Operation Read Those Books, Days 21-22

(You can read more about Operation Read Those Books here.)

For Day 21, I finished reading The God of the Mundane, by Matthew B. Redmond (final review coming soon).

For Day 22, I finished reading The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. Again. (It's still good.)

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Operation Read Those Books, Day 20

(You can read more about Operation Read Those Books here.)

What did I read? Chapters 7-13 of Matthew Redmond's The God of the Mundane.  Yep! Ate up quite a few chapters!

What stood out? Well, when I read chapter 7, I thought, "I'm going to start tomorrow's blog by saying that chapter 7 is the real jewel of the book." But then I read chapter 9, and I knew I couldn't let chapter 7 hog the limelight, because chapter 9 was amazing.

So instead of going chapter by chapter - because there's so much good stuff! - I'm just going to excerpt a few of my favorite quotations.

Chapter 7 talked about St. Paul's command to the Thessalonians that they should "aspire to live quietly". I liked this observation:

This living quietly is not only ignored in the Church, it is rarely if ever seen as faithfulness. Not in this culture where the quiet is anathema. We Christians need to reckon with the fact that our tendency to not see a quiet/mundane life as legitimately spiritual comes from pride, a pride betrayed when we cannot be quiet about what we have done, and suffered, and seen. Ever.

Also, this:

Living quietly is a life so happy with the attention of God, that the attention of the world is not needed, and rarely enjoyed.

And:

It is grounded in the assurance of the notice of the Creator. 

Then there's chapter 9, which is a sort of extended analysis of It's A Wonderful Life. Redmond points out that everyone loves that movie, but no one actually wants to be George Bailey, toiling in obscurity, never living out his dreams. George Bailey had no idea of the actual worth of his life and actions. Redmond says:

Christians could learn a lot here. We are guilty of not knowing what all we have done. But actually, that is not where the real guilt lies, even if it is where we feel it. The actual guilt lies in our thinking because we do not know all that we have done, we must have done nothing. We assume some kind of godlike posture as if we know the ends and implications of all our actions, and then we make judgments based on them. Foolish, isn't it - this idea we have no significance because we have not seen it? We wallow in some kind of faux humility, never realizing that it is really ego that thinks, "If I cannot see it, it must not be here."

And I think I'll stop there, because I don't want to end up excerpting the whole book! But it reminded me of Christ's admonition to, "watch, therefore," because we don't know at what day or hour an accounting will be demanded of us. If we are always doing our regular duty, we'll always be ready to say "yes" when some more extraordinary duty is demanded of us. Redmond points out that Scripture is full of people who were called to something extraordinary, but that their calls found them while they were going about their ordinary duties: tending sheep, trying to have children, bringing lunch along with them when they went to hear a preacher, etc.  A good reminder.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell



(This book was an Advance Review Copies (ARCs) sent by the publisher — common practice in the industry. No payment was accepted in exchange for a review or mention, and the reviewer was in no way obligated to review the book favorably.)

Operation Read Those Books, Days 18 & 19

(You can read more about Operation Read Those Books here.)

Again, I'm not behind on my reading, just on my blogging! Here's the report from Days 18 & 19:

What did I read? Chapters 3-6 of Matthew Redmond's The God of the Mundane.

What stood out to me? In these chapters, Redmond begins to argue that we all "push back against the Fall" by doing our given work. Plumbers by fixing pipes, doctors by treating the sick, etc.

I like this idea. With all the death and destruction and sin in the world, making things right and neat and whole again is a step in the fight against evil. Good food, clean homes, fertile farmland . . . this is the stuff of life. And the product of faithful living.

My one quibble - and this isn't the author's fault - is that this might be a dangerous book for a Jonah. You know, for someone who is called to dangerous, radical ministry and who is inclined to run away. Redmond's very clear that there are people called to missions and such, but I think if you have that call and find that call hard, this isn't the book for you.

But I don't think he's writing to those people. For people like the rest of us, who are called to serve God in very ordinary circumstances? This book presents exactly the discussion we need to hear. I'm really enjoying it and, I think, profiting from it.

btw, I noticed my friend Michelle, over at Liturgical Times just reviewed The God of the Mundane, too. Check it out!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell



(This book was an Advance Review Copies (ARCs) sent by the publisher — common practice in the industry. No payment was accepted in exchange for a review or mention, and the reviewer was in no way obligated to review the book favorably.)

Operation Read Those Books: Day 17

(You can read more about Operation Read Those Books here.)

(Parenthetical note #2: This is actually yesterday's entry - I'm not behind on my reading, just my blogging!)

Yesterday I began reading The God of the Mundane, by Matthew B. Redmond. First off, I love the cover! Especially the tag:

A Breath-Taking Escape from the Fantastical!

Perfect!

And now that I've remarked on the wrapping, let's go on to the content.

