What are you reading right now?

[Vlad!]

Finished up The Other Wind by Ursula K. LeGuin. One of the first Earthsea books I've read, believe it or not, though I was familiar with many of the events and characters from watching the animated movie Geddo Senki based on one of the earlier books. It was sort of like reading Return of the King without having read The Fellowship of the Ring and having only watched The Two Towers as a movie.

Still good, though. Some of LeGuin's stuff is not really up my alley, but she writes enough excellent material that it doesn't matter.

[enemy anemone]

enjoyed reading half of Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars at the bookstore tonight. probably will go back and finish the rest later this week.
I'm hoping they will get a copy of Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split, by Laurie Perry, soon.

[dum spel chek duzzent liek teh werd "noir".]

[Vlad!]

Do bookstores not have a problem with you sitting there reading their books? Maybe if you're buying their overpriced beverages then it evens out.

[dgp11776]

I was wondering that myself.

I've probably read a dozen books since I last posted in this thread.  But right now, I'm reading these.

The First Commandment - Brad Thor
Cross Purposes - D. James Kennedy & Jerry Newcombe
The Passion of Jesus Christ:  Fifty Reasons Why He Came To Die - John Piper
Rich Christians In An Age of Hunger - Ronald Sider

[enemy anemone]

omg no. it's like a thing to do, go to Borders or B&N and read/study, whether you buy anything or not. Borders has tables and comfy leather chairs scattered throughout the store. maybe it's different where you're at? my mom has said that she doesn't like the Borders in her area (NC) and I was like ?!?!, but she said it's not the same as here in California.

(I do buy an overpriced but yummy beverage once in a while. maple white mocha, mmm!)

[enemy anemone]

finished reading the Veronica Mars book and looked at a very amusing picture book called Stuff On My Cat. it features photos of...stuff...placed on cats.
saw that O Jerusalem! has been made into a movie. I had read the book a couple times years ago and want to reread and see the movie.

[Vlad!]

Stuff on my cat is a compilation of photos from stuffonmycat.com. I used to look at that site frequently, but it's started to shift from fairly clever photos to photos of random crap piled willy-nilly on disgruntled-looking felines, which is only marginally amusing.

[enemy anemone]

yeah, I came back and looked at the website but didn't stay long. random stuff piles are funny the first time, but seeing a cat buried under rubber duckies isn't quite so funny the second time around.

[enemy anemone]

picked up Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and read the first few chapters at the bookstore. planning to read more.

[latinchic]

Billy Graham's autobiography, "Just As I Am".

Also, "The Kingdom of the Cults" and I forgot the author's name, sorry.

[bloop]

After finishing Wise Blood a couple weeks ago, I'm moving on to far more literary material. 

I Am America (And So Can You) by Stephen Colbert.

[enemy anemone]

more bookstore reading:

What Is My Cat Thinking?: The Essential Guide to Understanding Pet Behavior, by Gwen Bailey [I learned that the trill one of the cats makes is a sound of greeting, not of impatience, as I had been interpreting it up till now.]
The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, by Eric Liu
Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, by Frank H. Wu

imaginary reading:
Title: The Part of the Book That Explains What the Book Is About

[Vlad!]

Raymond Chen calls it "...what appears to be the current fad of giving your book a title of the form Catchy Phrase: Longer Explanation of What the Catchy Phrase Means."

I wonder if there are any purposeful asians. As far as I'm concerned, I'm an accidental tall, white guy.

[enemy anemone]

Raymond Chen calls it "...what appears to be the current fad of giving your book a title of the form Catchy Phrase: Longer Explanation of What the Catchy Phrase Means."

heh. I bow to Raymond Chen's superior titlemakingness. I knew mine was lame but that was the best I could come up with at the moment.
(I'm idly wondering what his current knitting project is. I'd read his blog if there were more knitting content.)

I wonder if there are any purposeful asians. As far as I'm concerned, I'm an accidental tall, white guy.

I initially reached for the book to argue with the title; my first reaction was "hey, I can relate to this phrase" but then thought "but isn't everybody 'accidentally' born into their physical features and culture/heritage? or is this person adopted? switched at birth?" (haha, yeah, right. non-Asian baby gets sent home with Asian parents and vice versa.) but I read a little bit and was drawn in.

here's a bit from the book, quite a bit of which can be read here.

Consider the mythology of the Overseas Chinese, which is how people in China and Taiwan refer to the thirty million or so ethnic Chinese who live elsewhere. The idea is simple: there is China, which is filled with Chinese; and there is the rest of the world, which, to varying degrees, is sprinkled with Chinese. The ethnocentrism is manifest, the essentialism unapologetic: "You can take a Chinese out of China, but you can't take the China out of a Chinese."

But just what is it that binds together these millions of Chinese outside China? Well, it's their Chineseness. And what is Chineseness? That which binds together the Chinese. Entire conferences and scholarly tomes have been devoted to this catechism, with roughly the same results. Granted, there exists, in the form of a rich culture and history, what political scientist Samuel Huntington would call a "core Sinic civilization." That civilization, however, isn't intrinsic to people of Chinese genotype; it is transmitted--or not. And whether it is transmitted to the Overseas Chinese depends, ultimately, on consent rather than descent. Chineseness isn't a mystical, more authentic way of being; it's just a decision to act Chinese.

my mom teaches a college course on Chinese culture so I want to recommend the book to her.

[Aaron]

Schil,

Did I fail to meet you at your brother's wedding last year? If you were there, I totally didn't meet you.

[Vlad!]

I don't think that idea is unique to Chinese culture. In America, the only time we really hear about terrible things that happen overseas is when they happen to other Americans (case in point: the British railway bombings. I don't know about where everyone else lives, but where I lived at the time, the amount of news coverage about the American girls who were caught in it far eclipsed the news coverage of the event as a whole [1]). Also, members of an ethnicity tend to latch on to other members. I have a lot of friends from India. They all seem to get together with other Indians and form a little clique. They're from different parts of India and often don't even share a native tongue, but the commonality of being Indian binds them together.

Also, I think Raymond writes about knitting approximately once per year. I think he made a knitting-related post about a month ago, so no more in 2007

[1] This is a biased sample, though, because those girls were from Knoxville, where I was living at the time. I actually went to school with one of them. But the point still stands that people in Knoxville care much more about what happens to other people from Knoxville than what happens to people from GB.

[enemy anemone]

Wanderer, I sent you a PM.

Vlad!, I can understand what you're saying but I kind of don't follow, at least not in context of the Eric Liu quote. I think we're thinking about two different things. maybe it's not clear from the quote I posted but Eric Liu wrote from the perspective of someone who did not feel the kinship that is assumed to be intrinsically there. which is why I found the book compelling. I think you would enjoy reading the page I linked to, if you're interested and feel like doing so in one of your bored times. (augh, I just now noticed that it is requiring an account. annoying. sorry.) anyway, I'll refrain from babbling on or pasting more stuff here. I might go back to the bookstore and read more in the book.

[I did a search for "knit" on Raymond's blog. "Tracey Ullman joins the roster of celebrity knitters with her book Knit 2 Together: Patterns and Stories for Serious Knitting Fun. (She also gets to add to the pile of books whose titles are of the form Catchy title: Long boring subtitle.)"
XD I looked at that book some time ago.]

[Vlad!]

I figured that was where he was going with this. But my point is (and I may be misinterpreting him) that he seems to be saying "the Chinese have this characteristic, so it's awkward to be Chinese but feel no special kinship". I honestly don't think that the way Chinese feel about other Chinese is any different than the way Americans would feel about other Americans inside China. His complaint is that Chinese people assume he has special feelings towards China and a kinship with other Chinese that he doesn't feel. I imagine that a third- or fourth-generation Chinese citizen of American ancestry would feel the same when encountering someone from the US. The US visitor would be happy to find someone who speaks English without much of an accent, and would maybe complain about their yearning for some American food that they just can't get over in Asia. But the American Chinese would feel no special relation to this gweilo.

I'm not saying it isn't a frustration, and I don't know if Eric Liu is claiming that this is something unique to Asian culture or if he acknowledges that his experience is just one of many. But, like you said, my reaction is that the culture one is born into is essentially an accident of fate[1]. This is true anywhere.

Which isn't to say that there's anything wrong with the book. I'll give that article a read (you can bypass compulsory registration with bugmenot, which I use).

[1] This isn't necessarily meant to imply that there is no greater guiding purpose in the circumstances to which one is born. I'm just saying that, from the perspective of an individual person, which culture he or she is born into feels random, even if it's not.

[ajyouthguy]

Seven Checkpoints for Effective Youth Ministry--Andy Stanley

[Aaron]

Martin Luther - The Best From All His Works

[bloop]

Martin Luther - The Best From All His Works

I'm guessing the one about those horrible Jews and their lies is out.

I'll be reading No Country for Old Men.  I like to have read the book before I watch the film.

[Wildcatblue7]

A Year in Provence--Peter Mayle

[ajyouthguy]

The Smell of Sin and the Fresh Air of Grace--Don Everts
Living With Questions--Dale Fincher

[Vlad!]

Living With Questions--Dale Fincher

I'll be curious what the premise of this one is. Usually books like this either fall back on the Euler gambit (no matter the question, the answer is "Jesus") or spend multiple chapters lamenting about us fragile fleshpots and our lack of faith, guilting the reader into ignoring the questions and blindly believing.

[ajyouthguy]

I'll be curious what the premise of this one is. Usually books like this either fall back on the Euler gambit (no matter the question, the answer is "Jesus") or spend multiple chapters lamenting about us fragile fleshpots and our lack of faith, guilting the reader into ignoring the questions and blindly believing.

here's the product description at Zondervan...

Product Details for Living with Questions

Living with Questions addresses tough theological questions that students ask and adults rarely answer fully. Philosopher, storyteller, and popular campus speaker, Dale Fincher addresses The Questions—a series of seven core, life-defining questions asked by high school and college students across the country—in a style that is personal and imaginative.

Description:
A practical and personal approach to apologetics for students. How many times has your teacher asked you a question, and you stare blankly at the ceiling, hoping to discover the answer lingering there? It’s frustrating when we don’t know the answers to the questions we’re asked by others, but it can be even more frustrating when we don’t know the answers to the questions we are asking ourselves. Have you ever asked one of these questions? • Does what I think really matter? • What is truth? • Is God there? • Has God spoken? • Am I important enough? • Am I good enough? • What’s so great about heaven? If you’ve ever wondered about any of these questions, you’ve come to the right place. In Living with Questions, Dale Fincher will help you look at each of these questions in such a way that you’ll discover clues, helpful tools, and answers—and what they all mean for your life and your faith. The answers you find will put you on a path to dig deeper and gain confidence in your faith. As Dale addresses the big questions that he’s been asked by students across the country, you’ll find that you’re not alone in your doubt, confusion, or questioning. As you learn to live with questions, even the answers are only steps in the right direction. You’ll find how they whet the appetite to go deeper into your purpose on this planet and to discover something big—yet very personal—that’s worth living for.

[Vlad!]

The title makes it sound more like a "You have questions that we can't answer and that's OK" type thing than a "Here are some questions needing answers, and here are the answers" book. I'm guessing that, despite the blurb, the "help" that Dale gives is basically reiterating basic truths from scripture and saying "these are the really important things. Deriving the answer to your questions from these principles should be simple and is left as an exercise to the reader". It definitely helps (him, not us) that the questions are all really airy-fairy and seem like teenage insecurities rather than real tough questions (OK, "is God there" has been wrestled with for a while, but I think we've established that this is something you really do have to take on faith, working from observation of the world around us and personal experience attributed to the supernatural).

