"Fri" I look forward to finishing books.

I missed writing meaningless stuff on here, so I hope you’ll humor me as I resume wasting everyone’s time with thoughts on minutia. One new thing I did realize, these thoughts need to be shorter. So don’t be surprised if this blog gets streamlined to leverage my core-competencies accomplishing mission critical objectives and synergizing the harvesting of low hanging fruit for future applications (business school, I miss you).

So back to what we were discussing; I look forward to finishing books. I’m not one of those people that enjoys making a list and then checking things off said list because checking things off is fun. But I do like to finish one thing before I start another. Lately, through gifts, and inadvisable trips to amazon.com I’ve been piling up books that I want to read. Now I have a pretty substantial pile of books that I really want to read. There’s only one problem; I’m a monogamous reader. I feel like I’m cheating on a book if I stop midway through and move on to a new book. Every time I crack open “the other book” all I can think of is my original, sitting on my shelf, with the bookmark still painfully stuck through its midsection. It’s terrible. That why its such a relief to finish a book. It’s like a clean slate. Thoughts have been heard, a complete story told and that book can finally rest in peace on the “finished” side of my bookshelf.

Aside from just trying to get though the books I want to read I also enjoy finishing books because then we can talk about them. Books are weird, they're not like news or current events which have a nice clean time window for proper conversation. Books have kind of a nebulous window. You hear from a friend that they’re reading a book that you are reading or plan to read, then you have to try and synchronize reading that book with that friend otherwise you’ll have nothing to talk about. Or even worse you’ll finish too late and by then your friend is already 4 books ahead of you and not interested in talking about that book from 3 months ago.

Another great part of books is just remembering them. Thinking back to the amazing things they taught you, or incredible adventures they told. Not finishing the book robs you of this for obvious reasons. You never know how the story ended; people and characters you had invested in are just frozen with no resolution. That joy of nostalgia and rediscovered wonder that you get from recalling that book is gone, all because of a lack of dedication. It’s sad.

So moving forward (the last business jargon I’ll use for awhile, I promise), hopefully I can be more dedicated, and knock out some of those books that are on my shelf. I look forward to giving it a shot at least.



O yeah I also look forward to finishing books so I can use them build a hidden passage in my house one day. I'd feel like a phony if I used books that I hadn't read.

"Mon": I like The Shack

The trouble I have writing about this is that there’s a good chance you –the reader- haven’t read this book. So it’s tough to tell you what I thought was cool about it without either A-influencing you’re future opinion, or B-telling you too much and ruining the experience for you. A isn’t really a huge concern because let’s be honest I don’t have that kind of influence over you…..yet. So that leaves me to discuss my “like” for this book and future books, movies, music, etc leaving out the best parts so that you can enjoy them also if you so choose. So keep that in mind while I describe why I liked this book

First let me give you a brief overview of the plot of the book. Mack is a family man that had something terrible happen to one of his family members. He sorta kinda blames God for that. He gets a note from God to meet him at the scene of the terrible thing- the Shack. The rest of the book is Mack talking to God about their misunderstanding.

Mack as a character is supremely relatable. Even though I haven’t ever had anything terrible happen to me, there are always the day to day “disasters” of car trouble, bad grades or even sad world events that allow me to glimpse the frustrations he has with understanding God’s will in this world. He’s also a typical guy (like myself) who has trouble getting things out there on the table and avoids serious conversation and questions with jokes or deflecting answers. That unity the reader is allowed to create with Mack just makes this book all the better.

The Author W.M. Paul Young --who was apparently raised in a stone age tribe by his missionary parents— has a couple of pretty cool goals with the book; as near as I could tell anyways. He wants to shake your mental picture of the Trinity to open your mind to re-considering the box you’ve put them in. He also wants to reveal the unfairness and ridiculousness of us sometimes judging God and his decisions.

The most effective way to get people thinking outside of their normal presuppositions is to shock them. Young does that by portraying the God the Father, Jesus, and The Holy Spirit as a large black woman, a giggly middle-eastern man, and a mysterious asian woman respectively. At first this will make you super uncomfortable. Well it made me uncomfortable anyway. But hopefully you’ll soon realize that he’s not defining the trinity this way, Young is just trying to shake you out of that Grey-haired older man God, Handsome White man Jesus, and magical foofoo dust Holy Spirit stereotype that you’ve created. Personally I realized that I really don’t consider The Holy Spirit as a sentient being so much as a force such as gravity or magnetism. Something I’ll definitely explore more in my quiet times.

The conversations between Mack and God’s different iterations are definitely the highlight of this book. It took a ton of guts for an author to write lines for the character of God, and although it may seem borderline blasphemous, in reality Young is just doing his best to apply what God has said before in the Bible to a real life situation. Mack will bring a problem to God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit (which Young emphasizes are all one being) and they then proceeds to try and work through the problem. The results are amazing, ideas or questions I’ve had and probably you’ve had such as “why does God allow evil?” or “How could a great God care about me?” are laid out and talked through. Sometimes they come to an answer, and sometimes appropriately enough God has to tell Mack that “Mack doesn’t have the capability to fully understand his complex works”. A lot like the end of the book of Job.

I did have one major gripe with the book. The cover of the book really does a lot of disservice to the book, primarily because it sets such a high bar. The cover is inundated with quotes from critics and celebrities proclaiming The Shack as the Pilgrim’s Progress for our generation. I mean the book was good, but Pilgrim’s Progress is incredible. It’s akin to crowning up and coming basketball players as “The Next Jordan”, or new movies as “This Year’s Citizen Kane”. The fact that there is a comparison already disproves the idea. Nobody said Jordan was the next Wilt Chamberlain or Pilgrim’s Progress was the next Confessions, because to be that good means there is no comparison. So it’s obviously no Pilgrim’s Progress, but the book is still good.

One final disclaimer. This book is a work of christian fiction, and as such should not be read to learn theology. As proof there is never any direct quotes from scripture to back up any of the responses or explanations from the God characters. Fictional books have a wonderful role, but education is not it.

So this was not one of those here’s a problem and here’s a bunch of anecdotes and scripture to fix it books. It’s not going to fix anything. What it does do however is potentially get you really excited about the personality and attributes of our amazing God. Then you can get back to your Bible and hopefully strive after God even harder than before. So even though it’s no Pigrim’s Progress, I have to say that I enjoyed and appreciated the message behind The Shack.

Thursday: I miss Choose Your own Adventure books

Remember these books? I do, they were like videogames for middle-class kids. Especially if you got them from the library, which was pretty much the only place I knew of that carried books until I was about 12 years old (seriously I didn’t know they actually sold these things in stores). All these books always had the best plots too; there was the book where you got captured by huge ant alien people, The book where you became a world class bicyclist due to some amazing device that a dying professor gave you (or as I like to call it "The Floyd Landis Story"), the book where you search for treasure a deep sea diver, the book where you’re in a band and 2 of your members get kidnapped an you have to go find them, and so many others. Ahh yes, good times.

Also I remember that on the back of the book s they always had that banner that proclaimed how many possible endings to the story there were, most had somewhere around 18 but if you could find one with 30 possible endings, you knew that book was going to be special. Only you really didn’t completely think it through, because all those endings meant you basically died, or failed within the first 5 pages every time. So you’re sitting there trying to keep bookmarks with your fingers on the previous decisions so when you inevitably die you can go back to that last decision and change your mind and find out if possibly the story could have been a whole lot better if you’d chosen differently. The answer was always the same… “no, not really”. See, for all the options that the books offered, the endings were always, always terrible. There was a huge buildup lasting maybe 15 pages and 5 harowing decisions and then you decide to follow that secret agent into the corridor instead of reporting back to HQ like you should and BLAM!, that was it.

I think the thing I miss most about them was simplicity of the book. It presented you with a crazy story, but then unlike every other boring one-tracked book you’d ever read, it suddenly gave you a chance to change something. It gave you some power over the story, it got you involved. Like I alluded to earlier, it was like the great granddaddy of the gameboy, or I guess at this point the DS,or PSP. And sometimes the simplicity and charm of things like books that give you options about the main characters fate, just can never be matched.