Books galore!

I do like it when Amazon sends me books, I finished Brave New World the other day and my reading list has just been topped up with Don Quixote and Anna Karenina. In the introduction to Anna Karenina, there is a quote from Tolstoy which I thought was pretty cool

" ...the aims of art are incommensurate with social aims. The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably , but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations. If I were to be told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I would not even devote two hours to such a novel; but if I were told that what I should write would be read in twenty years time by those who are now children and that they would laugh and cry over it, and love life, I would donate all my life and all my energies into it. "

I'd recommend Philip Yancey's 'Soul Survivor' as a brief look at Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as incredible Christian writers and inspirations (although both with plenty of problems).