miniZibaldone

The Italian author Umberto Eco belonged to a rare breed—a medievalist of encyclopedic erudition, a creative philosopher and a talented novelist. Prompted by his recent death, Eco’s first novel, The Name of the Rose , has resurfaced in bookstands everywhere.  The virtue Aquinas opposes to curiositas is not humility , but studiousness , that is, knowledge pursued well.  The parallel between the monastery with the vast library and a globalized world with Internet access should now be clear. Aquinas thought of curiositas as largely caused by acedia —i.e. spiritual laziness or aimlessness. Who among us has not wasted hours on Wikipedia rather than completing the task at hand?   [Full text]

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco   Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer by Charles Rankin

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell   Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco   A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks   Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks   Selected Poems by Robert Frost   It's A Battlefield by Graham Greene   Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon   Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway   The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse   A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man by James Joyce   Odd Thomas by Dean Kootz   The World The World by Norman Lewis

The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee Consider this Senora by Harriet Doerr   The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco   Burger's Daughter by Nadine Godimer   Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman   Notebook 1967-68 by Robert Lowell   All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy   The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh   A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh   The Jeeves Omnibus 2 by P. G. Wodehouse   The Mating Season and Other Stories by P. G. Wodehouse   Money in the Bank by P. G. Wodehouse