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Favorite reads of 2022
My ten most memorable reads of 2022, fiction and nonfiction, out of my 42 first-time reads: 1. The Book of Job — Robert Alter’s translation “Oh, let that night be barren, let it have no song of joy.Let the day-cursers hex it, those ready to rouse Leviathan.Let its twilight stars go dark.Let it hope for…
That All Shall Be Saved
I’ve started reading David Bentley Hart’s “That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation.” It is a powerful and convincing call to abandon the doctrine of an eternal hell and to return to the belief, widespread in the earliest centuries of Christian history, that God’s punishments were not eternal and that God would…
The Odyssey, books 11-24
Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey is unsentimental. Her language is poetic but straightforward, and never prettified. It’s unsparing about the violence and moral ambiguities in Homer’s poem, and not surprisingly, reading it is an emotional experience. This happens often in the space of one line, or just in single word of double meaning, as…
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