What did I read? The intro and the first two chapters.

What struck me? The questions Redmond asks. Here's the heart of it:

Is there a God . . . for those who are not changing anything but diapers? Is there a God for those who simply love their spouse and pour out rarely-appreciated affection on their children day after day? Is there a God for the mom who spends what feels like God-forsaken days changing diapers and slicing up hot dogs? Is there a God for the men who hammer out a day's work in obscurity for the love of his wife and kids? Is there a God for just and kind employers? Generous homemakers? Day-laborers who would look at a missons trip to Romania like it was an unimaginable vacation?

It's a really good set of questions. It's also, as the author points out, the kind of questions most of us ask at some point. What if we're not doing something spectacular for God? What if we're just . . . ordinary?

Redmond confesses to having been a preacher who preached the kind of sermons that made people feel guilty for not going on the mission field, for not doing something extraordinary and crazy and radical for Christ. And, he observes now:

It never felt right but it preached well.

That was the line that struck me the most. Because I know exactly what he means. Those calls sound exactly right, but they never feel right.

Reading that made me wonder: why? I think it's because the message is half-right: we are called to live completely committed lives, radically devoted to the cause of Christ, but we are also all called to serve different roles within the church.

I think the kind of sermon Redmond is talking about misses the second part. If everyone was a missionary, where would the support be? Or, even more close to home, if everyone was a preacher, where would the vestry be? (And the nursery workers, and the altar guild, and the choir members, etc.?)

I do think we are all supposed to say, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord: let it be to me according to your word." But that word is going to be different for each of us.

Takeaway? I really appreciated the opportunity to think about the question of where God is to be found in our day-to-day lives. It reminded me a bit both of The Practice of the Presence of God, and Milton's sonnet, "On His Blindness" (i.e., "They also serve who only stand and wait").

I'm interested to see what conclusions he reaches further on in the book. And I think there might be a hint in his words near the end of the second chapter:

We think the small, mundane, ordinary things we do each and every day are worth nothing before God because they are worth nothing before the gods of this world.

A hint that we might be wrong? I think so.

Peace of Christ,
Jessica Snell




(The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued new rules that went into effect on December 1, 2009. These rules state that product reviewers on blogs must disclose whether they received review products for free or received monetary payment for such reviews.

This book was an Advance Review Copies (ARCs) sent by the publisher — common practice in the industry. No payment was accepted in exchange for a review or mention, and the reviewer was in no way obligated to review the book favorably.)

Operation Read Those Books: Days 12-15

(You can read more about the Operation Read Those Books project here.)

I meant to write a catch-up post yesterday, but ended up just listening to the news out of Connecticut and crying. Lord have mercy on those poor families.

So . . . today I caught up and finally finished reading about Pytheas. Now my mind is spinning with images of amber and Iceland and the library at Alexandria.

What did I read? Chapters 5-8, which covered:
-Pytheas' exploration - by boat and on foot - of Britain
-the likelihood that Pytheas made it to Iceland
-the amber trade
-what happened to Pytheas' manuscripts after he wrote them

Verdict?
I enjoyed this book. It got a little tedious at times only because I didn't share the author's interest in mathematics and astronomy, but my shortcomings are hardly his fault. My only other criticism is that this book could have been vastly improved by more and better maps. The illustrator/cartographer produced really sloppy, impressionistic maps rather than accurate, well-lettered ones, and that made it harder than it should have been to follow the author's detailed descriptions.


I was struck by how following just one subject - in this case, Pytheas - in detail can illuminate a score of other topics. This book covered geography, burial customs, sailing ships, map-making, astronomy, archeology, the nature of scholarship both in modern and ancient times, and many other subjects, all because the author was trying to illuminate the life of one man.


The project
In other news, I'm really enjoying this Operation Read Those Books project. I'm going to have to continue it on past December, especially as I keep adding new books to my currently-reading shelf. But regularly reading non-fiction feels like it does good stuff to my brain, and I want to keep up the habit. 


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Operation Read Those Books: Day 11

(You can read about Operation Read Those Books here.)

What Did I Read Today? Chapter 4 of Pytheas the Greek: "The Lure of Tin".

Tell us something interesting about it: Apparently the tin near Britain formed when a massive batholith cooled and became granite, and the cooling process altered the sedimentary rocks around it, producing tin, wolfram, copper, lead, and zinc, in ever-widening circles around it.

See? I'm learning things I never knew.

That's pretty cool, actually, the idea of a giant molten hunk of rock, hundreds of kilometers long, forcing its way up through the earth and sending up spikes of even more molten rock, then cooling off gradually, and the heat and material radiating off it creating these layers and layers of metals that man would then mine for centuries. Such a gigantic, important, completely unobservable process. It's amazing to think about.