I mean, seriously? "Am I important enough?" "Does what I think really matter?" Is this a book on tough Christian questions or a self-help booklet for a recovering Linkin Park addict?

Of course, if you work with youth (as you presumably do, given your alias), I suppose it would be a good book to read to see if it's worth recommending to people having those teenage insecurities for the dubiously acceptable reason that they happen to be teenagers. Be sure to let us know if Dale says something profound. Also, I'm willing to bet that of the Biblical stories of Gideon, Moses, Abraham and King David, he tells at least two of them, while he avoids the more problematical stories of Job, Jonah, and Jeremiah (hmm, apparently having a J-name in the Old Testament wasn't a very auspicious sign).

[ajyouthguy]

i don't think it's as much of a 'this is the easy answers' thing as an encouragement to wrestle with the questions.  i have only read the first chapter, but that's the impression i have, which is hugely important for teenagers (yes, by the way, i AM a youth pastor) to know that it's ok to have the questions, to wrestle with them, and not to just believe b/c it's what they've always been told.  i could be wrong, but based on the setting where i got it, i think it's MUCH more of this type of book than what you are afraid it is, but i can see where your line of thinking comes from definitely.  i think the key to that description, which i'm sure he probably didn't write it, someone from Zondervan did, but i think the key to it is towards the end, the statement that even the answers are only steps in the right direction

[Wildcatblue7]

Freddy and Fredericka--Mark Helprin
Master and Commander--Patrick O'Brian

[ajyouthguy]

They Like Jesus but Not the Church--Dan Kimball

[phaith]

I just finished 'Leaving Church' by Barbara Brown Taylor (it was very good)

A friend just gave me the a book of the complete works of Vonnegut. I've been wanting to read his writing for a long time, and I guess I have no excuse but to give it a go now!

[ajyouthguy]

The Deity Formerly Known as God--Jarrett Stevens

[Vlad!]

I take it you like reading a lot of stuff at one time, ajyouthguy?

[ajyouthguy]

I take it you like reading a lot of stuff at one time, ajyouthguy?

to a degree, yes, i guess i have reader's ADD, but in this case a lot of the stuff i'm reading right now ties together, and i'll have one in my office, one in my bag, one by my home computer, etc, and read a little here and there of each, based on what's conveniently accessed at the moment.  Plus, i finished two books over the weekend (7 Checkpoints and The Smell of Sin), and am almost finished with one of the others (They Like Jesus But Not the Church).  I started on the newest one (The Deity Formerly Known as God) because it just came in and I was in a seminar about 2 1/2 weeks ago led by the author, and wanted to read it while the seminar was still fresh on my mind.

[ajyouthguy]

Finished:
The Deity Formerly Known as God
They Like Jesus But Not the Church

Started:
Dear Church: Letters from Disillusioned Generations--Sarah Cunningham
UnChristian--David Kinnaman and the Barna Group

[phaith]

Just started reading 'what is the what' by David Eggers

[Vlad!]

You ever finish Living with Questions?

[dgp11776]

Don't know if you're confused, but ajyouthguy read that, not phaith.

[phaith]

Don't know if you're confused, but ajyouthguy read that, not phaith.

I was a little confused by that too...but ajyouthguy was just above me so I assumed he was carring on a previous discussion. 

[Vlad!]

Sometimes I get lazy and don't quote the people I'm talking to, assuming that everyone following the discussion will catch on. Sometimes that assumption is not entirely valid. Yes, I was addressing el aj, the guy of youth.

[ajyouthguy]

to Vlad

it is my priority book for the rest of this week.  with Christmas-related stuff, not to mention 2 little ones, plus a couple of other books that were 'connected' in thought, it got pushed aside for the past week or two, but it is my focus/priority to get it read by the end of the day on Friday, if possible.