Books

Fasting does not change God’s hearing so much as it changes our praying From The Donald Whitney book I’m currently reading - image by Time Challies #Apt

…Neither saint nor Tzadik nor prophet standing at the gate; he’s just another sinner who has somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe inconceivable reality of our world. He doesn’t invent a single feeling or thought – all of them existed long before him… He’s here, at our side, buried up to his neck in mud and filth. The Seven Good Years: A Memoir, Etgar Keret

In the opening chapter of his autobiography, Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez explores his introduction to the English language, and the strain his commitment to mastering it places on his relationship with his parents. Being Mexican immigrants to America in the 1970’s, their primary language of intimacy and engagement is Spanish, their efforts in English being halting and deeply accented, even though his mother is an excellent speller of words. The emotion most stirred in those early days - when he as the up and coming scholarship boy gets to be out and about with them - is one of embarrassment and perhaps frustration at their limitations. For him, as with most people looking to escape the limitations of a certain kind of background, aspiration is a keen motivator, one that drives him to seek to immerse himself in knowledge and books, and take up the manners, airs and graces of the class and culture he looks up to. ...

I have been (re) reading Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing About Grace, the central idea of which is that the church has gone the way of the world in dealing with people who are different; with judgement and disdain rather than grace. For a book from 1997, it does not by any means feel dated, somehow remaining current not least for the issues it tackles; issued which defined the late Nineties but still continue to define our current epoch than anything else - homosexuality and the moral failings of people in leadership, temporal and spiritual. ...

Firmly mired in the middle of my February read, Ted Thompson’s debut novel The Land of Steady Habits, no thanks to a gruelling schedule at work with criminal deadlines, although I did manage to complete a profile of Selma star David Oyelowo for the church newsletter I occasionally write in. What intrigued me about that in the first place was how open he has been about his faith through out his career from theatre to Hollywood. Fascinating read, if I say so myself. Other than that most of my February reading was web based longform, a few of the more interesting ones being highlighted below: ...

Day 27 - Start a Book: Currently ten books into my thirty book plan for the year. Have two on the go at the moment - Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. Hopefully I manage to complete them by the end of next month. Day 28 - Write a Love Letter: Very much work in progress. I suspect this is one I will have come back to again and again. What is clear is that it wasn’t love at first sight by any account - I am far too rational for that - but over time I find a bond building, and increasing joy in the simple things. ...

Between Albert Camus’The Outsider and Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love, my 2014 reading has gotten off to a solid, if unspectacular start, both these books seeming to occupy opposite extremes of the emotional engagement continuum. In The Outsider, two excellent summaries of which can be found here and here, Albert Camus’ protagonist, Meursault, is defined by his (lack of) emotional reaction to the death of his mother; My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know - he says, and the subsequent problems that causes for him when he ends up getting sucked into a conflict that was never his to begin with, but which ends in murder. ...