October Book List
Oct. 31st, 2006 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chestnutcurlsThe Secret Country by Pamela Dean
A fantasy book about a group of cousins who have invented and played at a "secret country" together every summer of their lives. As they start their first-ever summer apart, they accidentally enter the Secret Country and discover that it's all real. An interesting premise, but I couldn't get into this as much as I expected to. It's the first of a trilogy, and while I expect to finish the series someday, I'm not really chomping at the bit.
The Journey of Desire: Searching for the Life We've Only Dreamed Of by John Eldredge
For years I considered Eldredge & Curtis to be the leaders of touchy-feely Christianity. This book broke down the last of my defenses, and forced me to admit that touchy-feely or not, their books speak to me in a way that few others do. I really see God's timing in my reading of this book. I've been thinking about futility and wasting your life, and wanting answers about it all. This book didn't give me answers per se, but it taught me a few things. I've typed out my favorite parts from the book, and they're under the cut. Highly recommended.
The Outside World by Tova Mirvis
A novel about an Orthodox Jewish wedding and marriage, and the families who reluctantly come together because of it. I didn't know when I picked it up that the author is from here, and thus a lot of the story is set in Memphis. I really liked this book.
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
People have been telling me for YEARS to read this. It lived up to the hype. It's about Anna, a thirteen-year-old girl who was conceived as a perfect match for her older sister, who's dying of leukemia. The last hope to save her sister is for Anna to donate a kidney. She responds by hiring a lawyer to declare medical emancipation from her parents. Really interesting - and the ending is a SHOCKER.
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
A weird, fantastic book about a girl who is sent to England to stay with country cousins she's never met - who turn out to be the family she's always wanted. Shortly after she arrives, World War III breaks out and the cousins are separated. The rest of the book is about the horrors of war they experience as they try to get back to each other, but through the eyes of the girl, who goes from broken and self-absorbed to caring and brave. There's also a love story that most would find squicky, but somehow in context it didn't bother me. This book haunted me for days. In a good way.
Books for October: 5
2006 year to date: 69
Our dilemma is this: we can’t seem to live with desire, and we can’t live without it. In the face of this quandary most people decide to bury the whole question and put as much distance as they can between themselves and their desires.
Christianity has come to the point where we believe that there is no higher aspiration for the human soul than to be nice. We are producing a generation of men and women whose greatest virtue is that they don’t offend anyone. Then we wonder why there is not more passion for Christ. How can we hunger and thirst after righteousness if we have ceased hungering and thirsting altogether? As C.S. Lewis said, “We castrate the gelding and bid him be fruitful.” The greatest enemy of holiness is not passion; it is apathy.
I enjoy [my son] Luke because he has more undisguised and unadulterated desire than anyone I know. He is “out there” with his desires and his disappointments. When we go over to someone’s house for dinner, the first thing he’ll ask will always be, “Is there dessert?” Part of me has tried to train this out of him; part of me admires the fact that he isn’t embarrassed by his desire, like the rest of us. He is unashamed. We hide our true desire and call it maturity. Jesus is not impressed. He points to the less sophisticated attitude of a child as a better way to live.
The danger of disowning desire is that it sets us up for a fall. We are unable to distinguish real life from a tempting imitation. We are fooled by the impostors. Eventually, we find some way of procuring a taste of the life we were meant for.
Our idols become the means by which we forget who we truly are and where we truly come from. They numb us…How else can we explain our apparent happiness when we are so far from home?
It seems at times that [God] will go to any length to thwart the very thing we most deeply want…Isn’t this precisely the reason we fear to desire in the first place? Life is hard enough as it is, but to think that God himself is working against us is more than disheartening.
We expect greatness from the offspring of the great. To be introduced as the image bearers of God is full of anticipation.
Even if we are loved, it is not enough. We yearn to be fruitful, to do something of meaning and value that flows naturally out of the gifts and capacities of our souls. But of course – we were meant to be the kings and queens of the earth.
Beauty is the closest thing we have to fullness without possessing on this side of eternity. It heralds the Great Restoration. Perhaps that is why it is so healing – beauty is pure gift. It helps us in our letting go.
We are at war, and the bloody battle is over our hearts…We act as though we live in a sleepy little town during peacetime. We don’t. We live in the spiritual equivalent of Bosnia or Beirut. Act like it. Watch over your heart.
