Booking It--Recent Serious

What’s the most serious book you’ve read recently?

Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. I highly recommend it.

"In her critically acclaimed Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor wrote about leaving full-time ministry to become a professor, a decision that stretched the boundaries of her faith. Now, in her stunning follow-up, An Altar in the World, she shares how she learned to encounter God beyond the walls of any church.

From simple practices such as walking, working, and getting lost to deep meditations on topics like prayer and pronouncing blessings, Taylor reveals concrete ways to discover the sacred in the small things we do and see.

Something as ordinary as hanging clothes on a clothesline becomes an act of devotion if we pay attention to what we are doing and take time to attend to the sights, smells, and sounds around us. Making eye contact with the cashier at the grocery store becomes a moment of true human connection. Allowing yourself to get lost leads to new discoveries. Under Taylor's expert guidance, we come to question conventional distinctions between the sacred and the secular, learning that no physical act is too earthbound or too humble to become a path to the divine. As we incorporate these practices into our daily lives, we begin to discover altars everywhere we go, in nearly everything we do."

Sunday Funnies

What I'm Reading Now

I'm always following a book trail. Sue Monk Kidd mentioned Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing in her Dance of the Dissident Daughter, and it sounded interesting. I'd already read and enjoyed Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, so based on Kidd's recommendation and my prior experience with Atwood, I'm going to give it a try.

"Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented...and becoming whole."

In the Bag

I'm taking suggestions. I've decided to buy myself a nice leather messenger bag, but I've had trouble finding one that meets my specifications. I want it to have a professional look--for work and conferences, but I don't want it to have that "briefcase" look. I want it to be quality leather, one that will last and age well. I don't want it to be huge, but I do need it to be big enough to hold papers to grade and a book or two, or my laptop, and it also needs to have pockets for my cell phone and ipod.

I shopped around when we went to Oklahoma City and earlier this week in Little Rock, with no results. I found this Coach bag online, and I'm leaning towards it, but I'm afraid it's gonna be a tight fit for my laptop. Any recommendations?

A Different Kind of Postmodern Novel

I've discovered a new author to add to my "Favorite Authors" list--Jodi Picoult. A friend at Ole Miss recommended her books to me a while ago, but I've only lately had time to start reading her. So far, I've read My Sister's Keeper, Plain Truth, Change of Heart, Vanishing Act, and I just finished The Pact. I'm addicted.

What's so wonderful about Picoult is that her books are great reads, yet at the same time they are well-written and thought-provoking. You get all the fun of recreational reading without the guilty feeling that you're wasting time reading junk.

Her novels that I've read so far have dealt with the medical ethics of bioengineering, teenage pregnancy, religious fundamentalism, family relationships, faith and doubt, legal ethics, truth, organ donation, the death penalty, the "kidnapping" of a child by her own parent, alcoholism, teenage suicide, and more. Picoult explores these relevant and intriguing issues with respect, never over-simplifying them or using her novels as a soap box.

Another thing I really like about her novels is that she constantly surprises me. I can't always figure out what will happen, and she doesn't take the easy way out. Her endings are unpredictable, no deux ex machina or pat solutions.

Postmodernism is not my field (wanna weigh in here, Ian?), but, in a way, it seems like she's using postmodern techniques, but not to the extreme of Pynchon or the other famous postmodernists (this is not a criticism, just a comparison of styles). In each of these novels there is a search for "truth," yet she reveals the story through multiple perspectives and shifts in time (but it still feels linear because the reader is never confused about where a scene fits in the story) without ever revealing the one "truth" a reader of traditional novels looks for. The narrative feels "finished," yet there is rarely complete closure. She explores big questions without giving definitive answers, yet it is an honest exploration. I never feel that she's toying with the reader.

If you haven't read her yet, you should.

S & S & SM

I told you Monday that Quirk is planning a follow-up to its wonderfully successful Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. This one? Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. No. I am not joking.

According to Publishers Weekly, "The Dashwood sisters, evicted from their childhood home by their conniving stepmother, land on a mysterious island full of man-eating sea creatures, instead of a nearby, downgraded, English cottage."

P&P&Z author Seth Grahame Smith kept 85 % of Austen's text untouched, but Ben H. Winters, author of the upcoming S&S&SM, maintains a 60/40 ratio. Rekulak, the editor, says they were inspired by "a wide range of cultural sources, both high and low. To that end, Rekulak said they looked to everything from Jules Verne novels to Lost to SpongeBob SquarePants."

I don't know. Jules Verne and Lost could work. But I'm a little put off by the SpongeBob thing.

It'll be published September 15th. Of course, I'll have to read it. I'll keep you posted.

Amazon Recommends

I've bought a lot of books from Amazon.com over the last few years, and one of their marketing tools is "Amazon recommends" e-mails. They suggest books that are related to the books you've been buying. So, when they send me recommendations for 18th century novels, or novels by women, or books related to language or women's issues or Christianity, I understand. It makes sense. But here's today's recommendation: Mallarme, Manet, and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning (Cambridge Studies in French).

As Ricky Ricardo would say, 'Splain that.

Oh. Maybe it's because France is near England.

Booking It-LOL

What's the funniest book you've read lately?

Well, that's gotta be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But I've already written a post about it. If you want to, you can read it HERE.

And there's another JA spoof coming out soon. I'll tell you about it later.

Sunday Funnies

Coffee + Fuzzy Shoes = A Great Way to Start the Day

But Where's Her Book?

Try This

I just finished reading Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World, and in her chapter "The Practice of Saying No: Sabbath," she includes an exercise that I've adapted a little and am going to try. I invite you to try it, too.

First, get a pencil and a piece of paper and find a few minutes that you can be alone. Then, on one side of the paper, list "all the things you know give you life that you never take time to do." What makes life meaningful to you? What's the life like that you live in your innermost dreams? What do you do in the life you meant to live but haven't gotten around to yet? Think about standing at the end of your life looking back over it: what would you wish you had included? changed? left out? Do not judge yourself or edit your list. "Promise not to shush your heart when it howls for the list it wants," Taylor encourages.

Now, flip the paper over and "make a list of all the reasons why you think it is impossible for you to do [or be] those things." That's all.

But now a seed has been planted. Maybe your longing heart will find a way through all those excuses. I hope mine does.