Because we had tickets to the (excellent) baseball game Friday night we had to skip the member's preview night for the Seattle Library Book Sale out at Sand Point. So instead after church we packed up and headed out there for half-price day. Generally the tables are getting bare and the pickins slim by this point, but this year ... this year I got everything I wanted and then some.
Here's a partial list:
4-box set of Wagner's Ring Cycle on vinyl with libretto, notes, and a three-disc introduction to the various musical motifs. It even looks nice in the family room! Already listed to Das Rheingold last night and it's gooood.
3-LP set of Bach's St. Matthew Passion
3-LP set of Prokofiev piano music including "music for children"
Two guidebooks on London, one with a map.
Lots of Boxcar children paperbacks for Sam.
One Steve Birnbaum 2007 Disneyland guide for Aidan.
The only thing I didn't find was a good book on Perl, and I don't really need that so long as I can borrow Eric's. (Thanks, Eric ...)
Monday, April 14, 2008
Book Review: The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue
This one's a fast read (good thing, too, since it's already overdue), and an engaging story about a man who faked his credentials to land a spot at Princeton. Much of the book started life as a magazine article, and it tells its story (mostly) backward. This choice has the nice effect of "peeling back the layers" of the con man at its center as you devolve through his various identities, but it's not always pulled off gracefully or easily. It also has the disadvantage of starting the story with the con man in Telluride, CO rather than at Princeton, where it's just an ordinary story of a man who lies to people and steals stuff, and you don't get to the real questions -- such as, "How did he lie his way into Princeton?" -- until halfway through the book. Also, the question "Who is this guy really?" has to wait till the end, but that's OK with me because of the deliberate structural choice.
Along the way you get analysis of how he did it and puzzlement as to exactly why. This puzzlement leads to a lot of theorizing, some of it valuable and some, well, not. For an example of the latter, see the chapter titled "Christmas is the Biggest Lie of All." Not sure what that has to do with college admissions or stealing bikes. Generally, when this book talks about the Princeton application it's firing on all cylinders. The rest of it is forgettable, but at least quickly read.
Now I'd better turn it back in before I owe another 50 cents!
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Book Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Ordinarily this book would look too much like typical fiction for me to read it, because it's the story of a family from the Dominican Republic suffering under the Trujillo dictatorship of the mid-20th century. Well, not only is it supposed to be a particularly well-written example of the genre, but the title character, Oscar Wao, is actually a Dominican fantasy nerd who reads Tolkien and Asimov and everything inbetween. So, being a fantasy nerd myself, I wanted to see how the author did in writing a character like that realistically.The answer is that Diaz nailed it. His portrait of Oscar Wao is so precise that even though a Dominican fantary nerd may never have existed on the earth, he gets the kind of details that are so accurate that they hurt. Reminds me of parts of high school that have been long since forgotten. Now, Oscar is more of a fantasy nerd than anybody else I know, taken to extreme in his focus, and that exclusion of other aspects to his life is about the only part of his characterization I can find fault with. What music does he listen to? What god does he believe in? You find out some of that through his actions, but I would have liked to know more.
This is a very well-written book, and it's only partially about Oscar. His mom and sister and sister's boyfriend get equal billing and narrative viewpoint passages. The book jumps back and forth in time and employs the Lost storytelling technique of starting in one time and then jumping back and forth to show us why that person is such a jerk, or ran away from home, or whatever. Actually, Lost stole that technique from comic books, so it's particularly appropriate for this kind of book.
The unmitigated Sauron-like evil of the Trujillo regime becomes slowly apparent as the book progresses. After reading about what it was like to live under that dictator, I was reminded of Jared Diamond's book Collapse, where he argues that for all its faults, the Trujillo regime was actually pretty good on environmental protection. For instance, you can see the Haiti-Dominican border from the air, because on the Haiti side the forests have been cut down straight to the border, while on the Dominican side they are untouched. Diamond recognizes that lauding Trujillo in any way is problematic, but I don't think he knows just how problematic it is. I think he should read this book -- I'd like to know if it would change anything for him.
This is indeed a bloody book, as its cover indicates. It captures the Caribbean character better than any other book I've read, but it certainly takes a bit out of you to read it and live in that world. Be warned.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
How to Bridge the Worlds
On the mp3 player during the commute this morning was a talk by Darrel Falk, professor at Point Loma (I think), a Christian and biologist who writes about evolution. He first talked about the obstacles he faced publishing his book, and especially getting a prominent evangelical to write the forward to it. It seems there was a prominent leader who privately agreed with his book but wouldn't write a forward to it, even though they were good friends, because of the politics of the situation among evangelicals. Then a prominent ID proponent agreed to write a forward, was gracious in person, but ended up writing a forward saying that science and Christianity must "get a divorce," much the opposite of the book's own conclusion. So that wouldn't do either. Finally Francis Collins came along and wrote the forward.
