Notable Book Challenge

I'm taking the challenge! I've started by reading these four books:

READING LIKE A WRITER: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. By Francine Prose.

THE LOOMING TOWER: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. By Lawrence Wright.

THE PLACES IN BETWEEN. By Rory Stewart.

IRAN AWAKENING: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope. By Shirin Ebadi with Azadeh Moaveni.

I am happy to say that I have completed the first three thus far this year.

Actually I am not quite finished with Iran Awakening, but should be done in the next day or so. It is engaging, and I am enjoying it. I know I will complete it.


The final non-fiction book on my list will be: THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA: A Natural History of Four Meals. By Michael Pollan. I have read The Botany of Desire so am eager to see what Pollan has to say. I am thinking about adding 5 books from the fiction list. I have one of them already. So, I think that will make a fine challenge: 5 non-fiction and 5 fiction.

What a lovely idea.

Wikiality, Truthiness, and Stephen Colbert

Wikiality: the idea that if you claim something to be true and enough people agree with you, it becomes true. --from Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report*. (*links to the clip from the Word part of the show where Colbert defines wikiality by checking Wikipedia for what he had said about Oregon as Washington's Mexico or California's Canada.)

Truthiness (noun)
1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)
-- http://www.m-w.com/info/06words.htm (Merriam Webster dictionary)

How is it that I have missed Stephen Colbert's show until now? Well, it might be because I don't watch TV--hardly ever. But I found a link to this Word segment. We could have a long and healthy discussion about the meaning of truth based on its changing definition.

Yikes. There's more to come on this topic...

Digital Hemlock

I haven't read the whole book but I did find some thoughtful quotes from this book:

"The more public the information, the more meaningless it is. The most significant personal knowledge is rarely shared. To upload a self onto the world wide web is to share the most irrelevant, public part of identity." p. 59

"A book can be flicked through, just as a hypertext link can be jumped, but electronic information encourages a smash and grab style of reading, rather than a smoother, more reflexive meditation. The key for teachers and the library profession is to show students and the public how to use divergent modes of reading and research. ...with dense historical description and high theory the reading is slow, drifting along with the sensuality for the words, so that detailed and intense meanings may emerge." AND " The materiality of searching, the evocative potential of exploring an exciting array of potential sources is still a significant part of an intellectual journey. Particular cultural practices have been lost through the electronic age: flicking through a card catalog, dialing a telephone or winding down a car window. Everyday life has changed, desensitizing corporeality and tearing the sensual surfaces of a textured life." p. 85

"The Internet is not a library--this is a dangerous metaphor."

"The desire to be someone else online is an act of denial as well as empowerment ." p. 124

Digital Hemlock. Tara Brabazon.

In My Language

I happened onto this video today. It moved me so much I watched it twice. And since I wanted to learn how to upload YouTube videos to my blog, I thought I would give it a go.

In My Language gave me lots to think about regarding autism, cognitive abilities, and personhood. I began to consider the subject in a totally different way. I have known people who were labeled "mentally retarded" and truly, they are seen as non-thinking, non-persons. We look upon them as helpless and weak. We pity them. And we have seen them taken advantage of. We might have even taken advantage of them ourselves.

I've wondered about it for a long time. How is it that God made them, too? Is there something we can learn from the autistic? How does this video relate to the verse: "But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness." --I Corinthians 1: 27-30.

It makes me want to be more compassionate and more loving to people who don't have the same advantages that I do. It makes me think that there will be a whole different paradigm in heaven. I'm humbled by that thought and by the fact that I need to pay attention to my surroundings in a different way.

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt--Holy Shoddy is Still Shoddy*

I wasn't going to waste any bandwidth on this but here I go. Something keeps bugging me. I just bought N.T. Wright's latest book Simply Christian yesterday. And who is writing cover reviews of it? On the back cover: Will Willimon, Walter Brueggemann, John Ortberg, J.I. Packer--great. All theologians. All excellent writers. All scholars. All solid.

What raised my eyebrows is the quote on the front cover says: "This will become a classic." --Anne Rice, author of Christ the Lord: out of Egypt.

