In today's entry we learn that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but maybe occasionally you should pick a book because of its cover. For my 6th [of 26] book I decided to search out #3 A book you pick solely because of the cover. I had been on the lookout for a cool looking cover almost since the beginning of this quest and hadn't been sucked in by any until I was at work one night and came across a book with a picture of a giant red thumbtack sticking into a map on someone's desk one night while I was doing my nightly cleaning of offices. I didn't recognize the title or the author yet I couldn't get my mind off the big red thumbtack, it was like it kept telling me the same thing over and over, first in just a gentle whisper but later in a full throated I'm about to go hoarse way "You are here!!!!"
I finally decided to relent and purchased a digital copy of Paper Towns by John Green for $4.99. Before I downloaded I did read the synopsis and it sounded interesting, I also learned that John Green was the author of a little book titled The Fault in Our Stars which you may of heard of, upon learning this it did give me pause, after all that book is a YA [young adult] tearjerker, which I didn't have any intention of reading, that had recently been turned into a rather popular movie, which I didn't have any intention of seeing. I also learned that Paper Towns had also been adapted into a movie soon to hit theatres. This one, I think I will see, at some point, maybe not in the theatre, but definitely on dvd or blu ray or digitally.
[This review won't be as long as some of my previous ones, but as always if you wish to only know my barebones opinion, scroll down.]
I feel some amount of responsibility to not spoil this book for those who haven't read it yet are interested in watching the movie, like for instance the meaning behind the title. What I will tell you is that it is about an Orlando, Florida High School senior named Quentin, which everyone just calls Q and it is about Q's neighbor, and one time close friend, Margo. They get into a small adventure which becomes a mystery which leads to a bigger adventure which leads Q and his friends Ben and Radar to the other side of the country. Along the way there are prom dates to find, questions to be solved, but more than anything there are people to be understood.
When it comes right down to it, Paper Towns is about answering the question, 'are the people we know really the people we know?' The book doesn't quite phrase it that way, but that is where it all boils down to. Each person in the book is who they are, but they are also all so much more and at times less. Paper Towns is about the people we create in our minds and how much that creation actually aligns with the way people really are. This is, of course, true when it comes to our memories of people but Paper Towns also posits that it is how most of our current relationships work also.
I read the first 30 pages of Paper Towns on day 1, didn't read any on day 2, and then ended up reading 275 pages on day 3. I devoured this book, section 1 was just plain fun, section 2 was the uncovering of the mystery, section 3 raced toward the final destination and race section 3 did, until the final chapter when it came to a screeching halt in quite a bit of exposition. The book's ending, left me wanting, wanting to know what was next, wanting more resolution. It also left me with a bit of confusion. The book begins with Q narrating in such a way as to suggest that everything that is going to happen has already happened to Q, but then the book ends in a moment, I'm not sure if the whole story was told from his perspective right before the end or what, I was expecting an end to the story and then an epilogue to finish what began in the prologue, instead it was just an end.
At base how I feel about this book:
I greatly enjoyed Paper Towns, evident by the speed at which I read the book. It had quite a bit of humor throughout. It does have some language and mature elements, much like you would find in a PG-13 movie aimed at teens. While the ending left me both wanting and with some confusion I would still highly recommend this book. When all is said and done I am glad that one of the books I was to read in this challenge was one I chose only because of the cover, that big red thumbtack took me on a pretty cool ride.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
Monday, March 23, 2015
Thursday, March 19, 2015
A Year Long Quest to Read: Book 5
Told you it was coming soon.
When I was deciding on #24 A book you loved...read it again I was originally going to read the first Harry Potter book, but I have read that book about 8 times so I decided maybe I should go another direction. I ended up staying in "children's literature" but decided to move back another decade plus to find the book I wanted to reread.
One of the wonders of my childhood was the Scholastic Book Fair and the catalog of books that would arrive monthly at my grade school. Each year and most months my mom would give me some money so I could get/order a book. Most months it was Hardy Boys and Choose Your Own Adventures but this one time at the Book Fair I picked up a book that showcased a couple of children on sleds on the cover. The book, I learned from the back cover was a fictionalized true story of children whom had helped smuggle gold bullion out of Norway under the noses of the invading German army during World War II. I picked up the book for a couple dollars and took it home and read it over the course of a day.
A day used to be the usual amount of time that I would take to read most books. Obviously when I was younger most of the books were shorter than most of the books I read now. Obviously when I was younger the subject matter of most books was a lot less dense than the normal subject matter of the books I read now. Obviously when I was younger I got lost in the characters and plot lines a lot better than I do now, free of the interruptions that take place nowadays. Obviously I am getting older. The last book that I was able to read over the course of a 24 hour period was Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. That is until I once again picked up Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan.
In the course of the story a boy and his friends daily hide gold on their sleds as they pass Nazi sentries on the way to a snow covered bank next to a fjord. Snow Treasure is a story of adventure and courage in the face of overwhelming odds, it is a showcase that courage does not always mean fighting the enemy but is often about being smarter than the enemy.
I bought Snow Treasure as a child but as happened to almost all my childhood books it was lost to time, a yard sale during childhood, or Half Price Books in seminary, I don't really remember when it passed on from my ownership. But I always remembered it fondly and then I happened upon it several years ago at Epcot of all places. One of the nations in Epcot's World Showcase is Norway and in their gift shop that you came to following the Maelstrom ride I found Snow Treasure sitting among other books about Norwegian history. I pointed it out to Mary and said that at some point I wanted to by the book again, she told me I might as well get it now or else I might regret it, I listened to my wife and purchased my second copy of Snow Treasure.
[Incidentally Maelstrom is currently being replaced by a Frozen ride, which should have better effects and music but will certainly be missing the history and gods of Norse mythology]
It sat on a book shelf for the past several years, for a time in my office, then in Henry's room and finally back to my office until I picked it up yesterday and read it from cover to cover. The story still struck a cord these 27 years later and I would recommend it to all children and adults who want a quick fun true adventure of good triumphing over the evil that is prevalent in this world. Edmund Burke once said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," Snow Treasure is proof that the opposite is true as well, the only thing necessary for the destruction of evil is for good men, women, children to do something.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
When I was deciding on #24 A book you loved...read it again I was originally going to read the first Harry Potter book, but I have read that book about 8 times so I decided maybe I should go another direction. I ended up staying in "children's literature" but decided to move back another decade plus to find the book I wanted to reread.
One of the wonders of my childhood was the Scholastic Book Fair and the catalog of books that would arrive monthly at my grade school. Each year and most months my mom would give me some money so I could get/order a book. Most months it was Hardy Boys and Choose Your Own Adventures but this one time at the Book Fair I picked up a book that showcased a couple of children on sleds on the cover. The book, I learned from the back cover was a fictionalized true story of children whom had helped smuggle gold bullion out of Norway under the noses of the invading German army during World War II. I picked up the book for a couple dollars and took it home and read it over the course of a day.
A day used to be the usual amount of time that I would take to read most books. Obviously when I was younger most of the books were shorter than most of the books I read now. Obviously when I was younger the subject matter of most books was a lot less dense than the normal subject matter of the books I read now. Obviously when I was younger I got lost in the characters and plot lines a lot better than I do now, free of the interruptions that take place nowadays. Obviously I am getting older. The last book that I was able to read over the course of a 24 hour period was Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. That is until I once again picked up Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan.
In the course of the story a boy and his friends daily hide gold on their sleds as they pass Nazi sentries on the way to a snow covered bank next to a fjord. Snow Treasure is a story of adventure and courage in the face of overwhelming odds, it is a showcase that courage does not always mean fighting the enemy but is often about being smarter than the enemy.
I bought Snow Treasure as a child but as happened to almost all my childhood books it was lost to time, a yard sale during childhood, or Half Price Books in seminary, I don't really remember when it passed on from my ownership. But I always remembered it fondly and then I happened upon it several years ago at Epcot of all places. One of the nations in Epcot's World Showcase is Norway and in their gift shop that you came to following the Maelstrom ride I found Snow Treasure sitting among other books about Norwegian history. I pointed it out to Mary and said that at some point I wanted to by the book again, she told me I might as well get it now or else I might regret it, I listened to my wife and purchased my second copy of Snow Treasure.
[Incidentally Maelstrom is currently being replaced by a Frozen ride, which should have better effects and music but will certainly be missing the history and gods of Norse mythology]
It sat on a book shelf for the past several years, for a time in my office, then in Henry's room and finally back to my office until I picked it up yesterday and read it from cover to cover. The story still struck a cord these 27 years later and I would recommend it to all children and adults who want a quick fun true adventure of good triumphing over the evil that is prevalent in this world. Edmund Burke once said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," Snow Treasure is proof that the opposite is true as well, the only thing necessary for the destruction of evil is for good men, women, children to do something.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
A Year Long Quest to Read: Book 4
I have now read four books this year and each one has been relatively heavy. I started off with Selling Water by the River thinking about the Church and Jesus and where the former gets in the way of the latter. I moved to a novel, American Gods, which dealt with belief in a wide array of ways. Third was It's God's Church, a book that dealt with the life and legacy of D.S. Warner, one of the founding voices of my particular stream of Christian belief. And then I searched for what my next book would be, I found one on my wife's bookcase that fit a certain criteria and thought that it would be a relatively fun read that I could just react to without much deep thinking. HAHA! That one didn't turn out the way I planned.
For my fourth entry [of 26] I choose to knock off #19 A book you were supposed to read in school, but didn't. Little known fact, I have always loved to read, unless I had to, and then I hated it. The truth if the matter is that y education would have been a much deeper one if I would have read all of the books that I was assigned, unfortunately that was not the case. For this particular book I reached back into undergrad, to an American History class taught by Dr. Brian Dirck. My fourth book was Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz.
Confederates in the Attic, is part travelogue, part history, and part sociological examination, mixed with a little humor, a little nostalgia, and a lot of racial issues.
[as always if you are merely interested in my barebones comment on the book, scroll down]
I finished the final 3 chapters late last night and waited until now to write this post, in truth I could have waited longer for what is found in this book will affect me for years to come. This year will be the 160th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and 50 years from Selma, and yet what Mr. Horwitz uncovered 17+ years ago rings as true today as it did then, whichever then you would like to point to.
As a student of history I would not argue that the Civil War was fought because of the institution of slavery anymore than I would that WWII was fought because of the treatment of Jews under the Nazis, and I write that with a large amount of sadness on both fronts. The Civil War was about a clash of economies, a clash of ideologies, a clash of temperaments and the end of slavery was at least as much about the needs of the North as it was about the morality of the issue. Abraham Lincoln himself stated that if the Union could be saved by freeing no slaves he would do that, if it meant freeing every slave, he would do that. Even the Emancipation Proclamation, which we hold in such high esteem, stated only that the slaves in the states that were in rebellion were to be free, not in the border states where slavery was still legal. It wasn't until over two years later when the 13th Amendment was ratified that slavery was finally declared illegal throughout the nation.
As a half caucasian half hispanic man I wish I could say that we have come all the way in the past 160, 50 or even 17 years, but we have not. The events of the past year alone tells us the truth on that matter. Are we better off than we were back then? That depends on how you define the term 'we' in that sentence. As Mr. Horwitz finds in his book there are still a number of Americans that would more than likely answer, no, and not all of those people would be white. We have gone from slavery to Jim Crow to legal segregation to equality to volunteered segregation, which makes me wonder if we ever actually reached equality in the first place.
[I realize that while I am a good little way into this post I have mainly not talked about the nuts and bolts of Confederates in the Attic but rather talked about my thoughts based on what I read. This leads me to believe that this is less a book review and more a review of how the book worked on me, but let me try to at least give you a little bit about the book as well.]
At base Confederates in the Attic is about Mr. Horwitz's travels in 9 Southern/Border states and how the people who live there view the Civil War. He encounters men who live to reenact the battles as realistically as possible, women who carry the memory of near forgotten ancestors, bigots, racists, heroes, and everyday people whose lives have encountered the remnants of the war. He talks with the last Confederate widow, whose husband was in reality a deserter. He interacts with a community reeling from a murder. He finds out the importance that Gone With the Wind has for the Japanese. Along the way there are many humorous moments, and moments that make your heart weep.
It has now been 24 hours since I finished the book and I am still struggling with certain aspects, which speaks to subtitle of the book, Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. 160 years later we are still fighting the war to some degree, but instead of muskets and cannon we use mainly our words, until the undercurrent of anger overflows into the daylight at the next loss of life, be it black or white or brown or red or blue or... This country still has issues with race and sex and creed, we still have a long way to go. MLK Jr.'s dream is still just a dream for a lot of people, and we must continue to break down the walls that exist, especially the ones of our own design.
At base how I feel about this book:
Confederates at times made me laugh, at times made me cringe, and usually made me stop and think about what I was reading, both the good and the bad. Mr. Horwitz knows how to paint a scene and how to paint a character, which is sometimes harder to do when the characters are real living breathing people. At base this was a good read, one that I wouldn't have truly digested as the person I was when I was a college student. It widened my view of the human condition in America, with its historical viewpoint and its look at current [though it was written in 1998] views on race.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
p.s. Book 5 is almost halfway finished already, so that post should be coming in the next couple days. And yes, 5 is a lot lighter.
For my fourth entry [of 26] I choose to knock off #19 A book you were supposed to read in school, but didn't. Little known fact, I have always loved to read, unless I had to, and then I hated it. The truth if the matter is that y education would have been a much deeper one if I would have read all of the books that I was assigned, unfortunately that was not the case. For this particular book I reached back into undergrad, to an American History class taught by Dr. Brian Dirck. My fourth book was Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz.
Confederates in the Attic, is part travelogue, part history, and part sociological examination, mixed with a little humor, a little nostalgia, and a lot of racial issues.
[as always if you are merely interested in my barebones comment on the book, scroll down]
I finished the final 3 chapters late last night and waited until now to write this post, in truth I could have waited longer for what is found in this book will affect me for years to come. This year will be the 160th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and 50 years from Selma, and yet what Mr. Horwitz uncovered 17+ years ago rings as true today as it did then, whichever then you would like to point to.
As a student of history I would not argue that the Civil War was fought because of the institution of slavery anymore than I would that WWII was fought because of the treatment of Jews under the Nazis, and I write that with a large amount of sadness on both fronts. The Civil War was about a clash of economies, a clash of ideologies, a clash of temperaments and the end of slavery was at least as much about the needs of the North as it was about the morality of the issue. Abraham Lincoln himself stated that if the Union could be saved by freeing no slaves he would do that, if it meant freeing every slave, he would do that. Even the Emancipation Proclamation, which we hold in such high esteem, stated only that the slaves in the states that were in rebellion were to be free, not in the border states where slavery was still legal. It wasn't until over two years later when the 13th Amendment was ratified that slavery was finally declared illegal throughout the nation.
As a half caucasian half hispanic man I wish I could say that we have come all the way in the past 160, 50 or even 17 years, but we have not. The events of the past year alone tells us the truth on that matter. Are we better off than we were back then? That depends on how you define the term 'we' in that sentence. As Mr. Horwitz finds in his book there are still a number of Americans that would more than likely answer, no, and not all of those people would be white. We have gone from slavery to Jim Crow to legal segregation to equality to volunteered segregation, which makes me wonder if we ever actually reached equality in the first place.
[I realize that while I am a good little way into this post I have mainly not talked about the nuts and bolts of Confederates in the Attic but rather talked about my thoughts based on what I read. This leads me to believe that this is less a book review and more a review of how the book worked on me, but let me try to at least give you a little bit about the book as well.]
At base Confederates in the Attic is about Mr. Horwitz's travels in 9 Southern/Border states and how the people who live there view the Civil War. He encounters men who live to reenact the battles as realistically as possible, women who carry the memory of near forgotten ancestors, bigots, racists, heroes, and everyday people whose lives have encountered the remnants of the war. He talks with the last Confederate widow, whose husband was in reality a deserter. He interacts with a community reeling from a murder. He finds out the importance that Gone With the Wind has for the Japanese. Along the way there are many humorous moments, and moments that make your heart weep.
It has now been 24 hours since I finished the book and I am still struggling with certain aspects, which speaks to subtitle of the book, Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. 160 years later we are still fighting the war to some degree, but instead of muskets and cannon we use mainly our words, until the undercurrent of anger overflows into the daylight at the next loss of life, be it black or white or brown or red or blue or... This country still has issues with race and sex and creed, we still have a long way to go. MLK Jr.'s dream is still just a dream for a lot of people, and we must continue to break down the walls that exist, especially the ones of our own design.
At base how I feel about this book:
Confederates at times made me laugh, at times made me cringe, and usually made me stop and think about what I was reading, both the good and the bad. Mr. Horwitz knows how to paint a scene and how to paint a character, which is sometimes harder to do when the characters are real living breathing people. At base this was a good read, one that I wouldn't have truly digested as the person I was when I was a college student. It widened my view of the human condition in America, with its historical viewpoint and its look at current [though it was written in 1998] views on race.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
p.s. Book 5 is almost halfway finished already, so that post should be coming in the next couple days. And yes, 5 is a lot lighter.
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