3) Confessions, by St Augustine

The end of my reading project is nigh. I have to admit I skimmed quite a lot of this; eloquent and heartfelt pleas to the Lord are all very well but get a bit samey after a while. Also Augustine's misogyny is really rather repulsive; by his own admission, he abandons his partner of fifteen years to make a socially convenient marriage (though he keeps custody of his son) - this at the behest of his mother, who is exalted throughout as an exemplar of saintliness.

Having said that, when on form he was a very good writer. His self-consciously funny line about his youthful flings, "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet" is one that I have used and adapted for many speeches. I found the passages on memory, and on the nature of time,well-expressed, though I doubt if they actually included any new ideas. Given my own past interests, I was very interested in what he has to say about astrology: his arguments against it are basically sound. Not surprising, in a way, that Augustine was one of the first Christian writers to insist that if science contradicts the words of the Bible, we should not take the Bible literally.

Anyway, I wish (and this is not something I often say of a book) that he had written less about lust and more about philosophy.

Actually the full list of books I own but haven't read is here. The ten most frequently tagged as "unread" by other Librarything users are:

1. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (☑)
2. Persuasion, by Jane Austen (☑)
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (☑)
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison (☑)
5. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli (☑)
6. The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson (☑)
7. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (☑)
8. The Confessions of Saint Augustine (☑)
9. Villette, by Charlotte Bronte (☑)
10. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (☑)

Some of these were reasonably high on the to-read pile; others will get promoted when I get back.