There are two sorts of books in my life at the moment: books to bind and books to read. This last week was dominated by books to bind as I started my new job on Monday and it didn’t leave me with much energy for anything else! It is good to have started and I think that it will work out well, but it will take some settling into – it’s not so much the work that is tiring as the process of adapting, learning how things are done here and how particular processes work.

However, in order to not entirely lose track of other sorts of books, it may be as well to mention the following.

  • On the way home from work yesterday I went via the Catholic Bookshop and bought Father Gabriel (Bunge)’s Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer According to the Patristic Traditionwhich I had seen that they had the previous week. It had long been on my to-be-read list, especially since someone I respect had seriously recommended it to me about a year ago. However, I only had access to it in French, and glancing through it saw that it was clearly worth reading really seriously which would have required sitting with my nose in a dictionary, and so decided to wait until I could find it in English. I’ll write more about it again, but, for those who don’t know who Father Gabriel is, there is more here and here.
  • Yesterday I also received an email offering me a review copy of Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon’s The One And The Many. It is the first time that I’ve been offered a review copy (on the recommendation of a friend – I have my suspicions who it was, but will not say more except that I am grateful). I have occasionally thought of approaching publishers for review copies but haven’t got that far yet. Plus, I have sort of wondered if publishers wouldn’t be inclined to blacklist me for posting too many quotes.
  • However, it doesn’t seem that this deters people from actually buying books. I mentioned a few months ago that I’d become an Amazon associate which means that if people buy books as a result of clicking on my links I get a small commission. While I did not expect this to become hugely lucrative, it has added up so that I was recently able to order two books. Father John Behr’s The Way to Nicaea should hopefully get here soon and which will provide a reading project that I had hoped to start a couple of years ago. And I recently ordered The Festal Menaion (it’s actually cheaper here) as that is something that I do need to have and it’s probably good to get it as soon as I can. 

Of course it would be fun if the two sorts of books could be combined, i.e. if I could bind some of the one’s that I read. I may do that with some of the liturgical ones if I have time. And I am tempted to restore the battered version of Newman’s Apologia that I bought recently, but suspect that I am going to have to prioritise time and energy…