Reading Freely

Books this Update

• Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality, John Shelby Spong
• Return of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov
• Spartacus, T.L. Mancour

Last week was a short but busy week for me, as I entered into finals week studying for exams, writing papers, and preparing to pack up a years’ worth of life into only a few boxes. Consequently, I only read one book from the library and finished off two others that I’ve read a little from all semester. Episcopalian bishop John Spong’s autobiography constituted the bulk of my reading. Although the book is the autobiography of a very interesting man — a man who challenged his traditions and tried to humanize his religion — it also serves to give the reader a look into the Episcopalian church’s innards. I’m always captivated by stories of people grappling with their most cherished beliefs, although Spong didn’t go into as much detail as I would have liked. The reader doesn’t get the step-by-step retelling that Infidel provided, although Hirsi Ali was writing for different reasons and her change of worldviews happened faster. Still, Spong kept my interest while telling the story of how he sought to bring Christianity in accord with science and the human heart.

This week I also finished Return of the Black Widowers, the last in Asimov’s Black Widower collections — books compiling his Black Widower mystery stories, in which a club of men with the titular name meet monthly for dinner and are presented by a guest with a mystery to solve. This collection is special, because it was published a decade after the maestro’s death and combines uncollected Widower stories with Asimov’s personal favorites. There are seventeen stories in all (five more than usual), including one (“The Last Story”) written by Harlan Ellison. As usual, I loved the collection — but I did miss Asimov’s characteristic comments. Ellison tries to provide this with an “afterword’ extracted from Asimov’s autobiography that does the job a little bit, but doesn’t seem quite as personal. Excellent as always — I particularly enjoyed being able to revisit old favorites, like “The Obvious Factor”.

Lastly, I finished a Star Trek novel called Spartacus. Those familar with Roman history, or perhaps just depictions of Roman history in popular media, can probably discern that this book’s plot is driven by a slave revolt. Specifically, a planet outisde Federation space called Vemla has been engulfed in war after the androids that provided the Vemlan’s standard of living revolted, guided by the more sentient “Alpha” androids. A few androids take over a ship and attempt to flee the brutal war, but a storm in space disables their vessel temporarily, at which point the Enterprise-D comes to their rescue. They tell Captain Picard that they are refugees, but soon after a fleet of Vemlan ships arrives and informs Captain Picard that they intend to bring their escaped property back with them — and he would do well to not interfere. Although Picard and his crew — and most of all, Commander Data — want to help the androids, they are bound by Federation regulations, philosophical questions, and the haunting fear that these androids are not the peaceful refugees they claim to be. I found the book quite readable.

Pick of the (Update): Return of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov

Next Week:

• The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman. I’ve used this book in research papers before but have never actually read it despite it being used in my western civilization textbook. I will remedy that this week.
• The Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov
• Familiar Poems, Annotated, Isaac Asimov. Asimov mentioned this in I, Asimov and it sounded interesting.
• Islam, Karen Armstrong. I’ve never finished any of Armstrong’s work before, and so in the interests of cultural literacy I’ll be lighting two candles with one flame. (I googled for more peaceful variants of the “kill two birds with one stone” variant, and I like that one the most.)
• The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown. Yes, I’m finally getting around to it.

Books this Update:

• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
• The Great Journey: Peopling the United States, Brian Fagan
• Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, Wayne Dyer
• Wicca for Beginners, Thea Sabin

I began last week by reading the biggest book first — and at over seven hundred pages, Howard Zinn’s history of the underdogs was definitely the biggest. After acknowledging that all historical accounts — be they notes scribbled down by Spanish friars, US Army army reports, college textbooks, or popular narratives — are written from a biased perspective, he owns his own bias and states that this book is intended to be a history of the losers in American history, meaning a history of almost everyone except white, male landowners. Beginning with Columbus’ treatments of the natives and ending with the invasion of Iraq, Zinn takes the reader through a very bloody and unpleasant history of the world’s self-titled “first democracy”. Although I knew much of its contents already, Zinn still manages to leave me reeling at parts. Obviously, a book like this isn’t going to appeal to people like my high-school self, whose feelings are better cared for when reading a history about America the Beautiful, constantly striving forward to more freedom and prosperity. As I’ve learned since high school, material prosperity always comes at a high human price.

I continued reading history with my next book, although it was not a narrative. Brian Fagan’s The Great Journey is more of a summary of what archaeologists and historians now believe about the arrival of humankind to the Americas. Fagan discusses the problems with finding out anything about the earliest human settlements — environmental factors that don’t lend themselves to the preservation of artifacts, for instance. What few artifacts survive — stone tools, for instance — are discussed at length. I’ve not read this much about flint knapping since the Earth’s Children series. The book is arranged chronologically, and Fagan tries to present it in terms of being a play — labeling the chapters as “acts”, for instance. Although it could be a bit dry at times, interesting information would surface unexpectedly — after page after page on stone-shaping, I found myself reading about an archaeologist who witnessed an Indian elephant die and immediately decided to test reproductions of stone tools by butchering it. I was then informed of the best method to strip an elephant of its meat — can’t say I was expecting that.

Through the week, I read bits and pieces of Wayne Dyer’s Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, a devotional using the Tao Te Ching as its source. The book consists of 81 essays, each written on a verse from Lao Tzu’s book of mystic wisdom. Dyer draws from various translations of the book for his essays, but always includes a verse in the text for the reader. He also connects Taoist thoughts to other religious and philosophical teachings as well as attitudes expressed in poetry. After initial comments on the verse, he distills it into one or two statement, and then comments on those. He ends each essay with a “Do the Tao Now” section, in which he makes suggestions to the reader for putting the thoughts into practice. I found this book to be more helpful than The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu, although sometimes it felt too…prescriptive. I have something of a distrust for intuitive “statements”. I was chagrined to find an advertisement of Sylvia Browne in the back of the book.

Lastly, I read Wicca for Beginners by Thea Sabin. My interest in this, like my interest in architecture and various other topics, stems from a PC game I play as a hobby — The Sims 2. (It’s not the first time a PC game has given me new interests, and it won’t be the last.) Although I was initially reading out of curiosity’s sake, I quickly connected it to my comparative religion studies. Sabin begins by explaining what Wicca is, hoping to shake the reader from his or her Hollywood- or church-given notions. I’ve heard a few sermons on the evils of Wicca in my lifetime: fundamentalist sects, like the one I was raised in, are quick to connect Wicca with Satanism. My own understanding of Wicca before reading the book was that it was a ritualized form of earth-goddess worship, but I found to my surprise that it has two deities as well as plenty of ritual. What I found most intriguing is that unlike most religions, Wicca is not built on philosophical or ethical practice, although it has an ethic component. The Wicca described in this book is very much about the power of symbols, rituals, and spells, and Sabin goes into great detail explaining what means what. I wasn’t expecting to find that brooms had symbolic significance or that witches wear special robes to rituals depending on the season, but these are some of the things I learned. The book was very informative, even though it is written to the potential initiate. (The “Mr. Spock” portion of my brain that Sabin urges the reader to turn off several times is far too implacable for me to be an initiate in any tradition.)

Pick of the Week: A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn.

Quotation of the Week:
The poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, which Dyer quoted in his book.

Next Week:

• Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality; John Shelby Spong
• Fates Worse than Death, Kurt Vonnegut
• World Religion: Opposing Viewpoints, various authors
• The Return of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov