What I'm Reading...

This month has been yet another slow reading month.  There have been busy distractions but I think a need for new glasses may be the root of the problem. 

DMP and I have also been making full use of our NetFlix Subscription which means 2 movies of week, which means 2 fewer evenings for reading.  Movies:  Paint Your Wagon, Chronicles of Narnia:  Prince Caspian, The High and the Mighty, High Noon, The Sun Also Rises, Rio Bravo, The Philadelphia Story, Master & Commander.

I have done a couple of "quick and dirty" medical literature reviews:

• macular degeneration for a private client
• Vitamin D
• is there an assoication between urinary tract problems/sugery and myasthenia gravis?

I've skimmed, clipped, filed, and recycled a 2 1/2 foot stack of periodicals.

I've begun transcribing my recipes.

I've been entering books into the church library catalog.

A couple of ideas have grabbed my attention in my lectionary reading and I'm starting to explore these biblical ideas, mostly in Hebrew Scripture:

• staff, the meaning of Aaron's staff in Numbers and it's implications in other passages
• robe, Elijah/Elisha is the source of my current curiosity but it is a recurrent motif

What I'm reading (I include picture links to Amazon where you can browse the book):

Brueggemann, Walter: The Prophetic Imagination. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.  There is hardly a page on which I didn't highlight something.  An extraordinary book!  "The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings."  p. 56  There is commentary on Psalm 137 p. 62.  "Speech about hope cannt be explanatory and scientifically argumentative; rather it must be lyrical..."  p. 65 "I believe that, rightly embraced, no more subversive or phrophetic idiom can be uttered than the practice of doxology, which sets before us the reality of God, of God right at the center of a scene from which we presumed he had fled." p. 66  "...exile is first of all where our speech has been silenced and God's speech has been banished." p. 69  "Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism." p. 88  "That tradition of radical criticism is about the self-giving emptiness of Jesus...  The emptying is not related to self-negating meditation, for it is a thoroughly political image concerned with the willing surrender of power..." p. 98  "Without the cross, prophetic imagination will likely be as strident and as destructive as that which it criticizes.... Prophetic criticism aims to creat an alternative consciousness with its own rhetoric and field of perception....  This kind of prophetic criticism does not lightly offer alternatives, does not mouth reassurances, and does not provide redemptive social policy.  It knows that only those who mourn can be comforted, and so it first asks about how to mourn seriously and faithfully..." p. 99  "...all functions of the church can and should be prophetic voices that serve to criticize the dominant culture while energizing the faithful....  Thus, the essential question for the church is whether or not its prophetic voice has been co-opted into the culture of the day." p. 125

Peterson, Eugene H.:  A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.  Discipleship in an Instant Society.  2nd edition.  Downers Grover IL:  Intervarsity Press, 2000.  I'm fairly certain I at least scanned the first edition, 1980.  A devotional reading of the Psalms of Ascent, Psalms 120-134.

Fiction: 
Schweizer, Mark:  The Organist Wore Pumps, a liturgical mystery.  SJMP Books, 2010.  Funny!  "It's tradition... when society started, women were not thought of as 'literary'... That's true.  Well, if you don't count Emily Dickinson, Christina Rosetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dorothy Parker, or the Bronte sisters."  See previous posts for more detailed descriptions of these books (Organist is the 8th in the series) which DMP and I both find hilarious.  I include the Amazon links for those who may want to browse but we buy our mysteries at Murder by the Book in Houston. link: Murder by the Book
This is a real bookstore with staff who knows their books and get to know their readers.  I love the $1 shelf at the back where I find treasure.  Unlike DMP, I don't read mysteries, except for the couple of authors who make me laugh.


Poetry:
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett: Sonnets from the Portuguese and other love poems. Illustrated by Adolf Hallman. Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1954. My friend, Konny, gave me this book and I've greatly enjoyed reading these poems.   The illustrations are particularly lovely in this gift book edition.  Adolf Hallman, 1893-1968, is a Swedish illustrator; his drawings for this book have the sparse look and muted colors of much Scandinavian art.  I usually look for vintage books like this one at estate sales and used book stores. When I must have it now I use  IOBA   or biblio.com  or abebooks.com or alibris.com   or, yes, Amazon.  When a book is in the public domain (as most books first published prior to 1923 are), it's a good time to read it digitally and this is my favorite starting point:  onlinebooks at U Penn and read EBB now at the poetry foundation.  "We walked beside the sea, After a day which perished silently, Of its own glory..."  "I thank all who have loved me in their hearts, With thanks and love from mine.  Deep thanks to all...  Love that endures, from Life that disappears."