But what did the author seem to find interesting? Okay, the charming thing about Cunliffe is how much he seems to love imagining his hero Pytheas observing, in real-time, all the sites he himself has researched through painstaking archaeological methods. He's scholar enough to always remind himself, "I can't be sure he was actually here, that he actually saw this," but I love how enchanted he is by the idea. It gives me a real feeling for why people go in to the field of archeology: they've got great imaginations and they're people-fascinated.

Or at least that's what I'm getting from his narration.


Tomorrow: Pytheas reaches the mysterious realm of Britain! I can't wait.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Operation Read Those Books: Day 10

(You can read about Operation Read Those Books here.)

Today I dug back into the tale of The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, by Barry Cunliffe, about a Greek explorer who managed to make it all the way to Britain around the year 325 B.C.

I picked this up as research for a book set in ancient Greece, and put it down once I actually started writing said book.

But it's a well-researched look into an interesting time: a time when you might be able to buy exotic goods in your city market - but also a time when no one in your city might have ever been to the lands those exotic goods came from - they might even not be quite sure where those exotic lands were. Merchant passed item on to merchant across trade routes hundreds of miles long, but no one merchant necessarily made the journey from one end of the trade route to the other.

But Pytheas . . . Pytheas decided to go as far as he could go, and maybe ended up getting as far north as Iceland, making discoveries all along the way.

Today, I read Chapter 3, "Escape from the Mediterranean". Apparently it was actually easier and faster to get to the Atlantic overland than through the straits.

That's it for today!

-Jessica Snell

Operation Read Those Books: Days 6-8 of 21

I missed my reading on Thursday and Friday, but made up for it today by reading to the end of "Raising Great Kids" by Cloud and Townsend - 6 chapters!

So, that's 2 books down, 7 to go!

I liked the whole book, but chapter 9, "Connecting to God: Worship and Spiritual Life", was worth the price of the whole book. Wow. This whole book is clear and practical and brilliant (and being clear and practical are about the surest signs of brilliance I know), and I appreciated it nowhere more than in this chapter. Here are a few of my favorite sections:

As a parent, you may feel a tension . . . You have a deep desire to foster your child's spiritual life, but you wonder where to begin. This chapter resolves this tension by dealing with two aspects - being involved and having a structure in which to operate.

I read that and thought: showing up and having a plan? It's like liturgy! You can't make God show up, right? And you can't make your kids love God, right? (Most terrifying part of parenting ever.) But you can have a structure and you can show up. That . . . that's comforting.

And remembering that God loves them even more than you do. That's the biggest comfort of all. Anyway - more quotations:

Your task is to do the background work for your child's encounter with God. All relationships, including one with God, have a structure to them. Creating that structure is something you can do. In other words, you can create a context that fosters connectedness to God. If you wish to start a garden in your backyard, you need to prepare the soil, add fertilizer, water, and sunlight, and remove weeds and pests. You have maximized the optimal conditions for plant growth in your garden. In the same way, you want to create optimal conditions for your child to meet and love God.

I'm encouraged by the idea of thinking of my children's spiritual life this way.

And I really liked this short observation:

As one parent told me, "We are working on helping our son learn that God is a better parent than we are."

One of the things they emphasized was modeling your own faith in front of your kids. They wrote:

More than in any other character capacity, spiritual development is "caught" more than taught. Spiritual growth involves many conceptual understandings, so your child will internalize more of what you are with God and her than what you teach.

Your own alive, defined, active, and honest faith is critical as your child seeks to understand and attach to a vague, invisible God. Do not spare her the struggle of faith, however, to the extent that she can developmentally understand it. Let her see that a relationship with God, just as a relationship with anyone, takes time, has conflict, and requires work. 

I also liked how, at the end of the chapter, they pointed out that while you as a parent are trying to work yourself out of a job - i.e., end your child's dependency on you - your child's dependency on God is never going to end. Instead, they said:

You are . . . helping your child make a shift from immature dependency to mature dependency on God the Father.

Hear, hear.

Great book. I want to reread it every year or two, because it seems like the kid of book I"ll get something different out of each time, depending on what stage my kids are at when I read it. Very basic, very good. Fives stars!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

"Good Poems", collected by Garrison Keillor (Operation Read Those Books: Day 5 of 31)

Good Poems by Garrison Keillor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So, I started this book by reading the introduction. And as Keillor talked about poems that tell stories, I had trouble remembering why I disliked him. And then I read:

"And then there is T. S. Eliot, the great stuffed owl whose glassy eyes mesmerized the English profs of my day. Eliot was once a cultural icon, the American guy so smooth he passed for British . . . but you look at his work today and it seems rather bloodless . . . Eliot didn't get out of the house much . . ."

and I remembered, Oh yeah, that's why I dislike him. Talk about reverse snobbery! Eliot sucks because he's not earthy enough. Heaven forbid poetry talks about, well, heaven.

