Back during Lent, one of my plans was to read shorter books only.  And I kept that, for the most part, which was nice.  Since then, though, I’ve taken the plunge with a few longer books (and one short book that I started during Lent and am almost, finally, about to finish).

As I write this, I’m about 16 pages away from being done with Oliver O’Donovan’s The Disappearance of Ethics.  It’s the holdover from Lent.  And it’s good, but it’s also one of those books that requires me to read and reread things a few times.  The book has definitely been good food-for-thought for me, both for the classroom and for day-to-day life.  For being such a small book, it’s quite the big-picture account of ethics and the Christian life (but not in a handbook kind of way).

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I’m about 2/3 of the way through Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.  His basic assertion is that over the last couple of decades society has gone too far in protecting kids in the real world but not far enough in the virtual one.  Lots of charts and statistics, for sure.  The last chunk of the book, which I just started, is more about what can be done to make a better societal correction with things like smartphones and social media.  Funny enough, a recent episode of Abbott Elementary had an opening scene that dealt with students and technology.  It was both funny and worrisome:

Perhaps one lesson is this: let’s not be naive.

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My other longer read is the book that can be found on the right column of the page: Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse.  It came across my radar the same time as The Anxious Generation; I thought it would be a nice counter-balance.  It’s a great book: compelling narrator, short chapters, and some quality world-building (and it’s a rather small world being built, which is nice).  Turns out I misread the dust jacket blurb about the story: what I thought was a main character simply “going missing” turns out to be much darker.  But Enger is a reliable storyteller, even if everything sad in the story doesn’t get to become untrue.  It’s my bus reading, so I’m still a week or so from finishing the novel.  It really is a good story, both heavier and more beautiful than I had expected.

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I’m not sure where I’ll go next book-wise.  New novels are always a little hit or miss for me (which is why I tend to read the same authors and rarely branch out to new ones).  Ephraim Radner released a new book that I just came across a week or two ago.  It looks a little dense, which is tricky because his style is also somehow elusive to me on a first read.  I’m also really interested in Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter Matters So Much by Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth.  It’s been years since I read anything from Peacock, but I’ve always respected his perspective.  Both books have a strong practical edge to them (they look to balance the practical and ideal well, really).  We’ll see what happens next.