Books this year: a book diary

This is a selection of Roman leaders from the Lives of Plutarch that took me months to wade through for some reason.  It wasn’t difficult to read, but it has massive amounts of information, and my eyes have a tendency to glaze over when confronted with that.

Since Plutarch wasn’t concerned with being accurate with the biographies he was writing, we’re treated to entertaining character sketches where even bad qualities are used to exalt someone somehow.  We are also made to witness manly, stoic Roman soldiers and generals act all weepy and cry at the drop of a hat, which is funny.

So, if you’re into classics, this is definitely in that category.  Because it’s written by an ancient Greek about ancient Rome.  There you go.

To begin with, every time I talk about this book, I say the title Sex God as if I were in a death metal band.

Now with joking aside, I found this to be an amazing book dealing with a not so easy subject.

I’m not exactly sure what I can say about it.  Bell takes God, sex, sexuality, relationships, and the ecstatic, orgasmic beauty and the bloody, disgusting broken mess of it all–what can appear to be nothing but strewn Lego pieces on the floor is somehow made cohesive like a stunning mosaic.

Ultimately, it’s all connected–which is at once terrifying and glorious, only because of the source of it all in the first place.

This was a very good read.  It was originally delivered as a lecture that Norris gave, and much of the material seems to have a been a springboard for another book of hers, Acedia & Me.

In The Quotidian Mysteries Norris explores the dailyness of life,  and why this dailyness is important.  I suppose this especially made sense to relate it to women, since as the saying goes, “a woman’s work is never done,” but it is truly applicable to everyone, since everyone gets sick of doing the same damn thing all the time, and has moments of staring at a bleak future of the same ol’ same ol’ and wondering why you never conquered the universe.

A response Norris gives to this problem is:

The contemplative in me recognizes the sacred potential in the mundane task, even as the terminally busy go-getter resents the necessity of repetition.  But, as Soren Kierkegaard reminds us, “Repetition is reality, and it is the seriousness of life…repetition is the daily bread which satisfies with benediction.”  Repetition is both as ordinary and necessary as bread, and the very stuff of ecstasy.

I want to assert this as the most primordial of cosmic axioms, but I mainly see it in the context of the liturgy of the church, where doing the same exact thing every Sunday lifts you into the heavenlies.

It may seem teary eyed and idealistic, but I can embrace the idea that if you embrace the mundane, the mundane can be transformed into something extraordinary.

This was from the Penguin Books “Great Ideas” series, and I had the great idea that this would be an easy, short read (only 115 pages, decent size type) and it might make me look smart.

It took me forever to trudge my way through.  And he isn’t a particularly pleasant guy–in a letter he wrote to a madame concerning her child, he writes that

In the case of the subject under discussion, I am incapable of finding a place for that emotion which leads people to cuddle new-born infants while they are still without movements of soul or recognizable features of body to make to make themselves lovable.  And I have never willingly allowed them to be nursed in my presence.  A true and well-regulated affection should be born, and then increase, as children enable us to get to know them; if they show they deserve it, we should cherish them with fatherly love…

And so on and so forth.  Basically, for me, this was merely a novelty to read as I was reading the works of the “originator of the modern essay form.”  But mainly it was mentally lugubrious for me.  At least, with one or two people out there, I might gain some street cred for having read it.

This was another book I read during Lent of 2009.  It came highly recommended to me by a friend, and since I’m a sucker for spiritual texts, I snatched a copy up.

Metropolitan Gregory (1784-1860) wrote a treatise on, well, how to live a holy life.  He walks you through an entire day and everything that happens during a day, and prescribes how one should go about it in a holy, righteous, and God-fearing manner.

I applaud his efforts, but it didn’t really jive with me as much as I had hoped it would.  The text itself had an “old world,” peasant appeal to me, but for Metropolitan Gregory, holiness is attained by building fences around your passions so that you don’t experience anything that might actually be pleasant as you’re trying to dodge gypsies from giving you the evil eye.

I don’t want to sound naive, but I think it’s odd when I see fundamentalism like this being displayed in this context, where trying really hard to think holy thoughts as soon as you wake up in the morning and living in constant fear of falling into sin passes as having an intimate relationship with the Lord.

Having said that, there is some practical wisdom in here, but I probably could’ve lived without reading this text.

Ok.  I suck at blogging books.  Whatever.  I read this near the end of February of 2009, at the beginning of Lent as a devotion/meditation to read and pray through during the church season.  It’s a book I’ve read multiple times, but one I’ve never blogged before (I don’t think…).

Anyways, the Canon of St Andrew is an incredibly long hymn chanted during Lent in the Orthodox Church–it’s chanted in parts during the course of a couple of evenings, then they bliztkrieg their way through it in one night, with an accompanied reading of the Life of St Mary of Egypt, a looming figure in the world of asceticism and repentant desert dwellers.  The hymn itself I think is rather moving, filled with multiple images from the Old Testament of being saved from sin and death and the constant availing of one’s self to the utter mercy and salvation of God.

To those who are unfamiliar with the tropes of wild eyed, bushy bearded and crazy Orthodox monks, this work can come across as very alien, with it’s constant usage of the intercession of the saints and what appears to be whiny emo self-deprecation.

What Matthewes-Green has done is taken this lengthy hymn and divided it up into forty readings with a line-by-line commentary explaining what’s being said, and then at the end of a reading she offers a meditation for your mental perusal about what you just read.  Matthewes-Green has a way of making the Orthodox explainable to Western Protestant eyes and ears without comprimising the essentials of Orthodox praxis and theology (and if I’m not mistaken, she was a convert from Protestantism to Orthodoxy).

This book has become an incredibly valuable tool during Lent for me, and it never fails to continue to speak different things to me… which I subsequently forget… but at least Lent comes once a year to try again.

My grandmother gave this book to me for a Christmas gift, and I’ll be darned if I wasn’t going to make this my first book of the year.  Overall, I would say this book was pretty good.Hahn’s thesis is that the liturgy of the mass corresponds directly with the book of Revelation in the Scriptures- that the vision St John received was a vision of heavenly worship.  Since the temple of Judaism was a pattern of what God prescribed in the heavenlies to be conducted, we see that New Covenant worship is not only patterned after the Old Covenant, but moreso after a more substantial prescription revealed to the church, seeing as how Christ was “the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.”  (Rev 13:8)I had only one major quibble with this book, that being Hahn using the Catechism of the Catholic Church  to make a foundational point of view to say that the mass the church celebrates is as heaven as on earth, even saying “[T]hat’s not just me saying so, or a handful of dead theologians.  The Catechism says so.”  The Catechism is a reflection of the Magisterium of the church- the compilation of tradition and mostly based on Scripture, but it isn’t a replacement for the Scriptures in an argument and it isn’t what gives the church authority.  Or maybe this is a sign of me being infected with Protestantism…Either way, The Lamb’s Supper is a good and readable book if you desire to seek a biblical and patristic view of an insanely hard Scripture to make sense of and gain a glimpse of it’s application to our lives now and how it affects the kingdom of God, especially as lived out in the the eucharistic liturgy.