bookish successes

Trust it to be books that cheered me up today.

In the morning a parcel arrived containing Matthew Henry's Communicant's Companion, newly republished by Solid Ground Christian Books. I'd nearly given up hope of getting it, since I ordered it a whopping two months ago - but I needn't have worried. I've already quoted it here actually (this bit from the first chapter) and it was so good all the way through that I just had to stock up on another couple of copies. I got it from here: it's got a nice new cover, although inside it's a facsimile of a nineteenth century edition, but as it says in the introduction (by Rev John Brown of Edinburgh, 1825), its contents are "very plain, very pious, and very practical." Definitely worth the wait.

Anyway, then this afternoon I had to pass a Barnardo's shop near my office and they had a box of 'Religion and Theology bargains' outside. And there I picked up Redemption: Accomplished and Applied by Prof John Murray and Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ronald J Sider - for the eminently reasonable price of 50p each.

And in between all that, I even discovered that a whole issue of the journal Reading and Writing was devoted to reading/writing in non-alphabetic scripts (like Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, etc), which hopefully doesn't sound too obscure, as it's exactly what I'm going to be spending the next wee whiley thinking about.