Texting Away

Sisters of Sinai is still being read, allbeit at rather a slow pace. It improved once the narration fo their expedition got underway, but the most notable event for me was their individual bad-luck at losing their late-found and ideally-suited husbands after only a few years of marriage. That, and how the sisters managed to acquire enough language skills in Syriac to pass muster as serious scholars. But they did, so all credit to them. It must have helped to have no small amount of money to smooth the way though! Some birthday money allowed me to get hold of William Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary, Walter Wilson's Pauline Parallels and a Penguin Classics copy of the poems of Goethe, with German and English text on opposing pages. Lovely - should keep me busy a while. I don't seem to have a 'non-serious' book on the go at the moment: I did get a copy of Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian from a charity shop for £1, but it's just laid on my desk at the moment, unopened. I've also worked my way through Textual Scholarship: an Introduction by David Greetham, and John Harvey's Listening to the Text which examines the rhetoric of Paul's epistles.
The Penguin Classics Desert Fathers book can only be read in very short doses: their utter refusal to engage with life in any sort of normal way is so alien that the mind boggles almost immediately. I shall post the most bizarre example of this when I've finished all the chapters.