Mortimer J. Adler
The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.
Laudato Si, Pope Francis
Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis
The End of the Modern World, Fr. Romano Guardini
The Lord, Fr. Romano Guardini
Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold
A Study of History (two volume abridgement), Arnold Toynbee
Forever War, Dexter Filkins
Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations, William Ury
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, Roger Fisher & William Ury
Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David, Lawrence Wright