Title Change!

This blog used to be called "The Shape of a Christian Life." I'd hoped to use it for thoughtful musings on my faith life as an United Methodist pastor in New York.

For a few years now, most of the posts have been about the books I'm reading, books I hope to read, etc. So I renamed the blog!

This Just Read: Cryptonomicon

So, over the winter I re-read Neal Stephenson's epic Baroque Cycle. This planted a seed in my brain to re-read Cryptonomicon, the book that inspired The Baroque Cycle. I've read Cryptonomicon many times--it hits many of my pleasure centers: World War II, cryptography, the invention of the digital computer, submarines, romance, new world economics, geek culture, post-modern paranoia, etc... The list just goes on and on.

I just finished it yesterday and was pleased with the re-read. I noticed something I hadn't before--probably as a result of just having read The Baroque Cycle. Rudy Hacklheber asked a favor of Hermann Goring when they meet. That chapter takes place in Goring's personal rail carriages, surrounded by stolen Nazi art. Rudy's request is left hanging at the end of the chapter--we never find out what it was or whether it was granted.

Later, Rudy flees Germany and hooks up with other characters in the book, ending up on a Nazi submarine around the Philippines. When Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe finds the sunken sub fifty years later, he discovers gold sheets with holes punched out of them.

At the same time, Lawrence Waterhouse--working for American intelligence--is using stacks of punchcards to hold cryptographic data. Presumably the Bristich and Germans are doing the same. It's easy to imaging (as I did on prior readings) that these gold sheets were somehow connected to that.

Reading The Baroque Cycle, however, we know that Daniel Waterhouse (predecessor of Lawrence and Randy Waterhouse) was compiling a Universal Language with Leibnitz for Peter the Great. He was, in fact, cataloging this language on gold sheets with holes punched out of them. Some or all of this work must have been held by Leibnitz, eventually ending up in Rudy's hands (for what purpose we cannot know).

Anyhoo, I've missed out on posting about books I've been reading this spring--there have been a few. I'll try to do a catch-up post. At the same time, I'm kicking off my Summer Reading List with Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. I hoe yo have my entire reading list up this week.

Good reading!

This Just Read: Lovecraftian Flashback

I've been diving into the short stories of H.P, Lovecraft this past week. It's transporting me back to 1983, when I first discovered them. Lovecraft's prose is the opposite of Hemingway's. Papa's credo was: "all you have to do is write one true sentence." Hemingway is spare and painfully honest. Lovecraft's work is opaque, overblown, even rococo. Both deal in indirection, but for different reasons. This week I've read:

• The Colour out of Space
• The Call of Cthulhu
• The Dunwich Horror
• The Whisperer in the Darkness
• Dreams in the Witch-House
• The Shadow over Innsmouth

I may move on to the longer stuff: At the Mountains of Madness or (my favorite) The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

Anyway... it's good to be back.

This Just Read: Catching Up

I'm waaaay behind in posting about books I've read. I haven't posted since September. Ouch. Since then I've read:

Rachel Held Evans' A Year of Biblical Womanhood
I really enjoyed it. I follow her work online and really wanted to read one of her longer works. This one was great.

Lawrence Wright's Thirteen Days in September
Great plane reading. An account of the Camp David Accord. These are events that happened when I was a teen--too young to really know what was happening. A well-written, detailed account.

Finally finished Shane Claiborne's Irresistible Revolution
I love Shane's stuff and had been reading through this book in bits and pieces. I finally pushed through to the end. I highly recommend it!

John Jackson Miller's A New Dawn
Star Wars: Clone Wars was wrapped up and they were launching Star Wars: Rebels. This is the novel to get folks into that animated series, introducing you to the characters, etc,.. It wasn't great (last year's Kenobi was great), but it was good Star Wars fun.

Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle

For some reason I decided to re-read this 3,000-page, nine-book opus. I love Neal Stephenson's writing and in this work he comes closer than ever to the running monologue inside my head. Not quite a prequel to Cryptonomicon, it jumps back three hundred years to follow a vast array of characters through the birth of the Enlightenment. Yes, there's the Einstein-Leibnitz debate, King Solomon's gold, alchemy and natural philosophy, swashbuckling and antics in the court of the Sun King. It's really an indescribable work, so I'll stop now.

I may have forgotten one or two books in there...