Summer Reading List 2008!

Yay for lots of books! Here we go...

"Grant me, O Lord, to know and understand which should come first, prayer or praise; or, indeed, whether knowledge should precede prayer. For how can one pray to you unless one knows you? If one does not know you, one may pray not to you you, but to something else. Or is it rather the case that we should pray to you in order that we may come to know you?" -The Confessions of St. Augustine,by Augustine, in a vivid contemporary translation by Rex Warner!

(Curiousity may have killed the cat, but it seems to have taken Augustine on quite the adventure! Everybody should listen to the Switchfoot song about Augustine, by the way...can't remember what it's called right now...)

"The day was now departing; the dark air released the living beings of the earth from work and weariness; and I myself alone prepared to undergo the battle both of the journeying and of the pity, which memory, mistaking not, shall show."
-Inferno, by Dante Alighieri, in a verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum!

(In intense agreement with Mr. Choo, who inspired the reading of this particular book, all I can say is: Dante Rocks!. You can tell how eloquent I've become since moving away from Torrey, eh?)

"Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman...with the infant at her bosom...an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity [and] only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant she had borne."-The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

(Oh, sad, sad book...Hawthorne has a way of describing things so vividly that it sends veritable pangs through one's heart.)

"[Raoul] was now twenty-one and looked eighteen. He had a little blond mustache, attractive blue eyes, and a girlish [personality, I mean] complexion." -The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux.

(Yup, that about sums it up.)

I'll probably be able to finish all of these on our two-week trip to Florida. Which starts tomorrow morning. At three. In the morning. Which is the problem with living in a small town, because the nearest commercial airport is 100 miles away in Seattle. Oh well. Anyways, yay for good and interesting books! What are your summer plans/books, friends?