in the summer term 2026
I keep returning to Claire Dederer’s Monsters. Not because it answers anything, but because it doesn’t. She loves Polanski’s films. She knows what he did. She can’t make those two facts resolve. The book is her circling that failure, again and again, refusing to pretend she’s figured it out.
I find that honesty unbearable and necessary.
And then there’s Simon Stjernholm’s Sensing Islam—a book about what happens when religion enters through the ear, the skin, the breath. Sufi practitioners in a cold London prayer hall. The Prophet’s sweat in devotional poetry. The contested ground around a saint’s grave.
What draws me is the question underneath: what do we miss when we treat knowing as something that happens in the head?
I want to read both of these books slowly, with others, in conversation. Not seminars that dissect. Just thinking together. Letting the questions land where they land.
More soon.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (2. Dezember 2025). Two Books I Want to Read With Others. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 7. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/159ld

