{"id":16550,"date":"2017-05-12T06:29:14","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T11:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=16550"},"modified":"2017-05-12T06:29:14","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T11:29:14","slug":"a-malady-i-wont-suffer-and-a-quiz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/12\/a-malady-i-wont-suffer-and-a-quiz\/","title":{"rendered":"A Malady I Won’t Suffer, And A Quiz!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the April issue of First Things<\/em> magazine, David Bentley Hart discusses divesting himself of an extensive library<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I knew I would never be able to amass the literally hundreds of thousands of volumes that Gladstone and Disraeli each left behind when they departed this life, but at its apogee my library was around 20,000 volumes, which in our day, and within the practical material constraints pressing on me, was a fairly estimable hoard. Some of the books were rare and beautiful, many were ordinary, a great many superfluous, but I clung to all of them like a miser guarding the heaps of gold coins kept in his vault.<\/p>\n

. . . .<\/p>\n

In any event, it is all gone now, except for a few jagged fragments. In 2014, a natural catastrophe of an insidiously furtive and unanticipated kind overtook both me and my library, and ultimately (though in agonizingly protracted stages) the latter had to be liquidated. The bereavement of losing nearly forty years of accumulated texts, however, was not nearly as great as I thought it would be (allowing for the possibility that I am still in a state of shock). It turns out that all those texts are still out there to be read, and that many of them I did not need anyway. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dear me, I shall miser on.<\/p>\n

But the bulk of the piece is a reading list recommendation for a friend based on the books he had. I’ve recreated the list here, with the usual items I’ve read in bold<\/b> and items I have not read but are in my library in italics<\/i>:<\/p>\n