New Books - June 20 2008

It’s really nice to come home from work and to have your son state rather strongly that he wants to go to the bookstore later that night. It was a real sacrifice for me, but we took the grueling two-or-so-mile trip to Half Price Books.

The bad news is that they didn’t give me the books for free. The good news is that they gave me two books for a good price. The first was a recent book (2003) by William H. C. Frend entitled From Dogma to History: How Our Understanding of the Early Church Developed (Amazon). Amazon has it on sale for $19.99 currently; I got it for $4.98.

The second book isn’t nearly so recent, Cranfield’s commentary on Mark in the Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary series. They had it for $24.99. It is out of stock at Eisenbrauns, but they have it listed for $33.25. Or you can get it from Amazon for $40. Yeah, I call that a win.

So, good book day! Since I just finished my book on Erasmus, I will probably be looking for a new book soon. Perhaps the Frend volume? For now I’ve got (only!) two books partially read, a biography of Constantine and a book on Greek literature. I still have about 800 pages to go on the latter, so that one will take me a long time to finish. I rarely read books as long as The Stand; like this volume, they are generally not as interesting and so take forever.