So, where does she come off as qualified to assess N.T.Wright's writing? She writes crappy vampire books, has a Christian conversion, writes one shoddy piece of imaginary fiction on the missing years of Jesus the Christ as a young person that seems to me to be based on Gnostic writings, and she is given front cover billing on N.T. Wright's book. There's something wrong with this picture. Maybe I've connected the wrong dots. Maybe there's something I've missed. Maybe it's because I respect Wright and hold his writing up to high esteem. As I do Packer, Ortberg whose books I have also read.

What is this world coming to? Do people in the publishing world know that she writes trash? Does she have any theological training? What qualifications does she bring to evaluate theology? Does the publishing world think the reading world is stupid? (uh, don't answer that!) How do publishers choose who writes those blurbs anyway?

Elton Trueblood's line "holy shoddy is still shoddy"still fits.

Here's the review of Christ the Lord: out of Egypt I posted on Library Thing.

When I read this book for my book club a few months ago, I couldn't figure out why Jesus and some of the other characters laughed so much. The word "laugh" is so overused, and it puzzled me. I thought surely the author could have used various synonyms: smiled, giggled, grinned, cackled, snickered, guffawed...you get the idea. Then I read "Judas and the Gospel of Jesus: have we missed the truth about Christianity" by N. T. Wright, and then the light bulb went on. Rice is writing this book from a Gnostic point of view. Wright indicates that "laugh" is a Gnostic code word of sorts. Since reading Wright many things make sense to me now. Also part of the book takes place in Alexandria, and in it Jesus studied under Philo. Wright comments that Philo is associated with gnosticism in "The Last Word" which is about scriptural authority. Rice may profess Christianity, and Christianity Today had a nice little puff piece about her conversion. Ultimately she would have to rely on extra-Biblical writings to create the young life of Jesus of which canonical scripture is silent. Even in fiction there has to be some historical basis. When I read this book at first it struck me as "just ok". But now I can't recommend it at all. Her worldview is poles apart in subtle kind of sneaky way from mainline scripture. She has followed after the extra-biblical, non-canonical stuff quite cleverly. I am somewhat amazed that there hasn't been more mentioned about this in the press by people who are experts in Biblical times. In fact I don't think I've seen anyone who has questioned it in this way. I think her writing skills and historical research are extremely weak. Very disappointing. I think this book is riding the coattails of the Davinci Code mania to sell a few books. 4/1/07

*thanks to Elton Trueblood, this is still a timeless truth.

I'd really like to know from Biblical scholars what they think about this book.

OK. I think that's enough thinking for today. I'm going to go take a nap.

Can we ever do too much thinking?

This is me this week. It's spring break, and I'm having a delightful time. So far I have had some good times of just "thinking." I don't think I do enough of it. Do you? What do you think about when you sit down for a rest? What do you wake up thinking about? What do you fall asleep thinking about? Thinking is definitely underrated. We should do more of it, I think.

Ok, now I've got to get up and "do" something. Of course, there are all of those requisite jobs such as laundry, grocery shopping, etc. to catch up on. See what I mean. We always think we have to get up and do something.

Now I'm reading Anne Lamott's Blue Shoe. I can't say that I'm really getting into it that much. I think her strength lies in the personal narrative, essay. I read Rosie which is also fiction and liked it. But Blue Shoe just hasn't grabbed me so far. I should finish it today. Who knows what I'll think about reading next.

By the way, I found a great site for free images. Stock.xchng: http://www.sxc.hu/home. I think it's pretty nifty.

Grey's Anatomy

I just downloaded all of the episodes of Grey's Anatomy from Itunes. If you know me well you know the reason I like this show is that it takes place in Seattle. I just learned that it is filmed in California, but there are some nice outside shots of the city. So, here's a great snippet between Meredith and Derek from the first season.

DEREK: "Seattle has ferryboats?"
MEREDITH: "Yes."
DEREK: "I didn’t know that. I've been living here six weeks, and had no idea there were ferryboats."
MEREDITH: "Seattle is surrounded by water on three sides."
DEREK: "Hence the ferryboats. Now I have to like it here. I wasn’t planning on liking it here, since I'm from New York, and am genetically engineered to dislike everywhere except Manhattan. But I do have a thing for ferryboats."

I could have a thing about ferries and Derek. More quotes to come...