Yes, there are some amazing poems in here. Keillor's intro isn't the fault of any of the poets he collected here. But, sigh. What an intro.

And yet - it's not all bad. Keillor has a lot of really good points, too, of course he does! The man is brilliant. And frustrating in his prejudices. And brilliant . . . I could go back and forth forever. But enough of that. The volume as a whole is more worth reading than not, so pick it up if you're in the mood for poetry, and feeling patient enough to sift out the chaff.

View all my reviews

(And this counts as my Operation Read Those Books! entry for the day. And also counts as the first Currently Reading book off my Goodreads shelf for this project - yay!)

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Yarnalong: socks and Grace!

I have a lace scarf on one set of needles, and cabled kilt hose on another, but what I've found myself turning to during this busy December is the calming rhythm of a plain ol' set of vanilla socks, knit in a pretty yarn (KnitPicks Stroll Tonal in "Winetasting" - though it looks more like Lambic Framboise to me - yum!):

And I'm also spending December doing a reading project: attempting to actually finish the ten or so non-fiction books I'm "currently reading" (according to Goodreads). Right now, I'm on "Raising Great Kids: Parenting with Grace and Truth" by Cloud and Townsend, and really enjoying it.

This is turning out - so far - to be a good way of getting through all those books I sincerely meant to get through when I started them, but somehow forgot about. Anyone else have a pile of those sitting on their shelves, or is it just me? Good books, interesting books, just books without the narrative drive of fiction, and so books that are easier to put down.

Here's to picking them up again! :)

More yarn and literary goodness over at Small Things.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Operation Read Those Books!: Day 4 of 31

Well, yesterday's headache turned into today's mild flu, but I was feeling better enough by tonight to read another chapter of "Raising Great Kids: Parenting with Grace and Truth".

Today's chapter was titled "Developing Gifts and Talents: Competence", and it was all about teaching your children how to work, and helping them develop and grow the talents God's given them.

Pretty simple and straight-forward, but a good reminder: let your kids succeed. Require effort, encourage exploration, praise success, let them know they're loved regardless of accomplishments, but help them develop real skills and abilities and a good work ethic. I like it!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Operation Read Those Books! Day 3 of 31

Yes, I'm skipping Sundays. :)

Today I read from "Good Poems", which is such a mixed bag of an anthology, let me tell you.  No awesome excerpts because, frankly, I have a headache and need to stop looking at my computer screen and get myself off to bed. I'll try to post a bit of one of the poems tomorrow, though.

But I kept on with my project! getting those bookshelves clear!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Operation Read Those Books: Day 1 of 31

My Advent project this year is to shrink my currently-reading list. I plan to read a chapter a day from one of the books on my currently-reading shelf or, in the case of the poetry, five pages a day. Will this see them all read by the end of December? Probably not, but it'll make a decent dent in the pile.
(A fuller description of this blog challenge can be read here.)

What did I read? Chapter Six of "Raising Great Kids: Parenting with Grace and Truth" by Cloud and Townsend.
What was it about? As the title of the chapter states, it's about helping your kids as they're "Living in an Imperfect World".
Gives us a good quotation! Okay, here you go:

A better way than seeing ourselves as good is seeing ourselves as loved. A child who is loved as herself, both good and bad, does not need to see herself as positive or negative. She sees herself as loved, and the whole issue goes away. A loved self is stronger than a positive self; the child doesn't need to worry about losing her "good self." She doesn't need to hide or deny what she does. No matter how she performs, she will be loved.

So true, it made me want to cry.  Good book; I'm glad I'm reading it!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Operation Read Those Books: a December Project

There's something nice about starting the new year with a clean slate.

Now, for liturgical Christians, the New Year starts in about a week and a half, with the coming of the Advent season. And then, since liturgical Christians are ordinary citizens, too, we get a second New Year on January 1st.

So, I want to use the time in between my first New Year and my second to clean up a very important area of my life: my bookshelf.

Here's my Currently-Reading shelf on Goodreads.  See the problem? Yep: I am currently reading 11 books.

There are only two novels on there right now, and there's a reason for that: I read novels quickly. The narrative tension pulls me through, and I often finish them in a day or two. But non-fiction books don't have the same urgency-of-plot, and so I'll start one, put it down, and forget to pick it up again.

Yet, I still want to read them.

So, my Advent project this year is to shrink my currently-reading list. I plan to read a chapter a day from one of the books on my currently-reading shelf or, in the case of the poetry, five pages a day. Will this see them all read by the end of December? Probably not, but it'll make a decent indent in the pile.

And I'd love to have you join me. If you're interested, just leave a comment here - and on future Operation Read Those Books posts - linking to your blog. I'm hoping to post a note or a quotation from my day's reading each day of Advent, and I'd love to see what treasures you find, too.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell