Reasonable People Can Disagree

One of my favorite sayings is: "Reasonable people can disagree." I use it at home, at work, with friends and with strangers. I use it for political arguments but also much more mundane matters (crunchy vs. smooth, peanut vs. plain, etc.).
Now I have to use it for my friend Doug who didn't like Marilynne Robinson's book Gilead as much as I did.
Read Doug's post here.
Read my praise of "Gilead" here and here.

On hearing Ulysses

To help me in my quest to read Ulysses, I've checked out an audio version from the library -- 22 CDs read aloud! I'm surprised at how illuminating the audio version is, and it's definitely helping me make better progress with the book. The key reason is that Jim Norton, who reads the book, uses different tones of voices in a highly expert way. He uses a stately clear voice for standard narration; a slightly louder, accented voice for the dialogue; and a quieter, faster voice for the characters' inner thoughts. This, to me, is what makes Ulysses so difficult: Joyce blurs the lines significantly between narration, dialogue and inner thought. The audio version helps immensely in sorting out those strands. I've borrowed the Naxos audio version of Ulysses, read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan. On Amazon, it costs $94.49.

Lives of the Saints

I read a good book about St. Francis of Assisi recently (Francis of Assisi: Performing the Gospel Life by Lawrence S. Cunningham). Best of all, it was short -- less than 200 pages. Despite its brevity, it included the pertinent historical facts and some interesting theology. If only all authors could achieve such economy! You can read an interesting book review of it here.
Also to be filed under saints: The New Yorker has a fascinating article about Mary Magdalene and her development over 2,000 years of Christian history. For example, there is no evidence in the Bible that she was a prostitute. You can read the article through this link for awhile.
Interesting excerpt:

Today, with so many Biblical literalists around, we have to fuss about what Scripture actually says, but in the early centuries after Christ’s death such questions were less important, because most people couldn’t read. The four Gospels, for the most part, are collections of oral traditions. Once they were written down, they served as a guide for preaching, but only as a guide. Preachers embroidered upon them freely, and artists—indeed, everyone—made their own adjustments. The English scholar Marina Warner makes this point in her book on the Virgin Mary, “Alone of All Her Sex” (1976). As Warner shows, many of the details of the Nativity so familiar to us from paintings and hymns and school pageants—“the hay and the snow and the smell of animals’ warm bodies”—are not in the New Testament. People made them up; they wanted a better story. Likewise, they made up a better Mary Magdalene.

On why Spoonreader.com is not taking over the Net

New York magazine has a big article on bloggers. (Read it here.) Apparently the hottest blogs can earn up to $2 million a year thanks to advertising. They mention a website called Gawker that includes celebrity gossip. According to the experts, the secret to a great blog is relentless, regular posting. Which, as you can see, is why spoonreader will never get beyond my 12 loyal readers. I'm back in library school this semester, too, and it cuts in to my extracurricular time.
But I'm not going away, and I will try to post something more substantial real soon! And to my dear 12 readers, please know that you are very special to me and I care deeply about each and everyone of you. Happy Valentine's Day!