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MannyRayner

Manny Rayner's book reviews

I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.

Currently reading

The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
Richard Dawkins
R in Action
Robert Kabacoff
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
Douglas R. Hofstadter
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Harold McGee
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Simon Evnine
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Christopher M. Bishop
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
Richard C. Tolman
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Julia Herschensohn, Martha Young-Scholten
La porte étroite - André Gide Gide said that he meant this book to be treated as one half of a pair, together with L'Immoraliste. I took him at his word and read them in rapid succession. By the way, I should say this was atypical - I'm a "when all else fails, read the instructions" kind of person, but I found both books together at a second-hand bookstore and it seemed silly not to do what he said.

Looking at other reviews, I seem to have a fairly different take on the book, and perhaps my reading route has something to do with it. So, here we have a guy who's in love with this charming girl, Alissa, and is hoping to marry her. Alissa, however, takes it into her head that God doesn't wants her to marry her nice fiancé, but rather to contract a form of anorexia, coupled with depression, which eventually kills her. On the way, she also manipulates her unfortunate sister into marrying someone she doesn't much like, trapping her permanently in a loveless marriage.

Well, if Alissa was someone I knew personally, I wouldn't be rhapsodizing about her moving closeness with the Divine. I'd be trying to get her into therapy as quickly as possible, and meanwhile reading up the literature on religious mania. When I did what Gide suggested, and compared her with the main character in L'Immoraliste, I decided that his take on her wasn't very different from what mine would be in a real situation. He thinks Alissa is falling into one of two possible errors with religion, allowing it to take such a large part in her life that it drives her mad, destroying her and also several people she supposedly cares about. The hero of L'Immoraliste falls into the opposite trap. He rejects religion entirely, living an utterly selfish life which ends up killing his beautiful and loving wife in a particularly horrible way.

So, to sum up both books, I'd say Gide was telling people not to abandon religion - but also not to overdo it, and not to forget to listen to their normal human feelings and their common sense. Pretty balanced advice, in fact.