Summer Reading

Vacation and our big software release at work left me with little time for reading this summer, but I did manage to finish a few books. Here's what I read:

The Shack--I read this one because someone at church was doing a book discussion on it, and I was hoping to go. (Then reality hit me over the head. Attend book group? The day I arrived home after flying back from Oregon on the red-eye with the four kids and without Michael?) Anyway. The book is horribly written, and the theology struck me as neither profound nor shocking. Not worth your time unless you are seeking great examples of info-dumping. Then read the first chapter or so.

Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog--Now this book, I highly recommend. Or would, if there were anyone left in American who hadn't already read it. I laughed out loud. Many times. Of course, I've actually lived with a psychotic Labrador retriever. It might not be quite as funny if you've only known normal dogs. (And yes, I cried at the end. Hard.)

Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith--This is an interesting look at one woman's journey as an Episcopal priest, and what led her to quit her position in a congregation to become a college professor. It makes me want to hug my minister and ask her if she is taking enough time for herself. This book also marked the return of my quotation book, which fell by the wayside for a while.

"I will keep the Bible, which remains the Word of God for me, but always the word as heard by generations of human beings as flawed as I. As beautifully as these witnesses wrote, their divine inspiration can never be separated from their ardent desires; their genuine wish to serve God cannot be divorced from their self-interest. That God should use such blemished creatures to communicate God's reality so well makes the Bible its own kind of miracle, but I hope never to put the book ahead of the people whom the book calls me to love and serve.
"I will keep the Bible as a field guide, which was never intended to be a substitute for the field. With the expert notes kept by those who have gone before me, I will keep hunting the Divine Presence in the world, helped as much by the notes they wrote in the margins while they were waiting for God to appears as by their astonished descriptions of what they saw when God did. I know that nine times out of ten, the truth scripture tells us is the truth about the human search for God."

House of Mirth--I am not positive, but I think this might be my first Edith Wharton novel. The writing is brilliant, as you might expect. Unfortunately, it gets more and more depressing to read, as you also might expect. The title (not the original) comes from Ecclesiastes: "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." Part of me wants to re-read Anna Karenina, because I think it would be interesting to compare Lily and Anna. But I'm really not eager to live in Anna's world again. I did like this quote from Selden: Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions and the mean ones truths?