I Know What I Did This Summer Part 2
I read! And drank coffee!!
I love to read and I always carry around a blue backpack crammed with books. It occasionally drives my wife crazy when we go places and I have to take books with me. And what really gets her goat is when I go to Starbucks 25 days a month and sit and read while drinking a four-dollar coffee, which I did most of the summer. (Double-tall, extra-foam, vanilla latte, please.) It kills her to imagine spending a hundred bucks a month on a non-flammable liquid. But what’s she gonna do? She already married me! Ha, ha, sucker!
Sheesh! I was kidding! Ouch! Stop throwing portable electronics devices at me, Kristi!
Most of the time I read books, they are work / ministry related. but I do throw in some for-pleasure only reading in every once in a while. Here are two of the books that I really enjoyed and what I thought about what I read:
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In The Idiot, Dostoyevsky set out to place the ideal of Christ into the person of a modern man, his character, Prince Myshkin. Through hundreds of situations, Dostoyevsky seems to use this interesting concept not to give us a cheesy Russian “What would Jesus do?” but to demonstrate how radically juxtaposed our modern culture is to the teachings of Jesus.
Sometimes Dostoyevsky executes his goal masterfully, as he does in an early account of Prince Myshkin and a poor outcast girl named Marie. Occasionally he’s not so masterful, but overall, he gives a great deal to think about. A multitude of powerful statements are made throughout the novel.
This book took me longer to read than any novel I’ve ever read. Yes, it was a lengthy book, but the greatest difficulty was in understanding who was who. Russian names were invented for the torture of Western minds. Simply getting through the first forty pages took me two weeks and extensive note-taking in the margins to track who was who.
Once I had done the work in those early pages, the rest seemed to flow quite well. I had the wonderful joy of reading this book and discussing it with my grandfather as he was also reading it.
Dostoyevsky was an interesting character. Most of his books were published as serial novels and he was paid by the page, leading to quite lengthy descriptions of people and events as well as some additional plot lines that weren’t essential to the story. Reading this book was very much entering into the world of 19th Century Russia, as the extent of the descriptions made for an immersed view of Russian life, culture, and society.
A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren
If you are a Christian and are up for a challenge in your thinking, read this book. Although instead of challenging my thinking, it really affirmed some of the thinking I’d already been doing. It was great for me to come across this book because it actually helped me to articulate many things that I have come to think and believe.
I’m personally so exhausted with the little games that Christians play or with politicizing what was a completely non-political movement. I personally can’t stand how much time, energy and money is wasted on what really comes down to Christian “entertainment”, when there are far greater needs in this world.
McLaren gives a discussion of some of the deep, troubling questions of modern Christianity in the form of a novel. He offers so much hope for new thinking in Christianity — which is really a return to old thinking.