The Joy of Reading

It is an honest-to-goodness rainy day.

I used to write rather often about theory vs. reality, but these days, I feel like I’m just trying to discern what reality actually is. I do know that if I want to feel confident about believing anything beyond what I can physically see, taste, touch, hear, or feel, I need to check, double check, and recheck. Interestingly, the means of doing so seem to be falling into my lap. (Wait! Is that too convenient? Should I be suspicious? See what I mean?)

Another phenomenon I used to write about was the carrying on of conversations among books. Hmmm… now that I think of it, I guess that the conversations among the books I’m reading and have recently read are extending to what I find online and in old writings/notes of my own. Perhaps more than anything else, the works of René Girard are turning out to be the thread that ties everything together. Last month, I finished reading I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, which may well be the most important look at Christology that I’ve ever read, even though it’s not strictly about Jesus. In fact, the book’s focus on anthropology, ancient civilizations, societal structure, philosophy, and Friedrich Nietzsche is what makes it so valuable in terms of understanding Jesus.

Moving on to Girard’s Deceit, Desire & the Novel further fleshes out everything, and the help the two books have been in understanding the crises of today have been invaluable. Yet, Girard’s ideas would be worthless to me without all that I’ve read and considered before, while, and after diving into his thought. I guess, more than anything, I’m just amazed and thankful that I’ve covered this ground, and I have no intention of easing off. In fact, I am now wrestling with myself over whether to pull out The Complete Works of Shakespeare and get started before I open Girard’s book on the bard, Theater of Envy. I know that I should leave it on the shelf. Three days ago, I should not have brought any of T.S. Eliot’s books downstairs, but I did, and his contributions to the conversation via Christianity and Culture have been both valuable and jaw-dropping. Less than twelve hours after reading most of chapter one, I opened Twitter and discovered a thread that directly quoted one of the passages that struck me most profoundly.

When considering my Dysfunctional Reader Syndrome, I often think of Dave Ramsey’s Snowball Principle for getting out of debt: pay off the credit card with the lowest balance first, then move on to the next one. Day after day, I toy with the idea of devoting all my reading time to the book closest to being finished, then moving on until I’m reading only one, maybe two, books at time. I can never do it, though. At the moment, I have ten books in process and could get at least two back on the shelf by tomorrow, but I simply don’t work that way and can’t imagine I ever will.