Christmas Goodies

I got a few nice books for Christmas, two of which I asked for and one I didn’t (though it looks interesting):

Questioning Q: A Multidimensional Critique, ed. by Mark Goodacre and Nicholas Perrin. The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture by N.T. Wright. Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses by Theodore Dalrymple.

I also got some money, some from a gift, some from beating my dad and brother thoroughly at bowling (my highest score of the evening was 177, which might be my highest score ever). The first was a book I’ve had my eyes on for a while, having seen it in the DTS library at some point. A quick perusal aroused my interest:

Christ and Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr.

The rest I spent on some "classics". The only excellent bookstore in Beaumont is a Barnes & Noble. I saw a classics series that I hadn’t seen before. The volumes are about 5 inches tall, mostly unabridged, have gold edges (I’ve always thought that was cool), are hardcover, and come with a nice built-in bookmark (something else I really dig in books). The size is nice because that makes them easily portable. Also nice is that they are only 5 or 6 bucks a piece. I got the following:

The Prince and The Art of War by Machiavelli.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by A. C. Doyle.
Treasure Island by R. L. Stevenson.
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.
Walden by Thoreau.

Not a bad catch. I’ve started reading The Prince. The advice in it will come in very useful when I try to subjugate a people under my sovereign thumb through force or deception (the term "Machiavellian" was aptly named after the author). Until then I’ll just take pleasure in the fact that I’m reading a book that was at one point apparently rather influential.

There were a few books I read some of over the break, including The Last Word, mentioned above, and an introduction to the field of linguistics. The only book I actually started and finished over the break was Candide, by the infamous Voltaire. Very interesting book. I’ll have more to say about that one in another post.

So, overall, not a bad catch.