The Goat Rope books shelf: religion and philosophy

During Slacker Week, i.e. those days between Christmas and New Year's Day, El Cabrero is doing as little as possible other than looking back at the year in reading. I was not particularly in a religious mode this year, if you don't count karate (which actually works pretty well as one), but I did read a bit about religion.

I don't always enjoy Karen Armstrong's books on religion, although I always seem to read them. I did enjoy one of her more recent books, The Case for God: What Religion Really Means.

I'm always a sucker for a good book on Buddhism, and Perry Garfinkel's Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All fit the bill.

I paid another visit to Aristotle this year, re-reading The Nichomachean Ethics and The Politics, along with Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History. On the down side, I crawled through Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and still don't know what all the shouting was about. It goes without saying that I revisited my old pal Nietzsche