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jonscott9's reviews
206 reviews
Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America by Mel White
3.0
Mel White has quite the life story: A former ghost writer for the likes of Jerry Falwell and other conservative Christian honchos, he was married with two children and then came out as a gay man when in his 40s. This account starts with his childhood (as it should) and works up from there to his activism in the present. He is a good writer, but unfortunately this memoir sometimes gets bogged down in self-involvement. He really didn't need to delineate all of his relational-sexual exploits for the reader to understand that his marriage was in peril and his mind was a mess. Written in 1993, his info seems dated sometimes, but the personal stories are heartrending. Here's hoping that his story has at least catalyzed conversations among family, friends, and fellow churchgoers across the nation. The subject matter is so often under rug swept.
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis
5.0
This spare, searing book was right on time for me. My mother's friend had just succumbed to her cancer battle, and a friend's father died unexpectedly as I was reading it. In these pages, Lewis deals with the grief and pain over the loss of his wife, Joy, to cancer. Candid and remarkably clear are his thoughts on grief, death, an afterlife, and faith. He doesn't pretend to know more than he does, nor does he pretend to have more (or less) belief or strength than he does either.
Lewis filled four notebooks and declared his thinking done as it pertained to grief. Those four notebooks comprise the four chapters of this brief but important book. I'm sure other sensitive, sensible books on grief are out there, but this is the best that I've found.
Lewis filled four notebooks and declared his thinking done as it pertained to grief. Those four notebooks comprise the four chapters of this brief but important book. I'm sure other sensitive, sensible books on grief are out there, but this is the best that I've found.
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
3.0
Vonnegut's thesis seems to be that "Men are machines." (Sure, it's cynical.) I thought this book had its highs and lows, times when I'd tear through it and others when it dragged me behind it.
The failed novelist Kilgore Trout is a great original character, though. And that's another thing -- Vonnegut's ace when it comes to naming memorable characters.
I do relish how he makes light of the inanities of our everyday existence. Example: Why is the lyric to the USA's national anthem peppered with questions?
The failed novelist Kilgore Trout is a great original character, though. And that's another thing -- Vonnegut's ace when it comes to naming memorable characters.
I do relish how he makes light of the inanities of our everyday existence. Example: Why is the lyric to the USA's national anthem peppered with questions?
What's So Amazing about Grace? by Philip Yancey
4.0
This is one of those books that helped me want to believe in God at all. Yancey's not highly quotable, which is maybe an overrated attribute anyway, but he's always solid. Of course the concept of grace takes center stage here, and he gives it ample play in disclosing his thoughts and interactions with a range of people. The stories are gripping, especially that in Chapter 6 where he shares of his friendship with Mel White, the former ghost writer for the Christian right turned gay activist. The first story, the borrowed Babette's Feast, is also wonderful. Insights pertaining to grace from Yancey's own life and relationships are peppered in and measured well.
Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud by Philip Yancey
3.0
What I admire most about Philip Yancey is that he asks the questions (and publicly) that so many Christians would like to hush up. He's okay with life being untidy. The three queries he poses: Is God unfair? Is he silent? Is he hidden? Yancey's willing to follow these questions all the way down and share what he's found. His prose is clear if not poetic, and that's okay. He just tends to strip things down to basics and build them back up again with a biblical backdrop. He pulls no punches and doesn't wax emotional. This book is no different from his others in that it's rich with knowledge and humility.
A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou
3.0
Angelou's writing is by turns poetic and plain here, and it works well. She speaks to tragic events of the mid- to late-1960s, when Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were both killed. (She was on board with the latter man's civil rights work.)
A firsthand race-riots account and personal relationships receive her gentle but firm treatment as well. Funny tidbits appear in her telling of working and writing for a theater after singing at a lounge in Hawaii and being upstaged by a bigger-voiced singer-actress who shall remain nameless.
This graceful short book is the sixth installment of autobiography from Angelou. It's a line of books that began with the classic I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I haven't read that book yet but intend to fix that this year, daunted or distressed as I already am about the subject matter.
A firsthand race-riots account and personal relationships receive her gentle but firm treatment as well. Funny tidbits appear in her telling of working and writing for a theater after singing at a lounge in Hawaii and being upstaged by a bigger-voiced singer-actress who shall remain nameless.
This graceful short book is the sixth installment of autobiography from Angelou. It's a line of books that began with the classic I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I haven't read that book yet but intend to fix that this year, daunted or distressed as I already am about the subject matter.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
3.0
Oy, what to say about Book 2 of the Potter behemoth? It's better than the first one, still not a book I'd term "great." I get the feeling that Rowling's thinking ahead as she writes, though, and that's Smart.
I enjoy Hermione, maybe because I was her male equivalent back in the day, bookish, studious, and rule-smitten. I explicitly do not enjoy the elf character Dobby. While I'm told that he has a crucial role to come in the series, here he flat-out reminded me of Jar-Jar Binks from the latter-day Star Wars flicks. That is to say that I detested the character's every scene, word, and movement. What a deplorable urchin. I mourn his creation.
The second half of this one picked up, as did the first. I still eagerly await the darkening of the series in Book 4, two books from now as I pile-drive the lot of them leading up to the last installment's release.
