on reading

This month I read seventeen books, and it was an eclectic mix from a hodgepodge of genres. The biggest achievement was finishing the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson; these books are long, and though I enjoyed Red Mars in high school, it was just too damned daunting to plow through the trilogy. Fifteen years later, I enjoyed them all immensely. I also read (or, rather, reread, since I read it first in my high school days) Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I hadn't seen Stanley Kubrick's dramatization of the latter novel, so I watched it one weekend at work. I told Ashley, "You would absolutely hate it. The first twenty minutes is nothing but a bunch of apes learning how to kill each other." 

Branching away from science fiction, I then plunged into science nonfiction with a textbook entitled An Atlas of Life on Earth and four encyclopedias on dinosaurs. The first three encyclopedias centered on a specific period of the Mesozoic (Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous--you know the drill), and the fourth chronicled the rise of the avian dinosaurs. I also read Michael Benton's The History of Life and Dougal Dixon's Surviving the Jurassic, which serves as a 'field guide' to those wishing to live the pioneering life in the Jurassic Period. A peculiar read, indeed.

As August wound to a close, I picked up one of my favorite book series from my Junior High days: the Harry Potter novels. I read the first three (The Sorcerer's Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, and The Prisoner of Azkaban) and then turned my attention to some western novels. Truth to be told, I'd never read a western before, and I was itching to try them out. My first two choices were superb: Louis L'Amour's The Iron Marshal and Loren D. Estleman's The Master Executioner. 

This past month I also finished J.C. Ryle's Holiness. I try to read a number of heavy-hitting Christian books a year; while I generally blow through histories and fiction, these spiritual books are ones I like to savor. It's been said some books are like water, deep and refreshing and you just want to drink them down as fast as you can; but others are like fine wines, which ought to be sipped and enjoyed with patience and peace. Ryle's Holiness was one of these books. Another religious book, the short-and-sweet No More Christian Nice Guy by Paul Coughlin, tackled the epidemic of 'niceness' within the western church. I close this post with one of my favorite quotes:

"To follow Christ through this glorious but ruined world, in our current glorious but ruined state of being, is to do more than do no harm. We are to be agents of love, light, and truth. This is an innately offensive, creative, proactive orientation toward life. It is kingly and police-officer like--the kind of orientation that creates peacemakers who will be called children of God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, 'We are not to simply bondage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.'"