Cullen Murphy.

Cullen Murphy is the managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly. His most recent book is The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own (Houghton Mifflin).

The famous complaint of the free-lance writer is that he's so busy writing, he doesn't have any time for his "writing." As a magazine editor, I have a parallel complaint: I'm often so busy reading that I don't have any time for "reading"-reading for pure pleasure, that is. Somehow, unexpectedly, these past few autumn months have brought an eclectic handful of books to hand, and provided a few stray days to enjoy them.

Out of the blue one morning came a note from an Atlantic Monthly reader recommending Larry Baker's The Flamingo Rising (Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 309 pp.) as "the most under-recognized book of 1997." Months went by, and then also out of the blue came a British paperback copy of the book, sent by the author. The double coverage was unnerving, so I gave in, and ended up reading through the night. The mise en scene is preposterous: The plot involves a complex feud between the outlandish family that owns The Flamingo, a drive-in movie theater on the Florida coast, and the more straitlaced family that owns the funeral home across the street. (Typical issue: Invasion of the Body Snatchers comes to town.) But the picaresque exuberance is grounded in deftly wrought characters and a narrative that possesses a profoundly moral core. I closed The Flamingo Rising with a sense both of satisfaction and gratitude, and bewilderment about what to read next.

As I placed The Flamingo Rising on the shelf at home reserved for an idiosyncratic "private stock" of books, I noticed a slim, hardbound volume that had been sitting there for years, and decided to re-read it: John McPhee's A Sense of Where You Are (reissued in paperback by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $12, 226 pp.), his 1965 profile of Bill Bradley, then still a student at Princeton and the dominant figure in college basketball. Originally a New Yorker profile, the book consumes no more than a couple of hours; one reason to read it is for an early sample of McPhee's clean, crystalline style. But, of course, the subject isn't McPhee. From the vantage point of the mid-1960s, Bill Bradley's classmates seem to take it for granted that Bradley will become president, or at the very least governor of Missouri. The title of the book refers to Bradley's finely calibrated instinct for the spatial geometry of basketball. McPhee describes watching Bradley practice on an unfamiliar court-at the Lawrenceville School-and seeing him miss one practice shot after another. "You want to know something?" Bradley says finally. "That basket is about an inch-and-a-half too low." McPhee goes on: "Some weeks later, I went back to Lawrenceville with a steel tape, borrowed a stepladder, and measured the height of the basket. It was nine feet ten and seven-eighths inches above the floor, or one and one-eighth inches too low."

A few days ago I finished Garry Wills's short study, Saint Augustine (Lipper/ Viking, $19.95, 152 pp.). The book is one in a series of brief Penguin Lives, edited by James Atlas, the idea being that the full Leon Edel treatment shouldn't be the only extant biographical model. (Some other projected Penguin Lives: Edna O'Brien on James Joyce; Roy Blount, Jr. on Robert E. Lee; Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis Presley.) Wills has written a crisp narrative essay on Augustine-as you'd expect, more an intellectual portrait than a curriculum vitae. He is at great pains to revise the popular view of Augustine as "an ex-debauchee obsessed with sex" and to emphasize the dynamic character of Augustine's thought.

Wills's range (during the past year I've read long pieces by him on Lincoln's rhetoric; the Starr Report; the Sundance Film Festival; and the new Venetian opera house) and his stamina remain a source of astonishment. He produces a new book at least once a year, and something brilliant for the New York Review of Books at least once a month, and then seems to turn up every few days in various other venues. One passage from Wills on Augustine inevitably brings Wills himself to mind: "Augustine dictated to relays of stenographers, often late into the night. He employed teams of copyists. His sermons, several a week, were taken down by his own or others' shorthand writers. In some seasons, he preached daily. His letters were sent off in many copies. He paced about as he dictated, a reflection of the mental restlessness and energy conveyed in the very rhythms of his prose."

How, one wonders, did Augustine ever find time to read? How, for that matter, does Garry Wills?

Finally, I would like to second a book recommended by William Pritchard. A.N. Wilson had the good fortune to publish God's Funeral (W.W. Norton, $25, 385 pp.) just as the state of Kansas was preparing to raise new hurdles against the teaching of evolution in public schools. The debates over belief and its implications as our own century draws to a close sharply echo the nineteenth-century debates that Wilson chronicles in this collection of mini-profiles (of Carlyle, Mill, Darwin, Arnold, Hardy, Eliot, William James, and the Modernists, among others). Strip the story down and there's nothing new here-the nineteenth-century contest between religion and reason is by now a musty scrim on the stage of civilization- but Wilson is a deft miniaturist, capturing some of the emotional character that has long since drained out of familiar arguments and personalities. Wilson's own journey from Anglicanism to agnosticism-not mentioned in this book, though Wilson has written about it elsewhere-adds a further layer of resonance.

One memorable story: John Stuart Mill, after borrowing the only manuscript copy of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution, calls on Carlyle later to confess that the whole thing had accidentally been burned. "Oh, that I had faith!" Carlyle wrote in his diary that night. "Oh, that I had! Then there were nothing too hard or heavy for me." He went to work, and wrote the volume again.