34 posts tagged “books”

I finished Magda Gerber's "Dear Parent" book last weekend. (Gerber is from Hungary originally, by the way.) My interest in baby info has gone from zero to sixty in the last few months and Agi and I borrowed this book from my sister.  Agi read it first and next I'll follow her w/ BabyWise.  We think Gerber's advice is excellent and makes sense to us:

- Babies hardly need any stimulation for many months. Simply coming out of the womb and breathing, seeing and eating is a sensory overload in itself.  (So no need for toys that make noise or are extra colorful.)

- Respect what the child can do (don't try to get him to sit up extra early) and let the child struggle to reach toys, move around.

- Constantly talk to the baby and tell him what you're going to do.  Rather than just picking him up, tell him you're doing this and give him a chance to get "ready." (For a second or two).

- Serve your baby lots of skittles and cheetos. ;)

I finished The Sparrow yesterday, a sci-fi and theology book I borrowed from Melissa F.  I was riveted to the story.  I've been keeping a Google Doc "Book Notes" log that I've found very rewarding and here are my notes:

• Story was a unique combination of science fiction and theology:  party of Jesuits and scientists travel to a different planet.
• Reinforced the complexity, sorrow, suffering, love and beauty of life.
• Author converted to Judaism as an adult and is also a PhD in anthropology. In the notes, she sees no inherent contradiction between science and religion.
• Story set forth view that God most likely steps back after creating world; loves us in our suffering and joy, but doesn't "micromanage" such events.
• Priest thinks he has the following dilemma as he experiences immense, overwhelming suffering and loss: (i) adopt view that the universe is random, as is his suffering, which makes it more acceptable (ii) or adopt view that God can be harsh, cruel or "vicious."
• "The Sparrow" refers to verse in Matthew that says such a bird won't fall to the ground without the Father's will.  And the main character falls hard--brutally so.  Book questions how God could allow such suffering.  But what's not emphasized--and should be kept in mind--is who gave the sparrow life and the ability to fly to begin with?  That's a key issue with all such "problem of evil" complaints.  What about the "problem of good?"
  

We had a great time hosting my buddy Calvin L last week for four days.  I showed him the coolest spots in Budapest and will get some pictures up soon.  Calvin is a great travel companion and loves soaking up the culture and unique experiences.  We both love cafes but he loves them on a whole different level and was generous to treat me to a wine-tasting session his last day.

This past weekend we spent lots of time with Agi's mom and went hiking on Saturday and went on a big walk around Margaret Island after church on Sunday. We drove up today to Aunt Eva's place for the annual blowout Easter celebration with Agi's relatives.  More pictures to come there too.  Happy Easter!

I've almost finished the novel "the Sparrow" and am making my way through Tim Keller's excellent and compelling "the Reason for God."  We also saw the very funny "Meet the Parents" a few nights ago for the first time--Agi and I both loved it.  One of our favorite comedies.

Agi and I fly back to Portland on April 26th.  I'm looking forward to a quick 3-day side-trip to Albania this weekend to visit some friends and check out the ministry there I had participated in back in 1995.

I'm very much enjoying reading The Sparrow--a science fiction book set in the future that deals with many heavy theological questions--that Melissa F recommended and loaned to me.

The author, a woman, has a female character named Sofia think the following: "She wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman."

Last weekend we had a great and memorable time in Amsterdam.  As I told Agi, one of the best parts about visiting an important place is that whenever you hear it spoken of again, it's not just a big fuzzy blur (except--in the case of Amsterdam--for those who ate some space cake).  It was a beautiful city with scenic canals, gorgeous buildings and bikes wizzing by everywhere.

A highlight was meeting up with our friends Orshi and Antonio (she's Hungarian & he's Portuguese) and cruising the city with them on Sunday.  They're a great couple and we get along well with them.  Their ninth month old son Miguel is quite a looker.

Perhaps the best part of the trip to Amsterdam for me was reading the Diary of Anne Frank concurrently with our visit.  I believe I read this book in high school but going through it now was an amazing, moving experience.  In fact, I think visiting a place in person and reading a book related to it is one of the richest experiences you can have in life.  I really feel like I got to know Anne as a person and her death as a fifteen year old was simply tragic and barbaric.  But her voice truly does live on, as does the very well done Anne Frank museum where you can tour the "Secret Annex" where her family hid out for two years without every being able to leave during that time!  Overall, reading this book was the most direct and concentrated look I've had into a real human soul that I can recall.  That kept coming back to me: she was real, her experiences were real.

I'll add in some pictures here soon.

Lovely Agi and I are heading over to Budapest for about six weeks.  There's a direct connection between Portland and Amsterdam & we're looking forward to taking advantage of our stopover there and staying for three days and meeting up with two friends: Orshi & Antonio and their new baby Miguel.  I've also packed the Diary of Anne Frank--who lived in Amsterdam--and will try to read a lot on the plane.  We got a great deal on a nice hotel via hotwire and are staying in the middle of downtown.

A few days ago I finished the very good "Great Books" book by David Denby.  He spent a year reading the works assigned to undergrad Columbia students as part of their core curriculum and wrote about how these Western classics impacted him.  In particular, I enjoyed hearing his impressions of both the Old and New Testaments (he's a secular Jew), Hume (the Scottish philosopher), Montaigne (French essayist from Bordeaux), Boccaccio (wild Italian guy) and Dante (another Italian who of course wrote the disturbing and brilliant "Inferno"). 

I've been spurred on to read more of both the Old and New Testaments and also read something from the ones I've never read before: Montaigne, Boccaccio and Dante.

I'm two thirds of the way through  "Great Books," a book written by New Yorker film critic David Denby.  He took a year to go through Columbia University's classic Western Civilization core curriculum and wrote about it.  I'm learning immensely about a variety of writers I really didn't know much about (e.g. Montaigne and Hume are very intriguing and I'm planning to read more) and I wanted to quote the author on his reaction to Rousseau:

"...Rousseau initiated the two great lines of attack against the property-owning new rich, castigating the bourgeois both as exploiter (the line of criticism leading to Marxism) and as philistine (the line leading to nineteenth and twentieth century bohemianism)... Locke's combination of property rights, legal rights, and constitutional limits of sovereignty was not enough for him.  Too tame, too bland, too soulless. He wanted something for the spirit, the blood, a force as powerful as religion. And his challenge gnawed at one's peace. In bourgeois life, you chased away danger, you achieved safety, putting up the tents, filling the tents with blankets and pots--all the goods that were taken from Job. But the effort to be safe, to avoid Job's fate, produced anxiety in its wake. Every once in a while, a sense of loss, even of desolation, came stealing in. Was this it? Wasn't there anything else? You mocked such questions because other people were hungry and had nothing... But still I wondered: Where was the great thing, the transcendent moment? Where was the ease, the sustained view of the flowering hill, the beneficence of a larger, free life? Would I even know when I had missed it?"

I'm about halfway done with Pascal's Pensees and I've been mainly reading him at night because the most profound of his thoughts are sometimes inscrutable enough to help me doze off...

But a few weeks ago I was absolutely riveted by his section XV: Transition from Knowledge of Man to Knowledge of God.  In fact, there have only been a few times when I've been as stunned and impacted by reading a few short paragraphs as I was here.  I'm going to add in what I found to be the most powerful content and then highlight the one sentence that impacted me the most:

    For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely more remote from an understanding of the extremes; the end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy.
    Equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
    Let us then realize our limitations.  We are something and we are not everything.  Such being as we have conceals from us the knowledge of first principles, which arise from nothingness, and the smallness of our being hides infinity from our sight.
    Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.  There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him.  The universe knows none of this.

I listened to David Allen's book "Ready for Anything" the past couple weeks while working out in the gym.  (By the way, I found few things more invigorating than listening to books while working out--at the end of the hour I feel awesome, focused and competent like a kung fu master).

I thought his book was very good and wanted to write down the practical advice he gave about how to live and work more productively.  His system is known as "Getting Things Done" or "GTD."  I really like productivity gurus for the most part.  He's very good and I've already implemented several key things he recommends:

- Get your work, tasks and goals out of your head and down on paper.  Be certain you can trust your system--it must be easy, simple and effective.  This allows you to remember what you need to do and--if set up correctly--it'll remind you when you need to do it.

- But writing the task/goal/project down is not enough--it must also always have the next action step involved.  Gmail is actually perfect for this, because you can start a project just as you start a new "conversation" and simply add a star next to the next action step.  When you've completed an action, change the star to the next action item or--once you've completed the entire project--you can delete the entire email conversation.

- Do a weekly review of your tasks and projects to make sure you're on track and working on the right stuff.

- Allow your mind to focus on creative problem solving and coming up with new ideas--not keeping track of what you should or could be doing.  Give yourself structure to produce freedom.

I've been loving google's gmail and calendar and I schedule deadlines for certain tasks using google's calendar.  Adios.