"But I’ve found, as I have grown older, the world has incrementally foisted upon me a preponderance of quick and simple easiness; it’s inescapable. What’s more, I like it! I like it too much! And reading a difficult book is not going to change that, or anything. Still, for at least a few hours a week, I have a chance to dedicate myself, among friends, toward material that requires sincere mental devotion, and I feel the satisfying kind of exhaustion. It’s fitting we began with Spinoza...."
The book club's first book was Spinoza's "Ethics." Castillo sums it up: "The book’s argument, supposedly, is that everything one needs for salvation is already at hand."
4 comments:
I was really interested right up to the part about gender being a construct, then I remembered why I have twice tried book clubs, and twice quickly quit them. I lack perseverance when it comes to suffering fools.
This post is worthy of the "lightweight religion" tag.
"Deep and difficult", eh? For me, that was a 2-inch tome entitled Fundamental Electro-magnetics.
If their first choice was Spinoza, unless they dial it down to Oprah altitude, they may get to a second, but certainly not a third book in the "Club".
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