Arrived in my pile and pawed on my sofa
And what a pile it is, after a while in China. I l have started pawing through:
Francis Spufford, True Stories & Other Essays. I have browsed this only selectively, but the essay on C.S. Lewis and the dangers of apologetics is superb. He quotes Lewis:
…nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of the Faith seems to me as spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just described in a public debate. For a moment, you see it, it has seemed to rest on oneself; as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar…
I also can recommend Spufford’s essay on what science fiction call tell us about God, and on Francis Bacon and the idolatry of the market. I look forward to the rest.
Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism, by Naoki Higashida, is a good autism memoir from Japan.
Scott E. Page, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy.
Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions.