What I'm Reading...

The list for this month is much shorter than usual.
As I have noticed before when I'm writing I read less.

I've been thinking about what I learned at BWWA 2010 and exploring websites related to Victorian literature.  I've been reading technical stuff on archives, libraries, and website design.  I've been exploring HASTAC - Humanities, Arts, Science Technology Advanced Collaboratory which I had not been aware of until I was interviewed (link on the sidebar) but this subject is fascinating to me.  link:  Bridget Draxler's current blog on the future of thinking. 

I've been catching up on periodicals and catalogs.  Shopping on-line for clothes;  they've quit making my trousers!  I hate to shop so it's a good thing that my view on fashion is:  "Fashion is for those who have no sense of personal style."

Probably spending too much time on Facebook but I'm enjoying reconnecting with my cousins, classmates, and kids I know & loved from my Sunday School classes.  

Fiction:

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn:  Mary Barton. 1848. Kindle. Project Gutenberg.   This book is essentially a love story with characters about whom it is easy to care.  That empathy is the snare to engage the reader in a discussion of capitalism and the conflict between mill owners and workers, in an investigation of power, money, and faith.
Bedside book:

Brueggemann, Walter:  The Prophetic Imagination.  2nd edition.  Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2001.   Brueggemann is never boring but his texts are incredilbly rich;  I expect to linger over this reading.   The first edition (1978) is the "first publication in which" Brueggemann says he "more or less found my own voice as a teacher in the church."  I am an admirer of Brueggemann and my mature views of scripture have been significantly shaped by his writings.  In this early book I recognize the roots of some of the later works--particularly Message of the Psalms.  Awed to Heaven, Rooted to Earth, the prayers of Walter Brueggman lives on my bedside shelf so that he prays for me when I cannot pray for myself.  In February 2005, Bobbie and I attended his lecture:  Psalms:  the good, the hard, the surprising.  Some quotes from my notes:  "The Psalms invite  us to push the edges of our emotional alertness to the reality around us."  "...faith requires candid entry into suffering..."  "good authoritative speech... generates a new world... why our speech must be imaginative and not cliched."  "Breath is a gift; it is not a possession.  Breath is the property of the life-giving God."  "There is nothing in your life that you cannot bring to the presence (orientation) to the absence (disorientation) of God."  "Biblical faith traffics not in certitude but in relationship."   "Church... too much an echo of the culture...  need to recover our idenitity...  as  ...the place where the truth is told and things are called by their right names..." " God responds to authentic trouble..."  the purpose of  worship is "to re-preform creation... people come to church overwhelmed by chaos... liturgy transforms chaos into creation."  "...the promise of new orientation is not a quiet deal between me and Jesus.  It is a BIG cosmic event in which I may participate."
link: some of Brueggemann's texts available on-line