Fasting by Father Slavko Barbaric. Full disclosure, I'm Protestant. So when I started seeing mentions of Mary in this pamphlet, I felt myself withdraw some from the text. However, I'm learning to push past black-and-white thinking so I prayed for the Lord to open my eyes if this small book had something for me. Reading it was a humbling reminder that, while there may be disparities between branches of the belief, we share many things at core. The book whetted my appetite (a thousand pardons for the pun) for more information on the discipline of fasting, and is very much worth a read if you have an open heart. A good place to start. I will seek more information on fasting.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip. Found this after begging for the title off a “Forgot its name” type forum. I forgot how rich the writing is. It’s a beautiful, vivid fantasy with strong characters and deep internal struggles and the writing is just decadent. I’ll have to come back to this one again in the future.
The Sabbath by Arnold G. Fruchtenbaum. It’s a slim volume but took me a while to get through. It’s a fascinating Messianic believer’s perspective on the Sabbath. He pulls every mention of the Sabbath from both the Old and New Testaments, systematically going over observations and implications of each mention and either undergirding or debunking various modern concepts surrounding the Sabbath. This is a helpful piece of context reading if you want to understand some things, like, for example, why exactly it bothered the Pharisees of Jesus’ day that his followers ate grain from a field as they passed through it on the Sabbath. Never before has it been clearer what happened and who was in the wrong on that count… In the end, I walk away with this understanding: those who follow Jesus are not bound to Mosaic law, because He fulfilled the law and also because He taught us how to seek and follow the spirit of the law. We are free to keep or to not keep the Sabbath.
The Jews and their Lies by Dr. Martin Luther. For me, this is a sad book to read. I owe much to Dr. Martin Luther for his role in the Protestant Reformation, for it has greatly influenced the faith and teachings I follow today. On the other hand, I am born Jewish. From where I stand, what I see is that this man—who was gifted by God to do great things at the beginning of his career—ended it with a work of bitterness and envy. There are some small grains of truth in some of the conflicts he describes, but more often than not what I see is deep misunderstanding and profound arrogance in his assumptions and leaps of logic. He is even arrogant when he speaks of what he would and would not accept from God himself.
I do not see him questioning if, perhaps, reaching the Jews for Jesus was not a calling placed on him in particular, but one that he took on and then became frustrated with. I do not see him assessing all the things Jews have to lose if they accept Jesus—one of many things which makes it so difficult. There is no understanding of free market economics at play here (not sure that can be held against him, it probably wasn’t widely practiced at the time), in fact he seems to be articulating vague strands of Marx’s ideas about what constitutes wealth and thievery of it long before Marx. He can’t fathom how the Jews were getting rich when they weren’t working like all the people around them, but a reading of Basic Economics and the essay Are Jews Generic? both by Thomas Sowell provide a very good answer to this. The sad truth is, this piece of work only erected another wall between Christians and Jews, and any Christian who wishes to reach the Jews will have to contend with the legacy of this book, and many others in the same vein.
There is an old Jewish song sung at Passover, “Dayenu” and it goes: if God had only brought us out of Egypt, it would have been enough. If God had only split the sea for us, it would have been enough. If He had given us Shabbat, it would have been enough. And so it goes for fifteen verses.
Luther has very nearly the antithesis here: if only the Jews could not commit usury, it would not have been enough. If only the Jews’ houses of worship and all their books burned, it would not have been enough. If only the Jews could be forbidden from speaking the name of God in our presence, it would not have been enough. If only the Jews could be locked in their houses, it would not have been enough. If only the Jews could be turned out of the country and shipped to their own land… oh wait.
Luther and the Jews: Putting Right the Lies by Richard S. Harvey. I dove into this right after reading The Jews And Their Lies. On the one hand, it presented me with some good context, both about Luther and the Jews of his time—by a Jewish believer no less! However, in the end, it wasn’t what I was looking for. I was looking for someone to explain and refute Luther’s lies about the Jews, and I felt that was largely brushed over. Perhaps it was brushed over because the author felt it had been more than covered in other works, and that is fair, but I can’t rate the book because I didn’t get what I was looking for. Instead of refutations, the book dwells largely on the topic of modern reconciliation, and imagines what it would have been like if key points in Luther’s life had gone differently. It was worth reading, but if you’re looking for refutations, this isn’t the right book.
American History in Black and White by David Barton. Mixed feelings about this book. It gives a lot of very good historical information that isn’t much talked about in regards to the history of the Blacks in America and how they were nearly universally Republican against the Democrats of the south who blocked every civil rights bill, anti-lynching bill, or attempt to repeal voter restrictions over the years. On the other hand, toward the very end, Barton briefly brushes past why Blacks switched to voting mainly for the Democrats. I feel like I’m missing a piece of the story, and I would have liked to hear more about why they switched when they were so ardently Republican—even in the face of violence and ongoing persecution—before.
I’m also a bit cautious because on the one hand, I have Barton framing the Democrats’ resistance to school choice as a racist desire to keep poor Blacks trapped in failing schools, but on the other hand I’ve read Thomas Sowell argue in books like Charter Schools And Their Enemies that, by and large, school choice is defeated by bloated school administration systems and teacher’s union lobbies that don’t want competition to undermine the good thing they have going. Both motives tend to land under the same political umbrella, but determining the motive is rather important to figuring out a concrete solution to the problem. So, there is a lot of very good historical information in here, but I take some of the motive claims with a grain of salt. This is a good puzzle piece in my search for the big picture.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I struggled with this book. I’ll move from negatives to positives, but the punch line is that this landed on my “all-time favorite” bookshelf. My main problem with Rand is that there seems to be no room at all for mercy, and that even a cry for mercy seems to be treated as parasitism 100% of the time. There are only—she seems to say—those who produce and those who consume, and the consumers are broken down into those fractional few who are grateful for the advancement provided to them and the by-and-large masses who would rather slowly set the world on fire and aim for death than allow the producers to shed light on their own true natures as parasites.
That is the micro-view of it. However if I pull back and look at this as an archetypal story, then the things she’s talking about absolutely exist in the human heart, and there are people who fit the molds of these characters perfectly. I was stunned when I got to about the 3/4 mark and was reading about James Taggart. Abruptly, I realized who had played the part of James Taggart in my life.
Worse, I recognized myself in the pages. I saw the beaten down public and low-level flunkies, too afraid to make a decision for themselves and desperate for someone to give them orders and relieve them of the risk and the responsibility of decision-making. That’s how I lived for a very long time. Shedding that mentality is, even now, a difficult process that I have not finished. But the book reminds me that even those people are not guiltless, that it is often their indecision and fear that perpetuate their own enslavement. I have found this to be true in my own case.
Finally, this book took me into the heart of evil. I grew up reading obsessively about the Holocaust, which I recognize now as evil externalized. I have never been able to look into the minds of the guards or the SS or the leadership and figure out what was driving them. Here, in Atlas Shrugged, I was taken through the subtle evils that seek to tear down the good. The evil man who, incomprehensibly, aims for death as his final outcome, even for himself. This book helped me understand evil in ways I never did before, and it was sobering. I will likely return to this book many times in the future.
Introvert Book Club Reads
Weapons Grade by Tom Clancy and Don Bentley. I like the spy novel. This is the second Jack Ryan book I’ve read, and I enjoy this fast-paced spy series that occasionally shows up on my doorstep.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. A memoir of Jeannette's incredibly dysfunctional family, this book is as beautifully written as it is painful to read, and there isn’t much else I can say about it except that often truth really is stranger than fiction.
Half-Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls. This true-life novel follows Jeannette’s grandmother, Lily Casey. I bolted this book down in two days and felt like I’d been transported to another world—a whole other way of life. Ranching in Texas was no easy gig, and this lady did basically everything from breaking to gelding. It’s one of those reads where every few chapters you step back from yourself and see both what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost as we’ve modernized. As Thomas Sowell says, everything is about trade-offs.
The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls. This looks like her first foray into fiction, though all three books I’ve read by her read very similarly—like true-life fiction. I bolted this down in one day. Her characters are vibrant and feel like real people with real disagreements, half-baked ideas, flaws, and contradictions. Her non-fiction is an excellent example of truth being stranger than fiction, but that same principle bleeds over into her first novel.
Games
The Shady Part of Me. I have a bit of a love/hate with this platformer. It’s an interesting game where you play both a girl and her shadow. The girl can’t stand to be in the light and the shadow can only exist in the light, so you lose if the girl gets trapped in the light or if the shadow gets trapped in shadows (or hits shadowy brambles, or gets squished between shadows). There is clearly a psychological story being told here, however, unlike Gris this one is extremely unclear and is bogged down with dialogue that feels unnecessarily vague and flowery. For the most part I enjoyed the puzzles, but got very irritated as the game dragged on without answering ANY questions. Again, Gris didn’t tell us a specific psychological story, but clearly took us through the stages of loss and grief to rebirth. I had no idea what The Shady Part of Me was trying to convey by the end. Even so, it was fun to play through once.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps. THIS IS THE SECOND TIME I FOUND A SEQUEL BEFORE I FOUND THE FIRST GAME, ARGGGGH... Doesn't matter. This is still an incredible game. You play as Ori, a small monkey-like creature, whose owl-friend, Ku, is lost in a dangerous place. You must find Ku while restoring the parts of the forest that have fallen to a mysterious "Decay". Just be aware that THIS IS GAME NUMBER TWO. Even so, it plays well stand-alone and is just gorgeous. I've paused my playthrough right now because I have to get my husband to help me beat one boss that I just can't (stupid sandworm). Even so, I've got to be 3/4 of the way through the game, so that's far enough to say that it's made my favorite game list. Next, I'll play through & comment on the first game...
TV Shows
What We Saw (Season 3: An Empire of Terror and Season 2: The Cold War). Oddball pick, but I sat down with my husband, Sergey, and our housemate to watch the two seasons of this show that dealt particularly with Russia. This is a documentary series by Bill Whittle, and these two are best watched in the order mentioned above. An Empire of Terror—which documents the rise of Lenin and communism in Russia—was so unsettling and disturbing, that for the first time I truly believed I had seen a horror worse than the Holocaust. I have seen that sort of accusation thrown around and that it’s begun to lose its meaning, so at first I was squirmy when Bill Whittle set up comparisons with better-known Auschwitz or Treblinka. However, by the end of episode 6 “The Red Terror” I was convinced that if any slaughter had a right to comparison with the Holocaust, it was what happened in Russia. It makes me wonder why in God’s name there is a statue of this monster in Seattle, like it’s some monument to intellectual honor.
Watching that season paved the way to better understand Season 2, which dealt with The Cold War between Russia and the United States. By that point, even if you don’t fully understand the Russian mindset, you have a better grasp of it from season 3 so that the decisions and frustrations on both sides of a massive mindset gap make a little more sense. Very good docu-series, very worth watching.