Sticky books
Jane Crow tagged me with a quiz:
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way. I already quote from it on the slightest of pretexts.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes, of course: Emma Bovary, Justine, Jordan Baker, Dolores Haze.
The last book you bought is:
David Taylor and Brian Jepson, Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther. The last piece of reading-for-pleasure that I bought was Zonenkinder by Jana Hensel.
The last book you read:
The book I most recently finished is The Koran translated by N.J.Dawood.
What are you currently reading?
As always, I'm reading several books concurrently:
Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: an uncommon dialogue.
The Bible as a crossreference to both of the above.
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Alte Meister also related to the above. I bought this 525 page reference catalogue for the sake of the 23 pages on the magnificent Herrenberger Altar which I visit regularly. After ten years of staring at it for an hour every two months, it still surprises and delights me.
Denkanstöße 2005, a local publisher's annual sampler, from Richard Feynman to Michael Moore via Gidon Kremer.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
W. Somerset Maugham, The complete short stories.
W. Shakespeare, Collected works.
Three people I choose to "stick this" to and why:
Krenneke because he needs a nudge to start writing again.
Smartmom because she is a book person: she blogged about finding a book by the elder Thomas Wolfe.
Savtadotty because she too is very likely a reader of catholic tastes ;-)
Labels: belief, herrenberger altar, meme, reading
posted by Udge @ 22:09
4 Comments:
OK, I did it. Now can I go back to blogging my epic series ;-)?
I've been reading a book that mentions Conversations with God (Michael Learner's Spirit Matters. How do you like it?
I like your taste in books.
Red, Conversations with God was given me for Christmas several years ago by my favourite cousin, it has taken me this long to overcome my resistance to what I expected it to be like. To my own surprise, I enjoyed the book. It reads very well: neither "preachy" nor "touchy-feely". Whether the reader believes that God moved NDW's hand, whether NDW himself believes that, is irrelevant.
I was reminded of something I read a few years back and can only imperfectly remember, where a scientist or philosopher was chided for not deriding fortune tellers. His reply was that an effective fortune teller is someone who is a good judge of people and has accumulated a great deal of knowledge about how the world works; the reading of tea leaves or whatever is only a frame in which to present this knowledge. NDW fits this bill well: there a lot of plain commonsense and clear thinking on offer (plus some pretty dubious reincarnation and no-man-is-an-island mysticism.)
People smoke and wonder why they get cancer. People stay angry all their lives and wonder why they get heart attacks.
The amusing thing is that unless you categorically reject that God would commmunicate with us, there is no reason not to believe it:
NDW: How can I know this communication is from God? How do I know this is not my own imagination?
God: What would be the difference? Do you not see that I could just as easily work through your imagination as anything else?
To put it in a nutshell: The book is written at right angles to established religion, it is about our (personal, individual) relationship to God and what this means for our place in the world and our relationships to each other. Anyone who believes in a Deity will find that much in the book rings true; anyone who hopes to find their religion praised will be very disappointed. Jesus figures only as one "Master" among many, Buddha is mentioned nearly as often and in the same tone of voice.
On the other hand, I find that NDW goes much too far in the fashionable direction of individual responsibility for everything that happens to us (which lets government, society and our fellows off the hook), and also that our feeling that God approves of what we do is the only yardstick of right behaviour. Theo Kaczynski and Ayn Rand would both approve.
Ooh, thank you for all of that. Good points all round.
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