17 posts tagged “books”

Ivy and I are doing some babysitting for my sister and husband tonight.  I'm still struck by how convenient it is that I can check email from their computer and also do some blog updates too.

I want to recommend a great book that Ivy and I both finished last week called "Children of Jihad" by Jared Cohen. (Note: checking books out from the library is actually a great incentive for having to finish them off with a deadline.)

Cohen is a young, adventurous, smart guy who graduated from Stanford, was a Rhodes scholar and loves to travel.  He spent two years traveling throughout the Middle East right after he graduated from college.  His book (written when he was 25 or 26) tells about his experiences interacting with young people from Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.  He asks them about their views on topics like democracy and terrorism and spends lots of time getting to know their perspective and culture.

Ivy and I both had our eyes opened in many areas: how similar young people in the Middle East are to Westerners; how most of these countries have experienced devastating wars just in the past couple decades and on their own soil;  how few opportunities they have to get a good education and jobs;  how oppressive it is to live in Iran and Syria in particular--they are police states similar to the communist system.

It was an inspiring book and I'm glad Cohen has since joined the US state department.  Also, having cross-cultural exchanges between the Middle East and the US and Europe is definitely the way to go and very important these days especially.  An idea that Ivy and I are toying with is to save up some money to go to the Middle East for a week or two with Ivy's cousin Rita who is fluent in Arabic.  That would be an amazing trip--and a hot one, so we'd want to go in the winter for sure.

"Under the Frog" is the name of a powerful book Agi and I both just read.  The cover describes it as a "black comedy."  The author (Tibor Fischer) was born in Britain to Hungarian parents who escaped from the Russians in the big Hungarian Revolution of 1956.  He's essentially a British guy but did live in Budapest for two years as a journalist right before the Wall fell and published this book three years later.

He's also one of the most talented writers I've ever read and you could say his sense of humor is devastating--kind of like Kurt Vonnegut.  Agi heard me laughing out loud all the time as I went through it.  I probably wouldn't have loved the book as much if I hadn't lived here but I'd recommend it nonetheless.  It was shortlisted for the Man-Booker prize (the top British and Commonwealth book) back in 1993.

I found the following excerpts of an interview with Kurt Vonnegut (who recently died) to be very interesting:

Tell me the reasons you’ve been attracted to a life of creation, whether as a writer or an artist.
I’ve been drawing all my life, just as a hobby, without really having shows or anything. It’s just an agreeable thing to do, and I recommend it to everybody. I always say to people, practice an art, no matter how well or badly [you do it], because then you have the experience of becoming, and it makes your soul grow. That includes singing, dancing, writing, drawing, playing a musical instrument. One thing I hate about school committees today is that they cut arts programs out of the curriculum because they say the arts aren’t a way to make a living. Well, there are lots of things worth doing that are no way to make a living. They are agreeable ways to make a more agreeable life.

We live in a very visual world today. Do words have any power left?

I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It’s an art form for very few people, because only a few can read very well. I’ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. [Laughs.] To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform. If you can do it, you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville, or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris. With pictures and movies, all you have to do is sit there and look at them and it happens to you.

You’ve stated that television is one of the most viable art forms in the world today.
Well, it is. It works like a dream. It’s a way to hold attention, and it’s awfully good at that. For a lot of people, TV is life itself. Churches used to provide people with better company than they had at home, but now, no matter what your neighborhood life or family life is like, you turn on the television and you get relatives, family. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but scientists have created baby geese that believe that an airplane is their mother. Human beings will believe in all kinds of things that aren’t true, and that’s okay. And TV is a part of that.

Is there another book in you, by chance?
No. Look, I’m 84 years old. Writers of fiction have usually done their best work by the time they’re 45. Chess masters are through when they’re 35, and so are baseball players. There are plenty of other people writing. Let them do it.

I finished Dickins' "Tale of Two Cities" right around Halloween last week.  (By the way, thanks to Brook & Kim for letting us stay at your place!  We got to see their new house in San Francisco and stayed two nights--Halloween being the second one.  Ivy had a meeting to attend in San Jose and she took the train in.)

I was very moved by A Tale of Two Cities.  It's set during the French Revolution and lots of suffering is detailed--both by the peasants who are beaten down by the rich people--and then by the rich people when the peasants turn on them and behead them.  Despite my simplistic summary, it is a beautifully written book and I made a few notes of several favorite passages that I wanted to record:

- "Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance...  Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away."

- "...thousands of acres of land--a whole province of France--all France itself--lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hairbreadth line. So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it."

- "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

A quick update on what I've been reading: 

A few weeks ago I finished Kim by Rudyard Kipling.  It was set in India and dealt with a young Irish-Indian boy's recruitment into the British Secret Service and his deep friendship with a Tibetan monk.  Very well written (hey, Kipling won the Nobel prize for literature--the first author writing in English to do so) and the story definitely pulls you in.  I also learned--via Wikipedia--that Kipling is famous for writing The Jungle Book and for an inspirational, "be a real man"-themed poem called "If" which had a big influence on Ayn Rand and upon generations of Brits as well.

I also recently finished Blue like Jazz by Donald Miller, a young Portland-based author.   This book is a very thoughtful, funny and honest take on "Christian Spirituality" and being part of a church.  His writing style is interesting and rather innovative.  He writes very informally--as if he's talking to you directly--and my experience is that it works well and creates a sense of connection with the reader.  Miller seems like a great guy and I could relate to a lot of what he was saying.   I appreciated his honest critiques and conclusions about how to love others and serve in the church without feeling being a Christian is a rule-based endeavor.  I highly recommend the book and I'm going to read it again.  (We borrowed our copy from Gabi N. and Agi is reading it now).

Finally, I just started "On Wings of Eagles" by Ken Follet about how American hostages were busted out of an Iranian jail in the late 70's by Ross Perot's corporation, EDS.  I love the international politics, insight into how executives run their big corporation and make decisions and the exciting nature of the story. 

I think I've found the best approach for getting variety and quality in what I'm reading: go with a "classic", then a thought-provoking, "philosophical" or "spiritual" book, and then a non-fiction book such as as a biography or real-life story.  This has been working nicely for me.

Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, has been a lot of fun and I'm glad I've been able to appreciate and enjoy it.  Scott is brilliant at witty dialogue and makes the reader respect his characters even while poking fun at them a bit.  Here's a representative quote made by a Knight Templar named Brian de Bois Guilbert (one of the bad French guys) about how he is so smitten with a young woman:

"By heaven, Malvoisin, yonder girl hath wellnigh unmanned me.  I am half resolved to go to the Grand Master, abjure the order to his very teeth, and refuse to act the brutality which his tyranny has imposed on me."

This isn't for everyone, but I'm really into it.  Only 30 pages left.

Last week I finished off the excellent book Perelandra by CS Lewis.   Since the airline was showing “The Astronaut Farmer” and “Wild Hogs” on both legs of the trip, I basically had 20 hours of spare time to fill up.

This book is the second in a three-part “space trilogy” by Mr. Lewis.  I listened to the first one “Out of the Silent Planet” on my ipod last January and overall I was able to get into this second book faster than the first.  I’ve read that Lewis viewed these books as some of his finest work and understand why--particularly after reading Perelandra.

Although the plot started out a bit slow, I was absolutely captivated and amazed about one-third into the book, when the equivalent of the devil shows up to tempt the innocent, unfallen race of creatures on the planet Venus (also named Perelandra).  As Lewis went on to brilliantly describe the process in which a person who knew no evil could be tempted to give in and compromise, I was mesmerized and convinced I was experiencing the work of a literary genius.  It was a genuinely powerful experience.  As I sat on the plane I thought of the Sistine chapel which we had recently seen and I personally would put sections of this book on par with Michelangelo’s work.  I’m no art expert but this comparison is what jumped out at me.

Perelandra definitely has weaknesses—such as the failure to make the main character more appealing as the hero-protagonist—but I’m already looking forward to the third book in the series.  One final thought about Perelandra:  it is sweeping in its philosophical scope and provides all kinds of insights to the deepest questions and issues of the universe.  Lewis confronts head-on the dominant scientific- materialistic viewpoint of today and shows how it doesn’t provide an adequate explanation for the reality of genuine evil and genuine love.

I found the following very interesting (taken off another blog I read regularly):

Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote a book called the Diving Bell and the Butterfly after suffering a stroke that left him totally paralyzed, save his blinking left eye (which he used to communicate words to an assistant). Going inside the mind of someone literally frozen is a deep experience. Add to it that Bauby is an extremely talented writer and you have something truly remarkable.

An interesting point & quote:

* After his stroke, Bauby's favorite letters from friends were not those which discussed the meaning of life but those which captured the small events which "punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep." Interestingly, the letters about deep philosophical issues were from the friends he knew the least well.

Last week I finished off the Secular City.  The last third of it was disappointing because he started equating the work of the church with politics and those two are not a healthy combination.

However, I also loved reading an amazing book over the last several days:  The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.  I downloaded the ebook because that was the cheapest option and it would have taken a month or two for it to be shipped from Amazon UK...

His main thesis is that people are often wasting their lives away on busy-work and not living as they themselves truly desire.  However--as he goes on to show--it IS possible to live well in every sense (in terms of work, play, family, service, traveling, sports, etc) if you decide to live by a somewhat different set of rules and priorities.  It is a revolutionary book and he had some invaluable suggestions on both a details/micro level and on the big picture/macro level.   He also had a helpful acronym that organized his ideas:  DEAL

Definition:  Define what your ideal life would look like.  Imagine you had $100Million in the bank and could do whatever you wanted.  What would you do?  For Tim, he wanted to become a world-champion kick-boxer, tango-dancer, motorcycle racer, world traveler and linguist fluent in 6 languages, and he went out and did all of this--all by age 29.  He goes on to show that most people can actually start doing the things they really care about most if they would simply define them, and then make them a priority and cut out the wasteful things in their lives.

Elimination:  Among other things, he advocates a "low information" diet.  This point really hit home with me because I definitely spend too much time simply doing passive reading of magazines and surfing the internet--often with nothing to show for how I spent my time.  Tim doesn't even read the papers or news online (I'm not going to go this far) and recommends only reading books that are actionable and will help you achieve your goals.  He reads an hour of fiction every night before going to bed for pleasure and to help fall asleep.  He basically recommends cutting out all the stuff you spend time on that is wasteful and isn't directly related to your goals;  disciplining yourself in terms of time and money as well.

Automation:   Tim literally works four hours a week running his online web business (hence the name of the book).  He has purposefully automated it to such a degree that he can do email once a week for an hour and spend the other three hours working on marketing and promotion, for example.  He has sales of at least $1M/year.  The key is being intentional about getting yourself out of the loop and creating a self-sustaining system that brings in enough revenue to support whatever you truly care about and want to focus on in life (e.g. working for International Justice Ministry and putting child pedophiles in jail, as my friend Kalen wants to do with his life!)

Liberation:  After Defining your life passions and what you truly want to DO and BE, Eliminating the stuff that just wastes your time and keeps you from doing and being what you want, and then succesfully Automating a revenue stream that will allow you to do whatever you'd like (ideally anywhere in the world) you are truly Liberated to a live a life that mosts people could only dream of. 

You don't have to have a huge amount of money to do all this.  Sure, like many "gurus" with a plan, an acronym or 7 habits, everything he recommends isn't for everyone.  However, I think most of what he says makes sense for me and I'm planning on following many of his recommendations.  One of the first things on my list is becoming decent at Hungarian.  So we shall see--it's all about results.

Harvey Cox is a professor at Harvard's Divinity School and I'm halfway through this book (which I somehow ended up acquiring from my sister Melissa.)  I've enjoyed Cox's academic content and broad knowledge of the world, history, literature and ideas.  The first part laid out a theological perspective on why secularization is a such positive thing for the modern world (e.g. the separation of church and state is essential for living well as a community of people, and Christianity actually rightly promoted this early-on).  He also described the development of the city and how God has been at work in the world promoting political and individual freedom over the centuries (a la Exodus).  I was intrigued by Cox's contention that the Western church has probably overemphasized personal morality (perhaps a vestige of "Greek philosophy" he says?) over structural, societal justice.  But, as I pondered his point that improving the powerlessness and living conditions of the oppressed is what the church needs to focus upon first and foremost,  it seems to me that biblical virtue on a personal level is actually a precondition for justice on a societal level.  It's typically the dishonesty and selfishness of whoever is in power that causes the masses to suffer.  It's the people who cheat on their taxes that keep money from flowing to those who most need it.

I do think, however, that the protestant Western church needs to get its focus off pleasing itself and "petting the sheep" with self-help messages and Starbucks-style cafes installed in mega-facilities.  Are poor people and widows being served by this?

Cox also slammed the efforts of well-intentioned "weekend work sessions" where rich suburban kids would go into poor slums for a couple days and help paint walls, etc.  He suggested instead that the black and white kids get together and knock on white people's doors in suburbia and try to effect political change (the book was written in the 60s).  Overall, it made me wonder how effective and helpful are the week-long "Mexicali" and other short trips where relatively rich Americans do manual labor in Mexican villages and play with the kids.  I did this for three years in high school and was very glad I went.  The best part was having my eyes opened to many Mexicans' living conditions.  But maybe we should have instead taught them English or put on seminars on how to apply for micro-loans from the World Bank?...   Very interesting issues.