Category: Books

A June article in The Atlantic Monthly reports on a long study done by a Harvard prof regarding what makes us happy. The prof filled his study with personally written detailed reports on his observations of his subjects. The author of the article ways that with the level of detail given, “…the lives become worthy of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.”

Dostoevsky, and I’m discovering Tolstoy as well, live in the minds of their characters. What makes reading either fascinating is their insights into what makes the characters tick. Tolstoy does so with a lighter touch, but so omniscient is he that he even speaks from within the mind of of one of the characters’ dogs.

Two men go bird hunting, and find themselves in a distracting conversation. All the while, the dog is wanting to hunt. You know this because Tolstoy tells you!

“While they were talking, Laska, pricking up her ears, kept looking up at the sky and then reproachfully at them.

“‘What a time to choose to talk,’ she thought. ‘And here comes one…. Yes, here it is. They’ll miss it.'”

You’ve got to love it.

I’m 55% along the journey known as Anna Karenina and touches like this have made it a worthwhile trip.

One of the characters is a government official who on one occasion turns in a study on some issue. Tolstoy comments:

“All the questions had received excellently drafted answers, and were not open to doubt because they were not the work of human thought, always liable to error, but were all the work of bureaucratic officialdom.”

You have got to love the twinkle in Tolstoy’s eye.

Plodding on…

The book, The Evolution of God, from which the Atlantic article was drawn, with which I interacted here, and here, and here, and here, has now been released to great fanfare. It was on the cover of the NY Times Review of Books, and so is guaranteed to receive a lot of attention. That review, by Paul Bloom of Yale is very positive. He calls it ‘brilliant’ and repeats the author Robert Wright’s assertion that God is a human creation who has, thankfully, evolved over time into a moral and rather decent chap.

I wish I had the wherewithal to interact with the book more than I have done, but I don’t see myself adding this 576 page book to my reading list any time soon. Bloom’s review will give you an overview, as does the critique of the book by Dinesh D’Souza in Christianity Today.

Makes me want to go out and read C. S. Lewis for some intellectual refreshment (or perhaps Harvard’s Armand Nicholi’s fascinating presentation of Lewis’ views).

Admittedly, this is but one man’s opinion, but a pretty smart man we should note. It is interesting to see that Freddy made the list at #4. I would demur at one point: I liked Freddy Goes to Florida.

To have a young child is to have an excuse to read aloud. It struck me that if I did not have one, I should be obligated to go find one.

The one I have and I began reading Little House in the Big Woods Sunday night. I’m surprised how much he likes it.

A few posts ago, I expressed surprise to see that on the reading list of Rays player Ben “Zorilla” Zobrist was Mortimer Adler’s book How to Read a Book. I was surprised because I so rarely run into anyone who has any other response to such a book other than to laugh at a book on how to read. It seems so oxymoronic.

When I taught English, I would assign the book and enforce its ‘rules’, much to the chagrin of my students. It became a past time to groan and complain about HTRAB, just as, I can imagine, piano students groan and complain about scales. When, however, budding pianists practice their scales, they become, in the end, more competent pianists. And when readers learn the skills involved in reading a book for understanding, they can begin to enjoy and profit so much more from from what they read. (Hopefully, the end result would be a greater desire to read, though I think that desire is born elsewhere.)

So, I was surprised to see a reference to Adler’s book in an interview of a professional athlete. That shows my bias about the intellectual interests of pro athletes. I would love to know how Zobrist was introduced to the book.

It is not only I who commend this book to others. It has long been my contention that if we would simply learn how to read, we would become more careful readers of the Bible, and less prone to being led astray by those who want to use the book to sway us. It is gratifying to find scholars who agree.

In their book How to Read the Bible for All it’s Worth, Douglas Stuart and Gordon Fee give the following suggestions for learning to do exegesis (biblical interpretation):

“How, then, do we learn to do good exegesis…?

“At its highest level, of course, exegesis requires knowledge of many things we do not necessarily expect the readers of this book to know: the biblical languages; the Jewish, Semitic, and Hellenistic backgrounds; how to determine the original text when the manuscripts have variant readings; the use of all kinds of primary sources and tools. But you can learn to do good exegesis even if you do not have access to all of these skills and tools. To do so, however, you must learn first what you can do with your own skills, and second you must learn to use the work of others.

“The key to good exegess, and therefore to a more intelligent reading of the Bible, is to learn to read the text carefully and to ask the right questions of the text. One of the best things one could do in this regard would be to read Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940, rev. ed. With Charles Van Doren, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972). Our experience over many years in college and seminary teaching is that many people simply do not know how to read well. To read or study the Bible intelligently demands careful reading, and that includes learning to ask the right questions of the text.”

