An intriguing look at what modern evangelical (theologically, not politically) churches should consider to be different. Jay Kim starts with an analogy from an online review of the church he was pastoring at the time where a visitor left a review that pointed out things like the music being no different that what she would hear at a concert and the whole spectacle feeling like it was designed to look like everything else instead of being its own thing. He goes on to discuss a number of items and cites everyone from John Calvin and N.T. Wright to Cal Newport and Beyonce. It's a short, interesting read that covers a lot of ground related to the rising tide against social media and other constant distractions and even spends a chapter on relating the approach to reading books made popular by Adler and Van Doren to reading Scripture.
The Prophets, a historical and theological investigation of the giants of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament by the great scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel. I was convinced that this was a collection of lectures delivered in Scotland the famous "Gifford Lectures" series, but either I am wrong or the entire internet, including the Gifford Lectures website is wrong. But I've had this book for almost 40 years, so it's about time I got around to reading it.
Another book I'd lightly skimmed for comps back when I thought I would someday be Doctor Bigredfutbol, and am now reading cover-to-cover. Published 49 years ago, and it shows in a couple of ways--few historians today would accept the concept of "wilderness" at face value the way Slotkin seems to have; and while his focus on 'myth' and 'literature' is heavily skewed towards printed matter--making the focus on New England understandable--that New England-centric approach in the opening chapters still comes across as very dated given that the consensus today is much more towards seeing New England as an anomaly/outlier, and the Chesapeake as being the true center of gravity for English (and later British) North America. That said, it's still a very intriguing--if somewhat taxing--read so far (I'm a few chapters in). Does not make me want to spend any time with the Puritans, though.
Jane Jacobs' First City Learning from Scranton, Pennsylvania a book about the history of Scranton told from the perspective of a Scranton native who became one of the foremost theorists of cities and culture by Glenna Lang. She has to talk around the fact that Jacobs wasn't the least bit interested in thinking about Scranton (she wrote about "great cities," and would often tell inquirers that Scranton is a "supply city" (at best these days). Interesting book, though some of its detractors bitch because it can't seem to make up its mind whether it's history or biography or whatever. Doesn't matter to me; it gets done what it needs to get done.
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner. "‘Harvard is such a fine sound forty acres is no high price for a fine sound. A fine dead sound we will swap Benjy's pasture for a fine dead sound."
Six Walks in the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, a memoir recounting six walks as well as relating the sorts of ruminations that float through one's mind while walking, by the husband of Jenny Slate (who appears in the background of this book by) Ben Shattuck
I'm reading a couple of non fiction works right now, but this year has just felt like the time to read make believe. The 4th book in the Gray Man series, Dead Eye, allows Court Gentry to exact some revenge on one of the people that wants him dead while also taking him from St. Petersburg to Tallin, Stockholm, Hamburg, Brussels, Amsterdam, and a few other locations. We move beyond the CIA and murder for hire crew a bit here and add in some government contractors and a nicely worked involvement of Mossad and Metsada. It's a brisk 597 pages with all the gadgets and violence you expect from these books. They almost read like a more mature version of 80s GI Joe with a single agent as the focus instead of a team.
Christ in the Communist Prisons, which has a minimal presence on the internet but which clearly exists, by a Romanian Jewish convert to Christianity and Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who spent 12 years over two sentences facing regular beatings and torture. Damn fine prison memoir.
He was something else. Dude publicly called out clergy that capitulated to the Nazis and then after the war started a ministry, Voice of the Martyrs, for smuggling bibles into countries where they're illegal that still exists to this day. That organization lost a lot of their funding in recent years for publicly opposing Trump and what evangelicalism has turned into in the US.
Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy – Donald L. Miller "The Father of Waters again goes Unvexed to the Sea." - A. Lincoln
The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris. A novel about homosexuality and Reconstruction. It was published in 2021 and is in Oprah's Book Club. Looks like an interesting read.
I am convalescing at my parents' house, and pulled a book off of my mother's book club pile. It's Mary Roach's Stiff about the many ways cadavers are used. Roach has a good thing going writing accessible, breezily informative books on clever topics like this one (i read another several years ago about the digestive system called "Gulp!"). This is roughly twenty years old but has an epilogue and reprint in 2021, presumably to take advantage of the proliferation of book clubs like my mothers. One odd thing: there's nothing in there from south of the equator.
The Wild Palms - William Faulkner " ... he (the old man) had recovered from his debauch, back in banks again, the Old Man, rippling placidly toward the sea, brown and rich as chocolate between levees whose inner faces were wrinkled as though in a frozen and aghast amazement, crowned with the rich green of summer in the willows ...."
The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens, a readable biography by about a poet who made a (really, really good) living as an executive for a prominent Hartford insurance company (and whose external life as a result is not super dramatic) by the really excellent biographer Paul Mariani. Three cheers for Mariani for being able to write a literary biography that doesn't approach 1000 pages, and which doesn't dwell on the worst aspect of the subject's personality.
Longitude by Dava Sobel. A book about the mystery and solution of the geographical problem of longitude. It looks very interesting.
I'm rereading The Bear and the Dragon by the late Tom Clancy. I first read this at Penn State in 2000. I'm rereading it so that I can sell it at 2nd and Charles in Delaware soon.
Orestes A. Brownson: American Religios Weathervane, a biography of one of 19th Century America’s strangest intellectuals (and that’s saying something) by Patrick W. Carey. Brownson was almost entirely self taught (he had less formal education than Abraham Lincoln). By the time he was 30, he had been a Presbyterian (by baptism), an ordained Universalist minister, an atheist, an agnostic, and then an ordained Unitarian minister. Then after a decade as an editor of multiple newspapers and quarterlies (the latter of which he would also supply about 90 % of the writing), he converted to Catholicism. He hung out with (and generally annoyed) all the major figures of American Transcendentalism, and would probably be better known if his published output wasn’t 1) so immense and 2) diverse and 3) wildly uneven.
I bought the book around 2018 after I finished Ancelotti's autobiography. I did not finish. this book. This past month, I decided to have another "go". Basically, the book was about his managerial style and his leadership. It contained many testimonies from his former players, including Ronaldo, Ibrahimnovic, John Terry, Nesta, Maldini, etc. The book was actually not very interesting. He repeated himself. However, he offered a lot of insights about his former clubs. The book was written in 2016 around the time he left Real Madrid and started at Bayern Munich. As a Real Madrid fan, I was able to put his philosophy and to put them into perspective what he did in the past season.
I found this book hidden inside a NYC bookstore. I saw the famous documentary from the early 1990's, but I was not aware of the book. Oh well, the book was written after the documentary came out.I rewatched the documentary again today after I finished the book. The book stayed true to the documentary with more background informations, inner thoughts of the characters, etc. I knew more things about them than what was presented in the documentary. So if you found their stories from the documentary sad, the book was even sadder. Their back stories were much deeper what was presented in the book. So of course, the book was better than the documentary.
The last Gray Man book that I got in paperback. It clocked in at 730 pages (technically 752, but that includes a snippet from the next novel) in this format and 528 in the hardcover that was first released (that I would have bought but couldn't find for less than $60 until after I already had the paperback in my stack to read for almost 6 months). Court Gentry has been trying to figure out why the CIA put a shoot on sight order out against him, and in this book he finally figures it all out. He did his job on an old singleton (solo) mission in Trieste, Italy but the agency head who ordered the hit screwed up and then painted The Gray Man as the villain. Court goes pummeling his way through DC and parts of the southeast as he spends his first time on US soil in over 5 years making sure he either finds out the truth and takes out anyone responsible or dies trying. The ratings at various sites have book 3 (Ballistic) and this one as the highest rated up to this point in the series, and I'd have to say Back Blast was my favorite read so far. From this point on they're all pretty much in the 4.7-5.0 range for most ratings sites. The real twist is that 9 of the 11 currently published books are simply listed as Thriller for the genre, but the next two books are Gunmetal Gray (Political Thriller) and Agent in Place (Action Adventure) so it will be interesting to see how the temporary change in tone fits the character and the story arc. In addition to a 12th book coming out in February, there's currently a Gray Man movie on Netflix (7/22)/in theaters (7/15) with Ryan Gosling playing the lead and Chris Evans playing the main protagonist. The trailer didn't give me much hope beyond them making it a Bourne type action flick without the character depth, but I'm going to watch this week with my fingers crossed that they actually held a lot back. The "critic" rating on RT is only 52%, but the audience rating is 89% and they're usually a lot smarter than the critics.
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)- I had never heard of this book until I saw it in a local Barnes & Noble last year. I decided to buy it. It's a tale of two hedonistic people who meet and marry in a doomed romance. This novel has reached its centenary. This is the second Fitzgerald novel that I have read. You can probably guess what the first one was. Should be interesting.
Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays, a short book by French poet and philosopher (rare combination) Benjamin Fondane, who tragically died in a Nazi concentration camp just days before it was liberated.