It’s typical of periodical media of many types, news, sports, special interests at this time of year to do year end reviews and so on. Last year I suggested some books which I thought most affected or influenced my thinking and ideas in the prior year. As a reminder the two books, which I still very highly recommend from last year were Stephen Collier’s The Bottom Billion (note: now in paperback) and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

  • For the first book, an interesting approach to the theodicy problem in The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? This book frames the problem and stresses that there aren’t “trivial” answers locates the best solution (and framing of the problem) in the literature as being found in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov which … I also finished reading this year at long last. And which, now having found the suggestion that this book, among other things, is “about” theodicy I will start to re-read. This book too, I glanced at but will return to when I return to the latter book here Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction.
  • For my second book, I’m going to have to go with The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, which I highly recommend to anyone who likes math and has a few collegiate mathematics classes under their belt.

How about you? Any books you found interesting that you read in 2008?

Related posts:

  1. Books Looked At While Traveling
  2. Four Books and Lent
  3. Book Review: Hand That Rocks The Cradle by Nathaniel Bluedorn
  4. Words and Mind: Tax Cuts as Costs for Government
  5. On Theodicy

Filed under: Books • Mark O.

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