It is a good thing that Barb and I are having no more children. I wonder what she would think of the name “Mortimer”?

I am, as I’ve reported, lumbering along through Anna Karenina, a 935 page book published 132 years ago. (Status: 37.6% complete. Update coming at 40%.) This will of course reduce the total number of different books I might read this year, but who’s counting?

Someone is.

I am cheered to find out from those who do the counting that the sheer volume of books out there waiting to be read is slightly smaller this year. According to the Books-in-print people, the total number of new books and editions published in 2008 fell, making the stack of stuff to read 3% shorter than that published in 2007.

That isn’t, though, very comforting when one stares at the real numbers. This from the press release:

New Providence, NJ – May 19, 2009 – Bowker, the global leader in bibliographic information management solutions, today released statistics on U.S. book publishing for 2008, compiled from its Books In Print® database. Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that U.S. title output in 2008 decreased by 3.2%, with 275,232 new titles and editions, down from the 284,370 that were published in 2007.

Did you get that? More than 275 thousand new books rolled off US presses in 2008, everyone of them expecting to be read by someone.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wrap my mind around such numbers, especially when I must choose the books worth reading, and line them up against my available time.

I wonder if we will continue reading into eternity? I’ll need to if I chose to tackle any more Russian novels (or Stephen King for that matter).

The article does go on to say that the volume of religion books published dropped 11% from 2007. That is probably a good thing.

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(By the way, my neighbor reports that her novel manuscript is complete and in the hands of a ‘superstar’ editing agency. She is a serious writer who has studied the craft and worked hard at it. I’m cheering for her.)

Our church has attracted a number of artists.

My daughter’s boyfriend pointed out recently works of art being created right under my nose, by my very own wife.

Pretty impressive (and not even her best).

Obedient, too. Calvin Seerveld in a rare book called Rainbows for the Fallen World (rare everywhere, but still available in Canada here) argues the importance of what he calls the believer’s aesthetic obedience – that we are all as disciples of Christ called to make our world beautiful.

It’s a great concept illustrated in Barb’s temporary creations.

Mine, I fear, lack her aesthetic touch.

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UPDATE: The book is available for $25US and postpaid, apparently, to the US here. The Calvin College says this about the book: “A must read for anyone interested in aesthetics.”

It is probably a bad idea to recommend a book that you have never seen much less read.

In most cases, no doubt, it is. But not in this one.

Dr. David McWilliams is the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Lakeland, Florida, and a dear friend of mine. That in and of itself does not guarantee literary quality, of course. But I know David to be a careful scholar with a deep pastoral concern for God’s people. When one brings those two qualities together with a good mix of communicative competence, the result is worth embracing.

As a friend I know that David is familiar in his personal experience with the issues confronted by Paul in Galatians. Like us all, he has confronted the struggles of living joyously free in Christ without falling over the edge into legalism. This produces a pastoral tenderness in all David’s exposition. I’m sure it will be reflected here.

Thanks, David, for your labor, and Covenant Presbyterian, for granting your pastor the freedom to use his rich gifts for the blessing of the church.

The book can be found here or here.

How dark should our children’s tales be? When ‘Ring Around the Rosy’ is understood as a metaphor for the black plague, and ‘we all fall down’ understood as death, well, I suppose that at least in some eras darkness was a part of a child’s apprehension of the world.

Last Christmas I was purchasing Kate Dicamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux from a local bookseller who encouraged me to get as well her later book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Based upon her recommendation, I bought it as well. However, like many a book, it sat unread (and therefore unloved) on our shelf for the past six months.

What a loss.

My son and I Sunday night finished reading it and I must say that I am in awe of the depth and beauty and honest realism of this book. Rare is the children’s book that I would easily read again. This is one of them.

On the one hand, this is a story about a china doll rabbit who gets lost and is found by various people. On the other hand it is a story which reveals the courage and pain that must accompany true love. Along the way one meets homeless men, an abusive father, a faltering girl, and a sad and sacrificial boy. A pretty grim landscape for a children’s book. But a landscape with a tender beauty which exposes sadness in a way that reaches the child’s heart as well as that of the parent. This landscape serves as a perfect backdrop for the redemption which is hard and long in coming.

It’s probably not cool for a dad to have tears in his eyes at the end of a book when reading it to his son, but so be it.

The only thing more certain to cause tears is for me to discover that Hollywood had gotten hold of the book. Sigh.