I enjoy Hermione, maybe because I was her male equivalent back in the day, bookish, studious, and rule-smitten. I explicitly do not enjoy the elf character Dobby. While I'm told that he has a crucial role to come in the series, here he flat-out reminded me of Jar-Jar Binks from the latter-day Star Wars flicks. That is to say that I detested the character's every scene, word, and movement. What a deplorable urchin. I mourn his creation.
The second half of this one picked up, as did the first. I still eagerly await the darkening of the series in Book 4, two books from now as I pile-drive the lot of them leading up to the last installment's release.
Reasons to Be Pretty by Neil LaBute
3.0
To be fair, this was not the final book for LaBute's play. Which is good, as I found the dialogue remarkably lacking or uninteresting in a few patches, especially striking because it's *him*.
LaBute's stuff (In the Company of Men, Bash, The Mercy Seat) is often subtle and nuanced. His comedies are bleak and not laden with guffaws. You have to work for the reward of the jokes, and they're usually coupled with a hearty heap of weightiness, regret, or pain.
This play centers on two couples, and the main character, a man, has made a remark about how, compared to a certain female at the office, his girlfriend's face is "regular." In true LaBute spirit, this one word is seized on by the offended party and used (and abused, and dragged into the mud, and spit upon, and hung on a cross, and drawn and quartered) for all its worth in turning the tables on her man and making him feel awful.
Meanwhile the "protagonist's" best friend, who he also happens to work with, is sleeping on his quite-beautiful wife behind her back. They have a child on the way. Will our anti-hero relay this info somehow to the wife, betray his friend? These people are simple, plain -- their lives, if not their faces, are truly regular -- and most of the action happens in the factory lunchroom. (I understand the setting, saw it clearly in my mind's eye, for the two summers I worked at one such place during college.)
I don't care to share any of the dialogue here. It didn't quite percolate like other plays (the recently-read The Busy World Is Hushed, et al), and maybe it was cleaned up in the rehearsals that this book was used for. I know some dialogue was changed, perhaps even considerably, from quotes I've seen in articles about the play that have key quotations said (and thus reading) differently.
The life of a play is interesting. So is the life of any one person, and of a relationship. Few writers explore these matters, and for the stage setting, than does Neil LaBute, the one-time IPFW instructor who became a big, famous film director, and who is well known for his incisive, gutting way with words.
LaBute's stuff (In the Company of Men, Bash, The Mercy Seat) is often subtle and nuanced. His comedies are bleak and not laden with guffaws. You have to work for the reward of the jokes, and they're usually coupled with a hearty heap of weightiness, regret, or pain.
This play centers on two couples, and the main character, a man, has made a remark about how, compared to a certain female at the office, his girlfriend's face is "regular." In true LaBute spirit, this one word is seized on by the offended party and used (and abused, and dragged into the mud, and spit upon, and hung on a cross, and drawn and quartered) for all its worth in turning the tables on her man and making him feel awful.
Meanwhile the "protagonist's" best friend, who he also happens to work with, is sleeping on his quite-beautiful wife behind her back. They have a child on the way. Will our anti-hero relay this info somehow to the wife, betray his friend? These people are simple, plain -- their lives, if not their faces, are truly regular -- and most of the action happens in the factory lunchroom. (I understand the setting, saw it clearly in my mind's eye, for the two summers I worked at one such place during college.)
I don't care to share any of the dialogue here. It didn't quite percolate like other plays (the recently-read The Busy World Is Hushed, et al), and maybe it was cleaned up in the rehearsals that this book was used for. I know some dialogue was changed, perhaps even considerably, from quotes I've seen in articles about the play that have key quotations said (and thus reading) differently.
The life of a play is interesting. So is the life of any one person, and of a relationship. Few writers explore these matters, and for the stage setting, than does Neil LaBute, the one-time IPFW instructor who became a big, famous film director, and who is well known for his incisive, gutting way with words.
Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1824 by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Waldo Emerson Forbes
5.0
What to say? It's Emerson. Emerson is eternal.
I like that a lot of his sentiments are echoed later by one Frederick Buechner, a personal fave, who surprised even himself in becoming a Presbyterian minister in his life, in addition to the Princeton instructor and scholar and writer he already was.
"I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching."
"Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory."
"I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated."
[what I'd like to believe about my own father:]
"My aunt had an eye that went through and through you like a needle. 'She was endowed,' she said, 'with the fatal gift of penetration.' She disgusted everybody because she knew them too well."
"Happy the man who never puts on a face, but receives every visitor with that countenance he has on."
"If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterwards."
"We resent all criticism which denies us anything in our line of advance."
"I look with pity upon the young preachers who float into the profession thinking all is safe."
"Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function."
"The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being. ... Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism."
And the beat goes on.
I like that a lot of his sentiments are echoed later by one Frederick Buechner, a personal fave, who surprised even himself in becoming a Presbyterian minister in his life, in addition to the Princeton instructor and scholar and writer he already was.
"I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching."
"Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory."
"I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated."
[what I'd like to believe about my own father:]
"My aunt had an eye that went through and through you like a needle. 'She was endowed,' she said, 'with the fatal gift of penetration.' She disgusted everybody because she knew them too well."
"Happy the man who never puts on a face, but receives every visitor with that countenance he has on."
"If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterwards."
"We resent all criticism which denies us anything in our line of advance."
"I look with pity upon the young preachers who float into the profession thinking all is safe."
"Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function."
"The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being. ... Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism."
And the beat goes on.