Bookwi.se

Summary: A book that is hard to recommend, because it needs a lot of caveating. The right person will find it helpful, most will not.

I have a ambivalent attitude toward reading the mystics. I value mystical thinking and practice, but I tend to find reading them an exercise in frustration. Mystics are often vague and contradictory. They often use language in unusual ways. But there is often still real help there.

Part of my ongoing reading about discernment is about how we apply what we learn even when there is not definitive directions. I was listening to a talk by Sean Rowe, the new presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and he said (my paraphrase) that we like to talk about discernment, and discernment is good, but the point of discernment is to eventually chose a path and follow it. That is a helpful point and one that I think DeMello needs to hear (or say).

What DeMello is doing here is not saying, “give up and stay where you are,” but “acknowledge where you are and pay attention.” His rough summary is that we don’t change by trying to force ourselves to do hard things, but by paying attention and allowing the Holy Spirit to bring awareness to us.

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Summary: A black history textbook wrapped up in a comedic wrapper. 

I am all about a good Black history book. And I also really appriciate history told by comedians because they are trying to get around the way that many people are resistant to dry dates and events presentations of history.

Black AF History is not a dry presentation. The humor mostly works to get to the heart of the presentation. I think some of the voice of his uncle sections fall a bit flat. But the vast majority works well.

I think one of the by products of the presenation is that this is not a universal Black presentation, but a particular black presentation. That should be obvious becuase there is no universal Black experience that is true of all Black peole at all times. Harriot grew up with a rural southern Black cultural experience. That experience will be differnet from an northern urban Black experience and different from a midwestern farmbelt experience and different from California suburban experience. And all of these are still stereotypical in some way which makes them also incomplete.

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Summary: Short look at both the history of WEB Dubois 1900 World Fair project and how it predated much of the graphical data representation that became common later in the 20th century. 

This is not a long book. There are really only a handful of essays. Those essays give context to the 1900 Paris World Exposition, WEB DuBois and his experience up until this point, and the data that was being presented. A final section discusses how innovative the presentation of the data was and how it predated later similar graphical data presentations.

I have known about this book since it came out but just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. I have an undergrad degree in sociology and part of an early job was using GIS demographics to help churches and church plants with planning. So I have a fair amount of background to know how important this event was in regard to data presentation.

But this matters in part because of what WEB DuBois and the others who participated were trying to do. 1900 was 35 years after the end of slavery. Contextually, 35 yeas ago was 1990, and the first Iraq War hadn’t happened yet. George HW Bush was president and the http protocol was being developed but the first real web browser would not be released widely until 1994. In other words, slavery was recent. It wasn’t just that slavery was recent but that there was widespread perception that Black Americans (and all from African decent) were “less than” those from European decent. The presentation, and WEB DuBois himself, were proof of the falsity of that belief.

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Summary: An orphan who aged out of foster care breaks his (chosen, not biological) brother out of an abusive foster care family, and that starts his discovery of his magical roots, a family he didn’t know he had, and a magical HBCU. 

I have been trying to intentionally read more fiction this year. That has mostly been young adult fiction because it is what has drawn me in so far.

Blood At the Root was published last year and I have seen it on the shelves of a few friends on Goodreads or seen social media posts about it. As I try to generally do, I avoided reading anything about it other than seeing that people I trusted recommended it.

Malik is 17 and petitioned to be released from the foster care system. His mother died when he was seven and people around him, blamed him for her death. He doesn’t really understand what happened. But he knows it has to do with his magic. Since the day of her death, he has magic. But it is mostly uncontrolled and comes out when he is angry or emotional. So he tries to repress his emotions to stay in control. (He is not always in control.)

The book opens with Malik stealing a car so that he can break his (chosen, not biological) 12 year old foster brother out of an abusive foster home. They have grown up in a small predominately Black Alabama town and they dream of going to California to get away from everything. I won’t give away too much more than spoilers from opening chapters, but in the midst of running away, they run into trouble and that leads them to find Malik’s grandmother who he didn’t know he had. She and all those around her also have magic and Malik finds an underground world of magic and Black community which he is not sure he can trust. He has been on his own for 10 years without anyone watching out for him. And it is hard to trust that there could be family that is trustworthy if they had not come for him earlier.

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Summary: An assessment of Bonhoeffer as a pacifist and how that pacifism remained unchanged throughout the 1940s, in opposition to how Bonhoeffer’s story is often presented. 

Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis is intentionally trying to reframe the story of Bonhoeffer. The common story is that Bonhoeffer after his time studying in NYC in 1930-31 came to see the Sermon on the Mount as the central teaching of Christianity. Bonhoeffer focused his teaching in the underground seminary on the Sermon on the Mount and that is reflected in his book Discipleship. But starting at some point in the late 1930s or early 1940s, there was a shift in Bonhoeffer and he came to see that his peace ethic was no longer a viable means of operating. This traditional version of Bonhoeffer shifts into a couple of variations, either Bonhoeffer kept his peace ethnic but violated his own teaching and particpated in the assassination attempt anyway, or he moved toward a type of Nebuhrian realism that justified his participation in the assassination attempt.

Mark Nation says that is all wrong. He directly challenges Bethge’s presenation of Bonhoeffer as changing and instead suggests that Bonhoeffer remained fully and conscously a pacifist until the end. The book is essentially a collection of six main essays about different aspects of why Nation thinks this reframing best makes sense of the evidence that we have and then four appendix essays.

The first essay is summarized by this quote: “Bonhoeffer, let it be said over and over, was not arrested for participating in any assassination attempts. He was arrested for helping to save the lives of fourteen Jews and was imprisoned for subverting the military’s power to conscript him into service.” Part of this discussion is about how Nation doesn’t think there is much, if any, evidence that Bonhoeffer did anything other that communicate with the ecumentical church that there was a movement in Germany trying to remove Hitler from power.

The second essay is about the importance of the “Jewish question”. It is nearly 40 pages and both points out how Bonheffer saw the the problem of overt antisemitism, but how Bonhoeffer was still supersessionist in his treatment of the question and how Bonhoeffer’s method was primarily to talk about the ability of Jewish Christians to be part of the church. Nation suggests that this was at least in part a strategy to get the church to recognize that if Jewish people are unable to be recognized within the church then the very concept of evangelism and the universality of the church was at stake. Germany was only about 1% Jewish and of those about 1 in 6 ethnically Jewish people were Christians.

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Summary: Twelve year old Eva has grown up in an underground shelter, all alone with just a robot who has cared for her from birth. When the shelter is breached, Eva confronts a world unlike anything she could have imagined.

Young adult fiction is a comfort food of books, but I have not kept my finger on new books coming out, so I am frequently finding books that are new to me, but not new books. I stumbled on Wondla because it is a cartoon series on Apple TV+. I hadn’t seen anything about it before I stumbled one it, but I was looking for something that that I could watch with my kids and my teenage nieces. My kids are starting to get old enough to be able to watch things that have some tension in them.

We binged six of the seven episodes in a weekend and then watched the last a few days later. Season one of the TV series is the first book of the trilogy. And presumably the second season (which is coming but doesn’t have a release date) will be the second book. In print, each of the books is roughly 450 pages. I read all three in less than 2 weeks. The first I read as an ebook from Kindle Unlimited, the next two I was able to check out from our local library in print. The Kindle editions were fine, but the print has great art in color that does not come out as well in a black and white kindle file.

A rough rule of thumb is that the intended audience of a book is the same approximate age as the main protagonist. In this case, Eva is 12 and she turns 13 in the context of the story. The cartoon has moved Eva to 16 years old and that shifts the cartoon story just a bit. In many ways, I think 12-13 is the better target. While Eva is very mature for her age, shifting her to 16 changes the story a bit for the 2nd and 3rd books. I haven’t seen the 2nd and 3rd seasons of the show, but my guess is that there will be a bit of a romance in them, which doesn’t make sense for a 12 year old. But more importantly the younger age makes more sense of Rovender Kitt (Rovee), the wise Alien who finds Eva and teaches her about the forest and becomes a father figure to her. It is not that older teens do not also need father figures, but I think the connection and the dependence works better with the younger age.

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Summary: A widower inherits a British estate, but he may lose it before he is even unpacked. 

I am trying to read more fiction. This is a goal that I have almost every year. I really am conviced that fiction is important, but I have a tendancy to gravitate toward “important” books. I saw that the Book of Hours was on sale and I picked it up. I read his book The Maestro when I was in high school and I enjoyed it. It was a book about a musician who was a real artist and as he came to faith he saw he could incorporate his faith and art. I real a lot of Christian novels as a teen and I have read very few past my teen years because so few felt worthwhile.

As I read The Book of Hours I couldn’t help but think about it as a novel version of a Hallmark movie. I enjoy a Hallmark movie very now and then, but I don’t really confused it for great art. It is fluff and fluff every now and then if fine. As much as can enjoy some fluff here and there, I do think that Karen Swallow Prior’s critique of Christians as overly attached to Victorian values, and mistake those Victorian values for Christian ones fits here. This is a sentimental novel that deserves the critique that Prior has for senatamental novels. But it also fits all of the standard Hallmark tropes. A widower from out of town inherits an estate. He is penniless and finds the estate is going to soon be sold for back taxes. He meets the town’s young (single) doctor who immediately hates him for not caring about the property and allowing it to fall into disrepair. There is a greedy developer to provide some tension.

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