What are you reading?

[Jamie]

What are you reading (or what have you recently finished? Have you read a great book recently that ties in with atheism? Have you been rereading the Bible in a different translation? Are you taking a break from philosophical inquiry to read a crime series?

[Jamie]

This week I am wading through Alexander Solzheitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, while watching the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. Gulag Archipelago is heavy reading though, so I am also reading a murder mystery, Transient Desires, by Donna Leon, and The Sea, by John Banville, whenever the human evilness of Soviet prison camps gets too heavy.

[Paul]

Just finished the audio of Susan Hill's The Various Haunts of Men, which was excellent, superbly written, but I couldn't help taking issue with some of the ideas. For instance, there is a medium who seems to be real, and it portrays some pseudoscience such as osteopathy and acupuncture as broadly effective. It's odd, I'm happy to read something like Rivers of London or The Stranger Times that are set in the real world but have actual magic, but I suppose to actual believe that is real would be clearly insane, while having the things many people DO believe in portrayed in a mundane world set my teeth on edge a bit.