Death with Interruptions...

a couple gems from Jose Saramago's Nobel Prize for Literature winning book...

“Context gives not only the background, but all the innumerable other grounds that exist between the subject observed and the line of the horizon.” -69

“It is still too early...so it can sleep a little more. This is what insomniacs say when they have not slept a wink all night, thinking, poor things, that they can fool sleep by asking for a little more, just a little more, when they have not yet been granted one minute of repose.” -204

Books Read 2010

So this is the list of books I read this year. It's a nice list- I probably overachieved a bit, but didn't quite make the goal of 2 books a week like I was trying. I don't anticipate reading this much in the coming year as I plan on taking more classes (in addition to work, church, friends, etc.) I didn't finish reading my Bible in Spanish like I'd planned. I think that's something I really need to do in 2011. I also would like to read more theology books. This year was full of "classics" which was nice, because I think I've mostly avoided them in the past. Although reading some of the "classics" always makes you wonder how they achieved that status. I didn't read as much non-fiction as I usually do. If anybody wants specific feedback/recommendations/etc. on particular books I would love to share!

Last year's list

I keep track of books HERE

January
Girls Gone Mild by Wendy Shalit
Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis -*
Light at Tern Rock by Julie Sauer
Stitches: a memoir... by David Small -G
Night by Elie Wiesel -O*
The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis -*
Flush by Carl Hiassen -*
Living Well on Practically Nothing by Edward H. Romney
The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov -O
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier -*
Interworld by Neil Gaimen -*
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver -*
Chile: Death in the South by Jacobo Timerman -O
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson -O*

February
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury -*
Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff
The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli -O*
When you Reach Me by Rebecca Stead -*
Babylon By Bus by Lemoine and Neumann
The World Is Flat [Updated]: A Brief History of the 21st Century by Thomas Friedman-* (I quit 3/4 of the way through though. I couldn't bear to finish it.)
Lord of the Flies by William Golding -*
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
The Two Reds by Will and Nicholas

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

March
Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes by Robert Brown -T
The Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry -T?
Iqbal by Francesco D'Adamo
Confessions of St. Augustine; translated by Outler by St. Augustine -*T
Antiquities of the Jews: Books I-V by Flavius Josephus -*T
The Lost Gospel of Mary by Frederica Mathewes-Green -T

April
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card -*
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (read and listened. great combo.)
The Violence of Love by Oscar Romero -T
You Must Kiss a Whale by David Skinner

May
Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global eds. Eidse and Sichel
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger -*
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri -*
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi -*

June
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri -*
Gifts of the Jews by Thomas Cahill -*T
¡Gracias! A Latin American Journal by Henri J.M. Nouwen -T
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane -*

July
Desire of the Everlasting Hills by Thomas Cahill -* T(and skimmed the book for footnotes)
Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card -*
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Shaffer and Barrows -*
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Drops like Stars by Rob Bell -OT
On the Road by Jack Kerouac -O* (listened mostly, it's worth being listened to simply for the rhythm of Dean Moriarty's words...but I read the last bit)

August
King Lear by Shakespeare
At the Corner of East and Now by Frederica Mathewes-Green -T
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen -*
Rex Libris Volume 1: I, Librarianby James Turner -G
Around the world with Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis
Organization of Information: Third Edition by Arlene Taylor (read parts, skimmed parts)
Home Economics by Wendell Berry -O T?
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson -*
Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather -*

September
Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe by Thomas Cahill -* T (listened and read, pretty pictures!)

October
How to Be a Gentleman: A Contemporary Guide to Common Courtesy by John Bridges
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. by Bart Ehrman -* T
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton -* T (definitely need to re-read)

November
The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris -O T
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card -*
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho -*
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld -*
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro -*
A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary by Alain De Botton
Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton -*
The Great Dayton Flood of 1913 by Trudy Bell
Simply Christian by N.T. Wright -T

December
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waughn -*
To Know Him: Beyond Religion Waits a Relationship that will Change Your Life by Gloria Copeland -O T

Moving Pictures by Kathryn and Stuart Immonen -G
A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld -G
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery -*
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway -* (set in Spain and Europe? holla.)
Forget Sorrow by Belle Yang -G
The Cincinnati Subway: History of Rapid Transit by Allen Singer
My Antonia by Willa Cather -*
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway -*
Pride and Prejudice by Nancy Butler and Hugo Petrus -G
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett -*
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James -*
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy -*
Daisy Miller by Henry James -*
Garden of Eating: Food, Sex and the Hunger for Meaning by Jeremy Iggers -O
Advent and Christmas with Thomas Merton compiled by Bauer and Cleary -O T
The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald -*
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James -*

(91) Total
(48) Audiobooks-*
(11) Owned books-O
(6) Graphic Novels-G
(19) Theology Related- T (of course, every book has theology in it, some are just more focused on it than others)

Books I REALLY REALLY wanted to read but didn't get to in a timely manner...
Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor
A Good Man is Hard to Find and other stories by Flannery O'Connor
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (10 pages in)
Nectar In A Sieve by Kamala Markandaya (80 pages in)
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
All the Names by Jose Saramago
Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago (really, all of the books by Saramago that I've never read. but these are the ones I had from the library)

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (partway through)

For Christmas????

Who is buying this for me for Christmas?
Volunteers?

Rolling Library!!!

Many Thanks in Advance.

Sweet looking library in Colombia

http://www.archidose.org/May08/19/dose.html


Click on the pictures in the article. Totally worth it!

Simply Christian

a good quote from this N.T. Wright book....

pg148
You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you being to take on something of the character of the object of your worship....
So what happens when you worship the creator God whose plan to rescue the world and put it to rights has veeb accomplished by the Lamb who was slain? The answer comes in the second golden rule: because you were made in God's image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive.
Conversely, when you give that same total woship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human being. It doesn't, of course, feel like that at the time. when you worship part of the creation as though it were the Creator himself- in other words, when you worship an idol- you may well feel a brief "high." But, like a hallucinatory drug, that worship achieves its effect at a cost: when the effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to being with. That is the price of idolatry...

Perhaps one of the reaons why so much worship, in some churches at least, appears unattractive to so many people is that we have forgotten, or covered up, the truth about the one we are worshipping.

A Week at the Airport

by Alain de Botton

{some of my favorite quotes from the book}

(on ANGER and OPTIMISM) Pg 33- We are angry because we are overly optimistic, insufficiently prepared for the frustrations endemic to existence…a recklessly naïve belief in a world in which keys never go astray and our travel plans are invariably assured.


(on a passenger DREADING vacation) Pg 40- There was, of course, no official recourse available to him, whether for assistance or complaint. British Airways did, it was true, maintain a desk manned by some unusually personable employees and adorned with the message: ‘We are here to help’. But the staff shied away from existential issues, seeming to restrict their insights to matters relating to the transit time to adjacent satellites and the location of the nearest toilets.

Yet it was more than a little disingenuous for the airline to deny all knowledge of, and responsibility for, the metaphysical well-being of its customers. Like its many competitors, British Airways... existed in large part to encourage and enable people to go and sit in deckchairs and take up (and usually fail at) the momentous challenge of being content for a few days.

(on advances in TECHNOLOGY but not BEHAVIOUR) pg 41- At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and aeroplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones and apologise for our tantrums?

(on WRITING)pg 42- Objectively good places to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studies have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way- towards a busy street or terminal- before they run out of their burrows.

(on RETAIL and FLYING) pg 57- [the terminal has too many shops]...“it was hard to determine what might be so wrong with this balance, what precise aspect of the building’s essential aeronautical identity had been violated or even what specific pleasure passengers had been robbed of, given that we are inclined to visit malls even when they don’t provide us with the additional pleasure of a gate to Johannesburg.”

….”The issue seemed to centre on an incongruity between shopping and flying, connected in some sense to the desire to maintain dignity in the face of death…It therefore tends to raise questions about how we might best spend the last moments before our disintegration, in what frame of mind we might wish to fall back down to earth- and the extent to which we would like to meet eternity surrounded by an array of duty-free bags.”

(on the SUPERNATURAL and flying) pg 62- Despite its seeming mundanity, the ritual of flying remains indelibly linked, even in secular times, to the momentous themes of existence – and their refractions in the stories of the world’s religions. We have heard about too many ascensions, too many voices from heaven, too many airborne angles and saints to ever be able to regard the business of flight from an entirely pedestrian perspective, as we might, say, the act of travelling by train. Notions of the divine, the eternal and the significant accompany us covertly on to our craft, haunting the reading aloud of the safety instructions, the weather announcements made by our captains and, most particularly, our lofty views of the gentle curvature of the earth.

How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel

So about a year ago I read this ^ book (by Alain de Botton- whom I adore) but I never published the quotes that hit me the most. But the quote from page 22 totally happened to me on Sunday when I was at CedarPoint. I saw a person who looked exactly like another person I know- he was just a different skin color! But his face, body type and mannerisms were spot on. So here are some quotes from Marcel Proust's writings and life, about relationships and reading... Enjoy!


Pg 22 -- “aesthetically, the number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know.”
Any such pleasure is not simply visual: the restricted number of human types also means that we are repeatedly able to read about people we know in places we might have never expected to do so.

Pg 215 -- “To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.”

Pg 25 -- “In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.


Pg 131 -- It is often assumed, usually by people who don’t have many friends, that friendship is a hallowed sphere where what we wish to talk about effortlessly coincides with others’ interests. Proust, less optimistic than this, recognized the likelihood of discrepancy, and concluded that he should always be the one to ask questions, and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you with what was on his.

Pg 133 -- “I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it’s more or less irrelevant to me that they’re intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere, etc."


Pg 137 -- The exaggerated scale of Prous’s social politeness should not blind us to the degree of insincerity every friendship demands, the ever-present requirement to deliver an affable but hollow word to a friend who proudly shows us a volume of their poetry or newborn baby. TO call such politeness hypocrisy is to neglect that we have lied in a local way not in order to conceal fundamentally malevolent intentions but rather to confirm our sense of affection, which might have been doubted if there had been no gasping and praising, because of the unusual intensity of people’s attachemnt to their verse and children. There seems to be a gap between what others need to hear from us in order to trust that we like them, and the extent of the negative thoughts we know we can feel towards them and still like them.We know it is possible to think of someone as both dismal at poetry and perceptive, both inclined to pomposity and charming, both suffering from halitosis and genial. But the susceptibility of others means that the negative part of the equation can rarely be expressed without jeopardizing the union.

Summarized pg 194 -- Letting ourselves be guided by books we admire does not rob our faculty of judgement or part of its independence… “There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his….”We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel, it is our own thoughts we should be develping even if it is another writer’s thoughts which help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves.