2009 Wrap-Up: Books

Dec 31, 2009
Categories: books, religion

Since i’ve procrastinated and am now left with three posts to write today, i’m going to keep my books post rather short. I’ve already written about every book i read this year, so you know what my opinions of them are. I only finished nine books this year (and re-read two) but i started several others, and for me this is a pretty significant increase in reading. I haven’t read this many books cover-to-cover since high school. Reading has finally gripped me, and i think my mother must be proud.

(Mom has become a recurring theme in my end-of-year posts. Maybe i should continue referring to what i think she thinks of me in the two to follow.)

Early this year i became sort of fascinated with pregnancy. Since my latter two years of college, i’ve had quite a few dreams in which i am pregnant or have a very tiny baby, so that’s probably what got me interested. That and reading dooce and subsequently watching videos on momversation, and also just being at that age where a lot of people i know are starting their adventures in procreation.

So i read a couple of tales of pregnancy; Accidentally On Purpose and It Sucked and then I Cried (dooce’s book). I learned all kinds of things, like what an episiotomy is and what post-partum depression is like and how very, very little sleep new parents get – and good stuff, like that giving birth can be an almost spiritual experience that may make you feel even more deeply connected to your husband. And guess what? I’m never, ever having a baby. EVER. I got really tired of hearing about the whole thing, especially what’s coming out of either end of a baby at any given moment. I’m definitely over it.

The other topic that my reading this year covered was, of course, atheism. For a while there i was really passionate about it and i enjoyed writing about it until my writings garnered what i maintain were some really unfair accusations. And i noticed that i was really pissing off some of my close friends and relatives, and i was forced to realize that i don’t have the power to change the way people think about things. I decided that it just isn’t worth damaging personal relationships to keep trying. Religion is a topic i really wish people could discuss and talk freely about, but the world isn’t ready yet. I’ve given up on being passionate about this, just like i gave up on being passionate about liberalism and vegetarianism and environmentalism in the past because i realized that it was not making me happy, it was making me miserable. Wanting to change the world is a miserable thing, so this year i want to focus on what i love about it, and read more on that.

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My Thoughts on The Lost Symbol

Oct 05, 2009
Categories: books, religion

After reading Angels & Demons on a whim back in 2007 within the whirlwind (for me) span of a single week, i hadn’t given much thought to Dan Brown’s other works despite having enjoyed the book. I had seen The Da Vinci Code movie and have now seen Angels & Demons as well, but i didn’t actually anticipate wanting to read another Dan Brown book. However, several weeks ago as i was driving to Ankeny for class, i heard an interview with Dan Brown on NPR regarding his latest addition to the Robert Langdon series, The Lost Symbol. I learned that the man wakes up at FOUR every morning and writes seven days a week, 365 days a year (”even on Christmas”). Maybe it’s just the fact that i’m taking a break from nonfiction, i don’t know, but from that moment i felt compelled to actually purchase the new book, hardcover and all, and devour it as quickly as possible. Which is more or less what i did.

Two weeks after purchasing the book, i found myself unenthusiastically getting through the last forty pages of The Lost Symbol. Up until that point it was a regular Dan Brown page-turner; formulaic but entertaining with a nice little twist toward the end that i didn’t see coming. The one thing that really bothered me was the usual heroine scientist’s discussions of her research in the field of Noetic Science which would, once published, prove beyond a doubt that people are more than just flesh and blood. People have souls and can use their mind-power to alter matter outside of the body, and God most definitely exists. I asked myself why that pissed me off, and i decided that if such research was actually published, i would learn about it and grant it whatever it did in fact prove, but at this point i can’t conceive of any science that could do any such thing. The mere idea is a little aggravating.

The last forty pages of The Lost Symbol really drove the metaphysical point home, though. Apparently the thesis of this action-packed work of fiction is that God is within all of us, and our belief in him is what has always unified people and will bring peace to the world (never mind the fact that there are very peaceful people – and whole cultures, in fact – who don’t believe in any god).

My first thought was, okay, whatever, this little fiction book, like many other things, was not created with people like me in mind. Perhaps Dan Brown is trying to smooth the ruffled feathers of believers with this book by emphasizing the importance of religious belief in general and no particular church (especially not the Catholic church) in particular. But, then again, i know a lot of religious people who might be put off by the idea, maniacally pursued by several of the book’s main characters, that God is literally in us; that we people are all gods or can become gods. Not that i think anyone will ban the book from their libraries for that reason, nor that atheists, who are perhaps the latest victims of Brown’s feather-ruffling novels, ought to. I’ve come to realize that there’s nothing Dan Brown could have written about religion or God without rubbing somebody out there the wrong way. And after all, it’s only a novel.

As far as the book goes, i wasn’t as enamored with it as i was with Angels and Demons, partly because i’m not familiar with Washington, D.C., whereas i had enjoyed the memory-lane tour of Rome in the latter book. The Lost Symbol seemed to drag a little at first. Robert Langdon was tricked into solving the puzzles this time, and dragged his feet for half the plot line accordingly. Once things got cooking, it was fun to read. I’d say it’s definitely worth a week of your time, especially if you’re patriotic and have your own particular brand of faith.

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The Portable Atheist

Sep 16, 2009
Categories: books, religion

I’ve been reading The Portable Atheist lately, and i’m enjoying it quite a lot. It’s basically collection of writings from throughout history on the topic of non-belief.

At the risk of igniting a new string of impassioned comments, i’d like to just point out a couple of things i saw in the text:

1. Albert Einstein called belief in a personal god “childish”.

2. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychology, called people who believe in a god “illusioned”, and suggested that they could also be referred to as delusional.

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Twins?! Blink and How We Decide

Aug 21, 2009
Categories: books

I read Blink by Malcom Gladwell a few months ago and didn’t like it much. I was hoping to find some insight to my chronic indecision and a way to chip away at it. I also love psychology and like to read about how the mind works. Unfortunately, i felt that the book contradicted itself, gave no usable advice and was generally quite overrated.

  

When we were at Powell’s in Portland at the beginning of the month, i saw that How We Decide was on the bestseller list. I read the blurb and thought the book sounded like what i had hoped Blink would be. I picked it up from the library last week, and i’ve only read fifty pages and jumped around to a couple of interesting-looking bits of the book, but i’m pretty sure i know where it’s going.

Both books start each point with a dramatic story about a person who had to make a tough decision, then describe what was really going on in his or her brain at the time of decision-making, and finally illustrate the phenomenon with quotes from scientists who have done studies on it. Each book has a story about a decision-maker in the armed forces, a sports enthusiast who just knows what to look for, and a homicide that shouldn’t have happened. The moral of the story? Trust your emotions! No, wait – don’t trust your emotions!

Although i don’t plan to finish How We Decide, i do think it may be more insightful than Blink. My attention was caught by one part in particular which describes how Christians and Republicans have been shown in studies to willfully ignore information that contradicts their point of view. In the study cited, Christians actually chose not to turn off static that was garbling a message debunking their faith, for example, while the atheist test subjects quickly pushed the button that turned the static off. In another study, Republicans failed to recall positive changes that took place under the Clinton administration. There might have been a bit about Democrats doing the same sort of thing, but um, if there was i honestly can’t remember.

For the most part, though, it seems to me that Jonah Lehrer just read Blink and thought, “Wow, this book stinks and Gladwell is getting filthy rich off it! I think i’ll just re-write it and cash in on his idea!”

I didn’t get anything out of either book, really, except for a few accounts of interesting psychological studies shrouded in a lot of journalistic fluff. This CNN article, 10 Ways to Be a Better Thinker, succinctly sums up the scraps of advice in Blink and How We Decide and adds a couple of insights of its own. I have come away from these books with a brilliant idea, though – i think i’ll read The Tipping Point and just re-write it, and voila! I’ll be a New York Times bestseller.

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Vague Endings – The Giver and Villette

Jul 17, 2009
Categories: books

After reading several non-fiction books earlier this year, i decided to take a break and read some fiction. One of my favorite books of all time is “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte, and so eighteen months or so ago i had picked up another of her books, “Villette”, the long rambling fictional memoir of a homely but passionate English woman who ends up teaching at a French boarding school and pining after a couple of different men. I only got about halfway through it at that time, so last month i decided to pick it up from the library and finish it.

Prior to that, Nathan and i picked up “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, since i was probably the only American public school student in the nineties who for whatever reason never read it. He read it to me over the course of a few weeks (yes, you read that correctly. We’re that cute). The story about a futuristic society that is willingly void of both pain and love was thought-provoking and entertaining, but had an ending that i found to be rather depressing, even if it’s meant to be vague and possibly hopeful.

  

I never would have imagined that these two books had anything in common, but when i finished Villette last night i was amazed to find that their endings are quite similar.

Lois Lowry ends “The Giver” with a scene that can be interpreted as either the last hallucination of a dying person or the actual attainment of a very unlikely dream. Lowry herself says that she “doesn’t think” that the protagonist just dies, but it’s pretty difficult to convince oneself otherwise. Being a realist, i assumed the worst, and felt a little disappointed by it. It’s fitting though, and i accepted it as a sort of Orwellian cautionary tale.

Villette is the story of the mostly un-charmed and lonely life of Lucy Snowe. One can’t help but hope that she’ll end up being loved by someone, and finally toward the end of the book her friend M. Emmanuel gives her his love and promises to marry her – but he is about to embark for Guadeloupe and won’t return for three years. And so she waits for three years, and declares to the reader that they were actually the happiest three years of her life. Then, on the very last page, she describes the terrible storm that struck on the day her lover was to return to her at last. She keeps the outcome hidden though, and encourages us to imagine that she lived happily ever after. As if that were possible! There was no lesson in this book, no poetic reason for life to have completely crapped on Lucy Snowe once and for all, destroying whatever little happiness she had finally managed to attain. After reading 580 pages of her struggles, i wanted a happy ending, damn it! Why did it have to be another “probably this is not a happy ending, but go ahead and imagine that it actually was” sort of thing?!

I’m going back to non-fiction!

In all honesty, i enjoyed reading Villette if only for the language. The English is flowery and passionate, and the smattering of French was a nice refresher-course for me. Still, i’m having second thoughts about picking up where i left off in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” I already know that the ending of that one is rather less than uplifting.

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