A fantasy book about a group of cousins who have invented and played at a "secret country" together every summer of their lives. As they start their first-ever summer apart, they accidentally enter the Secret Country and discover that it's all real. An interesting premise, but I couldn't get into this as much as I expected to. It's the first of a trilogy, and while I expect to finish the series someday, I'm not really chomping at the bit.
The Journey of Desire: Searching for the Life We've Only Dreamed Of by John Eldredge
For years I considered Eldredge & Curtis to be the leaders of touchy-feely Christianity. This book broke down the last of my defenses, and forced me to admit that touchy-feely or not, their books speak to me in a way that few others do. I really see God's timing in my reading of this book. I've been thinking about futility and wasting your life, and wanting answers about it all. This book didn't give me answers per se, but it taught me a few things. I've typed out my favorite parts from the book, and they're under the cut. Highly recommended.
The Outside World by Tova Mirvis
A novel about an Orthodox Jewish wedding and marriage, and the families who reluctantly come together because of it. I didn't know when I picked it up that the author is from here, and thus a lot of the story is set in Memphis. I really liked this book.
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
People have been telling me for YEARS to read this. It lived up to the hype. It's about Anna, a thirteen-year-old girl who was conceived as a perfect match for her older sister, who's dying of leukemia. The last hope to save her sister is for Anna to donate a kidney. She responds by hiring a lawyer to declare medical emancipation from her parents. Really interesting - and the ending is a SHOCKER.
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
A weird, fantastic book about a girl who is sent to England to stay with country cousins she's never met - who turn out to be the family she's always wanted. Shortly after she arrives, World War III breaks out and the cousins are separated. The rest of the book is about the horrors of war they experience as they try to get back to each other, but through the eyes of the girl, who goes from broken and self-absorbed to caring and brave. There's also a love story that most would find squicky, but somehow in context it didn't bother me. This book haunted me for days. In a good way.
Books for October: 5
2006 year to date: 69
Our dilemma is this: we can’t seem to live with desire, and we can’t live without it. In the face of this quandary most people decide to bury the whole question and put as much distance as they can between themselves and their desires.
Christianity has come to the point where we believe that there is no higher aspiration for the human soul than to be nice. We are producing a generation of men and women whose greatest virtue is that they don’t offend anyone. Then we wonder why there is not more passion for Christ. How can we hunger and thirst after righteousness if we have ceased hungering and thirsting altogether? As C.S. Lewis said, “We castrate the gelding and bid him be fruitful.” The greatest enemy of holiness is not passion; it is apathy.
I enjoy [my son] Luke because he has more undisguised and unadulterated desire than anyone I know. He is “out there” with his desires and his disappointments. When we go over to someone’s house for dinner, the first thing he’ll ask will always be, “Is there dessert?” Part of me has tried to train this out of him; part of me admires the fact that he isn’t embarrassed by his desire, like the rest of us. He is unashamed. We hide our true desire and call it maturity. Jesus is not impressed. He points to the less sophisticated attitude of a child as a better way to live.
The danger of disowning desire is that it sets us up for a fall. We are unable to distinguish real life from a tempting imitation. We are fooled by the impostors. Eventually, we find some way of procuring a taste of the life we were meant for.
Our idols become the means by which we forget who we truly are and where we truly come from. They numb us…How else can we explain our apparent happiness when we are so far from home?
It seems at times that [God] will go to any length to thwart the very thing we most deeply want…Isn’t this precisely the reason we fear to desire in the first place? Life is hard enough as it is, but to think that God himself is working against us is more than disheartening.
We expect greatness from the offspring of the great. To be introduced as the image bearers of God is full of anticipation.
Even if we are loved, it is not enough. We yearn to be fruitful, to do something of meaning and value that flows naturally out of the gifts and capacities of our souls. But of course – we were meant to be the kings and queens of the earth.
Beauty is the closest thing we have to fullness without possessing on this side of eternity. It heralds the Great Restoration. Perhaps that is why it is so healing – beauty is pure gift. It helps us in our letting go.
We are at war, and the bloody battle is over our hearts…We act as though we live in a sleepy little town during peacetime. We don’t. We live in the spiritual equivalent of Bosnia or Beirut. Act like it. Watch over your heart.
