One of the advantages and disadvantages of living in Hyde Park is the opportunity to browse amazing bookstores that serve the University community–between the Co-Op and Powell’s, you are likely to be able to find any new or used book you might want to find (barring highly obscure, long out-of-print or very specialised technical texts), which also means that you are likely to be tempted into getting quite a lot of books when you visit either store.  Today brought such a fortunate and catastrophic visit to Powell’s, which has a modest Byzantine collection (but even a modest Byzantine collection is awesome compared to the piddling selection at most chain stores), a passable theology collection and an astonishingly broad history section all together.  Looking for the complete works of Bolingbroke?  You can find them there.  Need a primer for Old English?  There it is.  I was less impressed with their theology section, which runs heavily to the modern, lacks any real representation of Orthodoxy and which, oddly enough, contains a copy of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality?, which is hardly a theology book.  But even given these limitations it still surpasses the religion sections at Borders, which run heavily to the DaVinci Code debunkers and the 987 books of Thomas Merton (it only seems as if there are that many, when there are, I believe, really only 852)–for a Trappist, the man is unusually verbose.

So the haul at Powell’s was quite interesting, and constitutes my leisure reading list for this year (whether or not I will get to most or all of these is another question).  Since other bloggers sometimes regale their readers with their latest reading choices, I thought my selections might be of interest to readers of Eunomia, so here they are by category.

Theology & Church History

J.E. Merdinger, Rome and the African Church in the Time of Augustine 
Ernst Renan, Averroes et l’averroisme  
 

Nova & Vetera: Patristic Studies in Honor of Thomas Patrick Halton 

Frederick J. McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome
British History

Hugh Douglas, Jacobite Spy Wars 

Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole

Byzantine History

Paul Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire

Georgina Buckler, Anna Comnena: A Study 

Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider

Near Eastern History

Meir Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest: The Road to Statehood, 1926-1939