Sometimes every seems to post which book they're reading for Lent, this year hardly anyone is.  So, just to buck the trend, and even though Lent is half over and I've read less than half of the book... I am reading Lucy Winkett's Our Sound is our Wound which is proving an interesting exploration around sound and noise and woundedness.  I can't honestly say I've really got nito it yet, but it is refreshingly different to read.  And for collectors of miscellaneous connections, I have never spoken to Lucy in my life, but we did once both stand at the end of Downing Street with Dawn French shouting 'make poverty history' along with a couple of hundred other women ministers.

By contrast, last night I was in the Mitchell theatre in Glasgow enjoying a couple of speakers in the Aye Write book festival.  The first, 36 Proofs of the Existence of God by Rebecca Godstein is a new-atheism meets religious-yearning novel that sounds fascinating and is a fictionalised exploration of philosophical topics by a 'new atheist' with devout Jewish roots.  Possibly a (more sophisticated?) parallel to some of Brain McLaren's 'new kind of Christian ' stuff, but I wouldn't know without reading it.  Certainly a similar premise of fiction to explore complex topics.

The second, a book on the Scottish Reformation by Harry Reid, facilitated by Richard Holloway, was very entertaining if far less focused, but left me wondering if the English Reformation (beyond Anglicanism) was really so different (albeit quite probably more bloody), the dangers of state churches being seen as normative and even the assumption that English history is actually anywhere as near uniform as sometimes portrayed?  And all this because I grew up in the 'cradle' of English protestant non-conformity.

Anyway, it was fun, it made me think and I met new people in new places, so it was a good evening.