My Holiday Wish List

There are two books on my wish list for the upcoming holiday season: The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life -- His Own by David Carr and Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Making of the Christian Imagination) by Rowan Williams.

Carr is a media reporter with the New York Times and his book is a memoir of a particularly difficult period of his life -four to seven years, he isn't sure how long- when he was a drug addicted crack smoker and coke seller and a danger to the people close to him. Carr's novel idea was to go back to Minneapolis with a tape recorder and video camera, peruse old arrest and hospital records and speak with scores of people from that period. I wouldn't ever think of doing anything remotely close to that in regards to The Road Not Taken: Memoirs of a Reluctant Guerrilla. I guarantee you I would be dead in a minute. I am happy to say that this is my best memory of what transpired in Cuba and end with that. Besides, as psychologists will attest, a person will remember with almost photographic accuracy the most traumatic periods in their life.

Rowan Williams is of course the Archbishop of Canterbury and his book examines the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky the great Russian writer. Williams discusses his book on an interesting and enlightening Stuart Jeffries podcast on guardian.co.uk and agrees that his work on Dostoevsky can be seen as an "indirect riposte" to the atheism of Richard Dawkins ("The God Delusion"), and Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great") who wrote recent bestsellers about atheism.

I have long been a fan of Dostoevky but when I first read his works beginning with "Crime and Punishment" I read them as literature. It was only later that I became aware of the connections to religion and philosophy. I am reading "Basic Writings of Existentialism" by Gordon Marino which examines existentialism through selections from proponents like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hieddegger, Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Ralph Ellison (a surprise) as well as Dostoevsky.

I am up to my 0ld tricks now: reading books with the child-like joy of discovery. If I learn something new in the process, well, all the better.