BitterSweetLife

As I struggle to reenter normal life after exam hysteria, several factors ease the transition: Summer weather, relaxed evenings, and luxurious reading, to name a few. No doubt each of these will be blogged about in due course, but it seems like a reading update is long overdue. The following titles (well, most of them) helped loosen me up for summer.

Some of these were read under academic coercion, several just because I felt like it and no amount of last-minute essaying or finals pressure was going to stop me, darn it. I've included "assigned" texts for my own gratification, just to savor the fact that I got the better of 'em. More flippant readers can feel free to skip those and note my "personal" reading only (helpfully asterisked). I saved probably the best title for last, so if you're going to read just one review, scroll down.


*This House of Sky – Ivan Doig*

Mr. Doig could be described in two words: stolid and perceptive. He is a poetic materialist, an imaginative phlegmatic. He impresses his own character deeply into what he writes, and his values emerge from under the printed words. In Sky's vast Montana panoramas, the people in his life appear as figureheads, each one a great entity, strong, rough-grained, durable. The keynotes of Doig’s life song—and it is poetic enough to consider a “song”—appear clearly: Independence, personal space, a knack for survival. A rough and ready brand of “making do” garners his respect and practice. Therefore, Sky has weight, it sits like a stone in a pocket, and holds a reader down. But in the end its earthiness defeats it.

For all its expansiveness, Sky is too small, and Doig’s world, replete with painstaking observation, overlooks the deep, transcendent thread that runs through sagebrush, sunrise, sheep and foothills. The glory of God is an alien concept to Doig; his magnificent capacity for straight evocative detail is ultimately shortsighted, self-contained. When he dismissively mentions “religion” (twice only, in the context of funerals), his trademark unflappability coalesces into smugness. Sky scrapes cloud, but fails to account for the infinite horizon.


A Survey of the Old Testament (2nd ed.) - Hill & Walton

You knew this was coming, right? I effectively finished the massive textbook as my second Old Testament Survey class wound to a close and I desperately sucked up material for the final. With my limited exposure to biblical survey material, I found H&W’s take to be succinct, conservative, and highly readable. Their footnotes, charts, and maps were helpful, and they successfully walked the line between paucity and verbosity. I was neither uninformed nor overwhelmed, but drew from the book often in my various exegesis assignments. I think, from my lowly state, this is what one’s supposed to call “a good introductory text.”


*The Eagle Has Landed – Jack Higgins*

After I heard Ravi Zacharias quote Higgins briefly in a talk, I noticed his best-seller going for $.01 on Amazon. After it sat on my shelf for a year, I read it so I could get rid of it. End of story, right? Just about. For a thriller, this novel read well, and I can see how it could have taken the nation by storm back in 1975. The characterization isn’t bad, but the book smacks of let-us-say-brave-words-and-die-ism. Too much black heroism, in my opinion. I guess existentialism was more in. Perhaps in closer proximity to WW2, this would have been fitting.

A few characters may prove memorable—such as Devlin, the “cold executioner” IRA man who is also the story’s most charming character, even though he’s a lout. Stock, true, but Higgins brought it off well. (The same cannot be said for the rest of his stock characters.) The blind courage of Steiner, the foremost “good Nazi,” is also not without impact. In fact, the book is full of blind courage, honorable men on the wrong side, and bravely-useless deaths. In a story like this, Higgins’ self-insertion at the beginning and end comes across as slightly egotistical.


Introduction to Biblical Interpretation – Klein, Blomberg & Hubbard

I powered my way through this 500-page textbook with the impetus of a letter grade nipping at my heels. Having polished the Intro off the afternoon it was due, I have to admit the experience wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Despite some redundancy in the O.T. genres section, Klein, Blomberg and Hubbard have created a first-class overview of the hermeneutical process from a soundly orthodox position. They refuse to sidestep nitty-gritty questions of application that more "philosophical" models overlook. For an "introduction" to hermeneutics proper, this book was thorough, and my feet are not just damp, but soaking.


*Shroud for a Nightingale – P.D. James*

Feeding a growing James addiction, I read this book during exam-cram breaks. Book number four in the Dalgliesh series provided additional insight into Adam’s principled nature. Dalgliesh also reveals a driven-ness and vulnerability not as visible in previous novels; we see him through the eyes of a sneering subservient and disgruntled suspects. Of course, I have yet to read a single book consecutively, so who knows what developments I may have missed—especially in books two and three. I continue to appreciate the authenticity of James’ work, even though I generally fail to do it full mental justice. This time around was no different, with finals bearing down. Maybe next time; and there will be a next time.


Whatever Happened to Worship? – A.W. Tozer

I was forced to read this book so I could write a paper on it, and with Tozer’s name on it, I wish I had enjoyed it a little more. Unfortunately, the volume suffers from posthumous compilation syndrome, and the collected sermons/essays lack Tozer’s characteristic depth and flow. There are still a number of valuable common themes (five of which I picked out dutifully in my essay)—such as man’s created purpose, artificial worship, worship as life’s fuel—but the book is too eclectic to be a masterpiece like The Pursuit of God.


*Orthodoxy – G.K. Chesterton*

After a period of anticipation spanning several years, I finally dipped into Chesterton proper. I’d read The Man Who Was Thursday in the past, but was still unprepared for Orthodoxy's ingenuity. If the mind is a think-tank, then some authors merely ruffle the surface. Chesterton thrashes up the depths. He’s an original thinker, mixing doses of hilarity with measures of sheer brilliance. He leaps from theme to theme and metaphor to metaphor with such speed and exuberance it’s sometimes hard to keep up.

Having done my best, however, I believe this book will be formative. Chesterton’s visions of God’s mirth, of the earth as salvaged from a wreck, of the imaginative soul, of the dead endings of mere systems of thought—and the high-spirited mode in which he expresses it all—are unique to him. The closest I come is Lewis, who readily admitted the influence of Chesterton in his own conversion. This is a book to be read, then read again, mined for insight, pencil in hand. Needless to say, a Book a' da Year bid is already pending.