After a story like that of frustration and private/public splits, I was expected a talk about the book itself. But that's not what Falk did. Instead he launched into a detailed, nuanced and sympathic discussion of why there is this split at all, with a focus on what kind of "loose ends" are so troubling in accepting science's view of the world. His tone and demeanor were the most Christian response I can think of (and, to my shame, they were not my automatic response when I heard his story!). He ended his talk with a discussion of how to bridge the worlds, that Christians with different views of the origins questions should deliberately get together and make videos or statements about what they believe and what they agree on. Now that would be right in line with what Jesus said about how the world will know us.
And then I realized another category of unity, perhaps the most essential one to the whole enterprise: if we are going the bridge the philosophical gaps between these two camps of Christians, the thing we need more than anything else is to worship together. All the manifestos and TV programs and everything would follow from that. If we spend thirty minutes, side by side, singing, reading, praying, then I think we'll find that the gap is not as wide as it looked before those thirty minutes. In fact, if we don't do that, I don't think we'll be able to bridge the gap at all.
This is what worship does, it brings us together. And that's why I think the worship part of the service is more crucial than the sermon, no matter how insightful or interesting the preaching. Worship is what we're about, and if it forms the foundation then we can do things where it looks like there's no hope, most important because we won't be doing it.
And while we're at it, bridging the worlds, let's pattern our worship off Revelation, to deal with the gaps in understanding that book too.
After a story like that of frustration and private/public splits, I was expected a talk about the book itself. But that's not what Falk did. Instead he launched into a detailed, nuanced and sympathic discussion of why there is this split at all, with a focus on what kind of "loose ends" are so troubling in accepting science's view of the world. His tone and demeanor were the most Christian response I can think of (and, to my shame, they were not my automatic response when I heard his story!). He ended his talk with a discussion of how to bridge the worlds, that Christians with different views of the origins questions should deliberately get together and make videos or statements about what they believe and what they agree on. Now that would be right in line with what Jesus said about how the world will know us.
And then I realized another category of unity, perhaps the most essential one to the whole enterprise: if we are going the bridge the philosophical gaps between these two camps of Christians, the thing we need more than anything else is to worship together. All the manifestos and TV programs and everything would follow from that. If we spend thirty minutes, side by side, singing, reading, praying, then I think we'll find that the gap is not as wide as it looked before those thirty minutes. In fact, if we don't do that, I don't think we'll be able to bridge the gap at all.
This is what worship does, it brings us together. And that's why I think the worship part of the service is more crucial than the sermon, no matter how insightful or interesting the preaching. Worship is what we're about, and if it forms the foundation then we can do things where it looks like there's no hope, most important because we won't be doing it.
And while we're at it, bridging the worlds, let's pattern our worship off Revelation, to deal with the gaps in understanding that book too.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Book Review: The Arrival
This book I read in an hour, but it's my nominee for best book read so far this year. It's a graphic novel, without words, about immigration in a world that really is unlike anything you've seen. I know, a lot of things say that, but this truly delivers. I don't want to give too much away about how the author does it, because half of the fun is the discovery, but I will say this is the Perfect Graphic Novel: the story literally cannot be told any other way than in this format. In a book like this, I expect imagination, but another aspect that surprised me is the subtle emotion captured in the characters' faces at certain points. The first example is a sad goodbye near the beginning: look at the faces and you can feel all the nuances of a painful but necessary departure.
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The only drawback to this book is you do read it so fast that you may be left wondering why you paid 15 bucks for it, but that's what libraries are for and it's how I got my copy. I'm just sad that I had to give it back this morning. I think I kept it for the full three weeks just because I liked it so much (plus I wanted to wait for Laurie to have time to read it too!). (Oh yeah, Laurie liked it, too.)
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Book Review: Then We Came to the End
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris took me a while to finish because I merely expected it to be funny. I think the review that led me to it mentioned The Office and that got stuck in my head. But, while it is very funny, it is not like The Office very much, except for the fact that it's set in one. The Office gets laughs out of being uncomfortable in the workplace, while this book deals with life and death. Some incredibly sad things happen in it, but somehow it fits with the tone of the book because those things are never mocked, but they make the characters that much more real. This book seems like Catch-22 set in a turn-of-the-millenium Chicago office tower. One of the things about "funny" books is it's hard to actually care about the characters in them, because they seem like characters, not like people. Both Then We Came to the End and Catch-22 succeed in being occasionally funny but more often telling perceptive stories about three-dimensional people. A different kind of funny. It took me a long time to finish it because I had to deal with different results from my expectations, plus I've been plain busy, but it was overall a good read and I can see why some people are calling it one of the best books of the past year.
Friday, March 28, 2008
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