recommended reading

I just finished reading The Poinsonwood Bible, which I want to take a moment and highly recommend. The novel is " a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on Afrcian soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the corse o thress decades in postcolonial Africa… " Barbara Kingsolver is an amazing writer and reading this novel at this point in my life was incredible because I could relate to a good deal of the experiences described in more than one way. There are so many quotes from the book that stood out to me, but I’ll just share one passage and leave the rest of the book to your own reading.

" Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Mathew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonesense to us now. All that oot washing, for example. Was it really for God’s glory, or just to keep the sand out of the house ?…Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass trhough the eye of the needle more easily than a rich man ? Or a coarse peice of yarn ? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean ? If it’s a camel, the rich man might as well not even try. But if it’s the yarn, he might well succeed with a lot of effort, you see ?… When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday, with out a lot of dublous middle managers. "

I just finished (almost all in one very lazy day) Nickel and Dimed, a journalists’ experience trying to get by in the poor working class in America, definitely worth reading. I wish so many of the people that I talk to here that think everyone in the US is rich and they would be too if they were able to get over there could read it also.

Just today I picked up (or got handed, actually) Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I’ve heard good things about the book and thought the change in genre might be good. I’ll hopefully get through it this weekend and start on Blink—content and evaluation TBA.