This month's issue of The Atlantic Monthly is a good one. Defying my own knee-jerk prejudices, I read most of the main article, Women of God , about Catholic nuns, by my least favoirte ersatz-Catholic writer, Mary Gordon, in Borders today. It's actually not too aggravating.

There are also several good pieces on Islam and an overview of the work of a writer I'm often asked to discuss, but never have because a) I have no interest in her work and b)I'm pretty confident I wouldn't like it, and that's not what the people who want me to discuss it would like to hear. It's Jan Karon, author of the folksy Mitford novels.

I'm tackling a new book in a genre I'm not too crazy about. A couple of days ago, in some Web wanderings, I came upon a Science Fiction/Fantasy writer of whom I'd never heard (not unusual), but who is a Catholic convert and, according to some accounts, weaves some sort of Catholic subtext into his work. His name is Gene Wolfe, and I will attempt to read Shadow and Claw which is really the first two books of a tetralogy called The Book of the New Sun. I dunno. Ray Bradbury was really the only SF writer I could ever enjoy, and I tried quite a few of them. This one sounds pretty complicated and dense, but I'll give it the old post-collegiate try, for the sake of Catholic Lit.