My Shelfari.com bookshelf (to the right) just got a little juggle. I had been devouring Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood when I interrupted it to read Mike Dooley’s Infinite Possibilities. The latter was for a Game Plan column and so I wanted to get it read before I interviewed Mike.

However, with that in the can, I have returned to Mary McCarthy and her compelling story. I was reading it both ways on the PATH train into the city today and for the first time in a very long time, I completely lost track of time during the ride.

What has me so fascinated in her story right now is her account of being in grade school and deciding to tell the nun, and subsequently a priest, that she has lost her faith and is questioning the Catholic religion. This starts as a stunt to get attention — “Say you’ve lost your faith,” the devil prompted — but ends up being an eye-opening realization that these adults have no satisfactory answers to her very pointed questions.

And I’m only about halfway through …