Reply #12: My 2007 Reading List so far

[BurtWorm]

Jésus: Anatomie d'un mythe, by Patrick Boistiers (Yes, I did read it in French, and no I didn't understand everything I read--but I understood a lot more than I was expecting to. I was looking for a book in English at my local library on the Jesus myth, and though I didn't find one, I happened upon Boistiers's book by happy chance in the foreign language section.)

Freethinkers, by Susan Jacoby (Excellent survey of secularism in the US, countering the right's picture of the country as a Christian Nation with facts about some of the major freethinkers who influenced policy and popular sentiment, from Tom Paine and Tom Jefferson, to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Robert Ingersoll, and on to the present.)

Betraying Spinoza, by Rebecca Goldstein (An excellent little book explaining Spinoza's place in Jewish and world intellectual history. Goldstein, a novelist and philosophy professor, writes very entertainingly and lucidly about her experience with Spinoza's life and philosophy, from the time she first encountered him, courtesy of a disapproving teacher, as am Orthodox yeshiva student in the 1960s, to her close acquaintance with him as professor of a course on 16th Century philosophers.)

The Heretic and the Courtier, by Matthew Stewart (Interesting but not fully satisfying <for me> book about Spinoza and Leibniz, how they resemble each other and where they part company. If you've Wittgenstein's Poker and/or Rousseau's Dog, you'll probably enjoy this book. I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn't read Goldstein's little book first.)

The Closing of the Western Mind, by Charles Freeman (Very well done history of the Church's mostly negative impact on the intellectual development of the Western World. Also a good history, and clear explicator, of Christian thought, East and West, in the first half of the first millennium.)

1973 Nervous Breakdown, by Andreas Killen (Enjoyable history of the watershed year in which Watergate broke wide open, PBS's An American Family became the first reality TV show, the Vietnam War was officially ended and American POWs began returning home, the New York Dolls hit it big, Mean Streets and American Graffitti premiered, Gravity's Rainbow was published, the Symbionese Liberation Army first burst on the scene, OPEC began the oil embargo that led to the first energy crisis, etc., etc., etc. I wonder if someone who doesn't remember that time would enjoy it as much as I did.)

Also reading:

Theologico-Political Treatise, by Spinoza
Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, by Morris Kline
Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins