BBC Project — Catching Up

Ok, so some of you might have been wondering what’s going on with the BBC Book Project I started some time ago. Yes, I’m still working my way through the list!  Apparently I haven’t given an update on my readings since the end of March.  Oops…

So, in case you’re interested, here, in no particular order, are the books I’ve been able to cross off my list since March:

• The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. — I enjoyed this read quite a bit, despite the heterodoxy it contains.  An exciting adventure with many twists and turns — reminds me of a John Grisham novel.

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon — I love this book!  It’s written from the perspective of an autistic boy, and I’ve never read anything like it before.  It gave me a great deal of insight into how autistic people think, process, and experience the world.  Read it!

 

 

 

 

 

• Moby Dick, by Herman Melville — YES, I made it all the way through Moby Dick!  I feel highly accomplished.  And I even enjoyed parts of it.  I could have done without the pages and pages and pages of minutia about whaling and all things whale (although you should go read the Wikipedia page on the sperm whale — fascinating!).  But the sections that were actually part of the story were amazing.  If you like Shakespeare, 19th-century literature, whales, or artistically presented theological dilemmas, you just might like Moby Dick.  My advice:  be ok skimming parts that don’t interest you.

• Germinal, by Emile Zola.  Looks at the life of coal-miners in 19th-century France, and their attempts to unionize so that they can earn enough to survive.  Brutal existence, lots of injustice, but a compelling read.

• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker.  Loved it!  Like a lot of African-American literature, not for the faint of heart.  But powerful, and great characters.

 

• A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute.  Great book!  Based on a true(ish) story of a group of women who were captured by the Japanese on an island during WWII, and who were forced to march around from place to place for the remainder of the war.  It’s also a love story, and it takes you from London to the Pacific islands to Australia.

• Animal Farm, by George Orwell.  I did NOT enjoy this book.  For some reason, I find it very difficult to read about animals suffering, even if it’s an allegory, even though it’s just a story.  I was glad to finish this one.

I also took a brief hiatus from my list to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot.  This book has gotten a lot of press recently, and for good reason — it’s a thought-provoking and compelling story that raises many ethical questions that pertain to us all.  I enjoyed the chance to learn some things about science through story. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out.

Currently, I’m finishing up Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and really enjoying it.  I haven’t seen or read anything about the movie that just came out, but I can’t quite imagine how they made this book into a movie, because of the way the book is written.  More on that once I finish reading it…

So that’s a summary of my literary accomplishments in the last few months.  Good times, great books, can’t go wrong!

Busyness as Moral Laziness | internetmonk.com

It took me a long, long time to learn how to NOT be busy.  I strongly recommend this article.  Here’s a sample:

The Desert Fathers (a protest movement in the early church) spoke of busyness as “moral laziness.” Busyness can also be an addictive drug, which is why its victims are increasingly referred to as “workaholics.” Busyness acts to repress our inner fears and perpetual anxieties, as we scramble to achieve an enviable image to display to others. We become “outward” people, obsessed with how we appear, rather than “inward” people, reflecting on the meaning of our lives.

 

Busyness also seems to be a determination not to “miss out on life.” Behind much of the rat-race of modern life is the unexamined assumption that what I do determines who I am. In this way, we define ourselves by what we do, rather than by any quality of what we are inside. It is typical in a party for one stranger to approach another with the question, “What do you do?” Perhaps we wouldn’t have a clue how to reply to the deeper question, “Who are you?”

– James Houston, The Transforming Friendship: A Guide to Prayer

 

via Busyness as Moral Laziness | internetmonk.com.

BBC Project: His Dark Materials

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials. I hadn’t heard of the trilogy itself, although I had heard of the first book, The Golden Compass, because a movie version came out not too long ago. I had vague impressions that Christians protested over the movie, so I anticipated some sort of anti-church bias. What I didn’t anticipate was how very, very much I would enjoy reading these books, despite the blatant, heavy-handed hostility toward the church that is central to the novels.

There’s a lot that I could write about His Dark Materials, and a lot more that I could learn with further study (for example, I’d love to go back and read Paradise Lost so that I could explore the influence that work had on Pullman’s trilogy), but I’ll offer a few ramblings here – hopefully that will inspire some of you to read them for yourselves!

The first book begins in a world that is both similar to and different from our own world. In this other world, every human has an animal-shaped “daemon” that in some way reflects the essential character of the person. The daemons seems to be similar to human souls, or the essence of personhood. This is one of my favorite parts of the novels – the interplay between humans and daemons. I don’t want to say too much about the actual plot of the books, because it was such a delight for me to discover the story with no foreknowledge. Suffice it to say, then, that these books are thrilling, painful at times, creepy at times (especially the first book), imaginative, and concerned with big themes of good and evil, matter vs. “spirit.”

As I mentioned above, His Dark Materials is no friend of the Church. In the world of the novels, the Church wields a great deal of power – almost tyrannically so. The Church claims to serve the “Authority” (God), and is portrayed as ruthless and repressive of humanness. Pullman takes Christian history and doctrine and twists it in these books – which fascinates me. For example, in the history of the Church of these novels, “Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church’s power over every aspect of life had been absolute” (Golden Compass, 27). Pope John Calvin – ha! I know some folks who would really go for that… but anyway. Again, the story of Adam and Eve gets told with some twists:

“And the serpent said to the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and your daemons shall assume their true forms, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food… and a tree to be desired to reveal the form of one’s own daemon, she took of the fruit thereof….
“And the eyes of them both [woman and man] were opened, and they saw the true form of their daemons, and spoke with them (367).

So, the Church teaches that this is how sin and shame enter the world – when daemons become fixed, when innocence turns into experience. The Church is determined to destroy “Dust,” which is a mysterious substance that surrounds humans but not children until their daemons settle – a substance the Church believes is original sin.

However, in the worldview of the book, Dust is what makes life worth living. It represents matter becoming conscious of itself… For in the worlds Pullman creates, it turns out that matter is all that is, and that matter is to be celebrated, not subsumed to a fictional “spiritual” world. In fact, even the angels (which also figure into the book) envy humans because they have flesh.

The Church, in these books, is Authority. The Church tries to destroy every good and natural feeling humans have. The Church tries to keep humans obedient and in submission, keeping them from becoming wiser and stronger – all in the name of the Authority. In Pullman’s books, the heroes are those who defy the church and seek to defeat the Kingdom of Heaven in order to establish the Republic of Heaven. The heroes are those who recognize that matter is what counts, who celebrate matter and delight in the wisdom that Dust brings. Good is what helps others; evil is what hurts them.

If the Church truly were like Pullman describes it in these books, then YES! Rebel! And let’s face it – this is the way a lot of people view the Church. And let’s face it, there are times where the Church has resembled the picture Pullman paints of it. The Church has at times brought legalism rather than life. The Church has at times denigrated or neglected matter in favor of spirit.

But Pullman makes no mention of Love. And Pullman has no place for new creation. And the Church in His Dark Materials is NOT the Church I know and love – or at least, not what the Church seeks to be. And thank goodness for that.

Link

Fantastic interview from the author of one of my favorite books, The Emotionally Healthy Church.  If you are in church leadership (or studying to be in church leadership), please, please, read that book.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Here’s the key principle behind preaching that leads to transformation in Christ: You can’t bring people on a journey that you haven’t taken. You can tell them about the journey, but they could read that in a book. But if you go on a journey with Jesus that has real depth, it will come out in your preaching. If you’ve been sidetracked from that journey with Christ—building a big church, or gaining people’s approval, or being so busy you can’t even think straight—I would say that God is telling you to slow down so that you can be with Jesus. Your people need you to spend time in prayer. Your people need you to be with God, so you can bring a real Word from God.

via The Spiritual Importance of Becoming an Emotionally Hea… | Preaching Today.

Dracula

Bela Lugosi as Dracula

Dracula is one of those books I never, ever thought I would enjoy.  I’ve tried to read Frankenstein a couple of times and failed to finish it — I just couldn’t get into it.

But Dracula turned out to be one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in this project!  Yes, it is creepy at parts — but less creepy to read than to view in a movie, I imagine (I refuse to watch horror movies, even old ones).

So what did I like about Dracula?

• The narrative technique: the book is narrated by letters and journals written by the main characters, along with a few newspaper clippings.  Granted, all the characters write in the same style (e.g. no dialectical differences, except for the Professor for whom English is a second language).  I enjoyed having to piece together parts of the story for myself.
• The book is written a bit like a mystery: we have to figure out what in the world is going on with this Dracula guy, just like the protagonists do.  I’m curious how much Bram Stoker’s original audience would have known about vampires — in our own context, it seems all of us know the “basics” of vampires (aversion to garlic, can’t be seen in mirrors, killed with a stake, etc.), but I wonder whether that would have been the case in the 1800s?  It would have made the book much more suspenseful if I hadn’t known Dracula was a vampire from the very beginning.
• The theological themes that interweave throughout the book: good vs. evil, light vs. dark, human vs. not-quite-human.  The plot is wrapped up in these cosmic themes — the significance of the characters’ quest to vanquish Dracula is, in a sense, a quest to vanquish evil itself.

One of the interesting, and incredibly disturbing, facets of the book is the detail that victims of Dracula, even if they haven’t fully turned into vampires, are “outcast from God” (272, Kindle version).  This is the primary motivating factor for the characters — not just that their loved ones would be taken from them by Dracula’s bite, but that these victims would be forever separated from God’s presence.

One of the main characters, Mina, is bitten by the vampire later in the book.  When Professor Van Helsing tries to protect her against further attacks by touching a piece of the Host to her forehead [so interesting!], the Wafer burns her flesh “as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal,” and she cries out in pain, “Unclean!  Unclean!  Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh!  I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgement Day.” (262)  And yet, at the same time, she is described as “that sweet, sweet, good, good woman,” with “loving kindness” and “tender faith” — “she with all her goodness and purity and faith, was outcast from God.” (272)

That’s the detail of this book that makes me the most grateful it’s fiction — that the vampire’s bite separates the victim so completely from God.  She herself did nothing wrong — she slept, the Vampire came, she became accursed outside of her volition and knowledge.

In contrast to the curse the Vampire brings, read Paul’s words in Romans 8:

Christ Jesus who died–more than that, who was raised to life–is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons [nor vampires!], neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (8:34-39)

Thanks be to God!

Heart of Darkness

Last book post, I forgot about another book I finished recently:
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I was really reluctant to read this one – in fact, I only read it at this point because i could get a free version on my Kindle app. All I knew about this book to begin with is that, but modern standards, it’s not exactly politically correct… You know, colonialism and all that. And that proved to be true to some extent – most of the time, the narrator describes the native Africans primarily as animals rather than as human beings. At the same time, however, Conrad is no fan of the white man either – he consistently portrays the white characters (other than the narrator) as corrupt, sinister, almost evil.

Heart of Darkness is a story within a story: the primary narrator, Marlow, tells the story of his trip into the center of the Congo to his shipmates/friends. Marlow is hired by a Belgian trading company to transport ivory downriver on the Congo River. However, his primary Quest ends up to be the retrieval of a mysterious ivory trader, Kurtz, from the heart of the wilderness.

There’s a lot to this novel, despite it’s relatively short length – and probably a lot at I didn’t grasp the first time around. “Darkness” is a big theme – the literal and wild darkness of the Congo wilderness, the symbolic darkness in the white men’s cruelty toward the natives, and the darkness within every human heart – our capability for evil. It might be interesting to study this novel through the lens of the doctrine of total depravity…

The crucial point in this novel comes when Kurtz is about to die. The narrator says,

It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face e expression of sombre (sic) pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror–of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image,at some vision–he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “The horror! The horror!” (p71, Kindle edition)

Not exactly what I want my last words to be. But for Marlow, this deathbed realization is remarkable, even extraordinary:

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine… I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle [on his deathbed], but was wide enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up–he had judged. “The horror!” He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour (sic), it had conviction, it had the vibrating note of a revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth–the strange commingling of desire and hate… It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! (p72, Kindle)

In other words, this man who had lived a brutal life has a moment of truth on his death bed. He sees the true “horror” for the first time – he sees into depth of the darkness and calls it what it is. For Marlow, that cry of recognition somehow renders Kurtz’s soul “as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal” (72).

In the context of the novel, that is the best a man can hope for: to recognize and call the darkness what it is. Not to live a virtuous life, not to succeed financially — no, to have one authentic moment of truth. No repentance. Just one moment of horrible recognition.

Thank God that Conrad’s portrayal of the “Heart of Darkness” is only half of humanity’s story.

The next book I’ll look at (in a later post), Dracula, also delves into the darkness of evil. But unlike Heart of Darkness, Dracula also shows us the light.

Recent readings

I haven’t posted since last October — yikes!  It’s a whole new year!

The main reason it’s been so long is because Les Miserables took me a reeeeaaaaallllly long time to get through.  I’m glad I read it, but it definitely wasn’t one of those books I could fly through quickly.

My favorite parts in the book:  the beginning — particularly the life-altering encounter between Valjean and the Bishop; and the ending — the way Hugo ties everything together.  My least favorite part: the lengthy descriptions of Waterloo, Napoleon, etc.  Maybe my knowledge of French history is lacking — or maybe I’m just not that interested in reading about war tactics.  On the other hand, I found myself fascinated by the lengthy description of the sewers and the sewer system!  What does that say about me… ?

Victor Hugo was remarkably insightful in matter of faith, character, and spirituality — I’d like to go back sometime and glean some quotes for future sermons.

After I finished Les Mis (which, by the way, I read entirely on my iPhone, and during the months I read it, I constantly had the soundtrack from the musical playing in my head because, yes, I can pretty much sing the entire thing verbatim), I was ready for something a bit less “thick”.  I turned to…

Dune!  I didn’t use to consider myself much of a science fiction person, but lately I’ve realized… I actually am.  I loved reading Dune!  I went through it very quickly, fascinated by the characters and world Frank Herbert creates.  I thought about reading the sequels to it rather than continuing with my BBC list, but I decided to plug along.  I’m sure I’ll pick up the sequels at some point.

So now, I’m enthralled by Bram Stoker’s Dracula!  Again, probably not a book I would want to read if it weren’t on my list, since I’m not a fan of the horror genre — but I am LOVING it!  I didn’t expect for it to be told through first hand accounts (particularly journal entries) — and for me, that makes it more interesting.  I suppose that given my liking for Dr. Who, I shouldn’t be surprised to find myself enjoying Dracula.

65 read, 35 to go! 

In other news, I really want a piano.  It’s been far too long since I’ve lived with one.  And by the way, I’m accepting donations.  🙂

Something like this would be nice…

A Mixed Start

Well, I am midway through my two weeks of vacation, and so far the highlights have been:

• Visiting my parents in California for a few days
• Eating at my favorite seafood restaurant in CA, “The Crab Cooker”
• Spending a day at the beach (the real, ocean-rimming beach — not the pathetic thing that lake-goers call the beach)
• A monstrous sunburn on certain parts of my formerly pasty Midwest body
• Visiting my brother in Santa Barbara and meeting his girlfriend (thankfully, I liked her — unlike his ex!)
• Being the 6th person to hear and see the score for a new choral/orchestral work that one of my dad’s friends wrote — based on the 1st chapter of Job!!  Fascinating and moving.

Unfortunately, immediately after I returned to Illinois, my vacation took a turn for the worst — my iPhone disappeared.  I think I dropped it somewhere in the courtyard or foyer of our apartment complex, and someone picked it up… and decided not to return it.  I’m still holding onto a little bit of hope that it will still be returned, but in the meantime I am grieving this little loss.

However, I’ve been making good progress on my book quest, and since I still have a week left of vacation (at my in-laws’ lake house), there might be more progress to come!

