P Street Picks

I haven't posted anything for ages now. However, my readings continued. I came across quite a few books and read some of them.

After David Gibson's Rule of Benedict, a comparable book came my way: A biography of the great Swiss Catholic dissident theologian Hans Kung. He writes about his struggle for freedom. In the 1960s, the young Kung and Pope Benedict-XVI as Father Ratzinger, were the two leading lights of the Second Vatican Council. In that grand stock-taking and reform synod of the Roman Catholic Church , the two young theologians took more or less similar progressive positions. Later Ratzinger slipped into reaction and Kung became the icon of progressive Catholics. Both books were borrowed from the Arlington Library. I completed Rule of Benedict while I could read only about half of the Kung book. By then, it was time to return the book to the library.

I continued visiting the old books outlet on P street in DC and made some interesting picks. One is an English translation of Russian writer Dmitri Merejkovski's classic, the Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci. The author is not a good story teller. But the book is interesting and full of facts, in fact too much of it. A surprising feature of the book is the large number of figures from the Italian renaissance appearing in it. In which other book of fiction will you be able to find Savonarola, Michaelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael, Machiavelli, the wicked Pope Alexander-VI and his son Cesare Borgia in addition to Leonardo Da Vinci?

Sometimes, you come across real surprises while looking for old books on footpaths. One such surprise was when I got to buy Bertrand Russel's classic, History of Western Philosophy. I had read this book in Colombo and wanted to possess a copy of it. Another interesting pick was Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume of Will Durand's popular series on world history. It is a big, but very interesting book, full of unexpected assertions and turns of argument which nicely punctures many of our fondly-held assumptions. I also bought a copy of the History of Church by Eusebius, the legendary 4th Century bishop of Caesarea and founder of Christian historiography, often called the Christian Herodotus. Of course, he is also criticized by 'purists' of historical objectivity like Edward Gibbon for his all-too-obvious bias.

So much about old books purchases. An interesting but different book read recently was written originally in Oriya by Fakir Mohan Senapati. In English translation it is titled Six Acres and a Third. I had read a review of the books about two year's ago in The Hindu Literary Review. Written about a century ago, it portrays with wit and beauty, the early 19th century feudal society of Eastern India. After finishing the book, I got the impression that it deserves to be more widely known and read.