In my last post, I mentioned that I was not impressed, thus far, with Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.  Well, I ended up really enjoying the book!  During the first part of the book, I thought it was going to be a bunch of sentimental nonsense, but it turned out to be a bit of a mystery story, with wonderful twists and turns!  I can imagine that in its day it would have been an on-the-edge-of-your-seat thriller.  I loved the way Wilkie Collins experimented with different narrative voices, and I especially loved the way he took his time unfolding the “answers” to the many mysteries raised in the plot.  It’s still a bit melodramatic in parts for my taste, but all-in-all a very enjoyable read.  I *think* I understand why it’s on the list — if Wilkie Collins had lived to see movies, he would have written a darn good thriller flick.

I finished another book too (The Remains of the Day), but I’ll save my reflections on that for tomorrow.

David Copperfield

And once again, the iPhone Kindle format comes through — I finished a major Dickens novel without any major difficulties!  I’m not sure whether I just found David Copperfield more readable than Bleak House, or my tastes have improved, or the iPhone format really does help me focus and feel like I’m making progress in the novel.   

[Side note: I keep forgetting that a Google search of “David Copperfield images” tends to pull up pictures of the magician.]

One way or another, I actually enjoyed David Copperfield.  Other than the fact that I hated Dora.  HATED that character.  Part of my ambivalence over Dickens in general is due to his sentimentality — it really gets to me.  And Dora has to be one of his most sentimentalized (and inane) characters!  I realize that that’s the point — David doesn’t end up calling her his “child-wife” for no reason — but she drove me crazy!  And I just plain hate having my heartstrings yanked by Dickens in saccharine sentences like,

 “I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers.  At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss — once, twice, three times — and went out of the room.”

I guess that isn’t SO bad… but it’s the best/worst example I could find quickly on my iPhone [one disadvantage of the Kindle thing — you can’t “flip through” the pages].

After prose that cloying, I feel like I should go read some Hemingway.

On the other hand, I loved David’s aunt, Betsy Trotwood — what a character!  I especially love how that tough old bird has such a tender, compassionate heart — it was quite a relief when David (I keep wanting to call him Pip!) ends up in her care after all the travails of his miserable childhood.

Now I’m on to The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.  Honestly, it’s not my favorite so far.  I’d better read something non-Victorian after this one… 

Crime and Punishment

I did it!  I finished a really really long Russian novel without major glitches!!

Some background:  I have tried (and failed) to finish The Brothers Karamazov at least four different times. One time, I was really making progress… and then my grad school classes resumed.  Try focusing on Brothers K while your mind is trying to juggle 10 different theological texts at once… yeah, didn’t happen.  The only other Russian novel that I remember reading is Demons (also by Dostoevsky) in my senior seminar with Dr. Roger Lundin (Wheaton College).  It was a great class, but I still had a hard time connecting with that particular novel.  I had assumed that enjoyment of the great Russian classics would simply not come naturally to me.

Crime and Punishment changed all of that.  I loved it!  I genuinely loved it and loved the experience of reading it.  I’d like to read some critical essays on the novel so that I can delve deeper into some of the major themes of the novel — I don’t think this is a novel that you read once and say, “Ok, I’ve mastered that one.”

I found myself mesmerized by the characters in the book, particularly the protagonist, Raskolnikov, and the magistrate, Porfiry Petrovitch. (Side note — one advantage of my undergraduate foray into Dostoevsky is that I was prepared for each character to have a zillion names and nicknames that would be difficult to remember…).  I also found it brilliant the way D. crafted the relationship between Sonya, a young girl who is forced into prostitution to support her family, and Raskolnikov.  And to make Sonya the most “Christian” of the characters — also brilliant.  The ending of the novel was perfect — if you haven’t read it, I’m not going to spoil it for you here.  Just read it.  (But don’t read it first — allow the book to build as D. intended!)

On a separate note, I read this entire book on my iPhone, using the Kindle app.  I actually found it easier to read the book this way — I’m not sure why.  Perhaps the fact that the text was broken up into shorter pages because of the small size of the iPhone screen helped encourage me that I was making progress — helped make it seem to go faster.  Perhaps it was the fact that I could read the book in bed while my husband falls asleep without needing a light on…

So my next project is David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, another author whose works I sometimes struggle to finish.  I am also reading this one on my iPhone, since I found I could download a free copy! So far I’m loving this book too — I’m on a roll!