matt shelton

My wife has a thing for non-fiction. She barely reads anything that isn’t loaded with facts and data these days. On the other hand, if you look back at what I’ve read in the past couple of years, most of what I read is anything but. I’m all about dystopian futures, space thrillers, cyberpunk, etc. Once in a while, though, she’ll find a gem that hooks me as well, as was the case with Dr. Luntz’ What Americans Really Want... Really.

Dr. Luntz’ survey data is compounded by his years of polling experience and time spent observing and recording human preference. Some of his data points are startling while others are really not that shocking. Short of posting entire excerpts here (which I can’t… I’ve since returned the book to the library), I will note that my greatest takeaway from the book was that really, deep down, most of us are all about ourselves. We want what we want because it benefits us personally.

Not really a positive, but at least it felt honest.

I’m on a serious book-reading roll this month. I promise I’m calming down now, because, well, the next book on my plate is The System of the World…

After my mom saw that I was reading Jesus For President last fall, she thought I might like this one by Donald Miller, the sub-title of which is Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. The authors of Jesus for President footnote Blue Like Jazz a couple of times, so I was already familiar with the book by reference.

I have a hard time deciding which one I like better, to be completely honest. On the one hand, Jesus For President was a hard-hitting look at Christian discipleship in a time when we find ourselves pulled more and more toward secular positions. It made me feel a bit bad about times in which I should have been a better follower of Christ, and guilt can be a powerful motivator!

On the other hand, Blue Like Jazz makes me feel a little more normal about feeling bad. Miller is a fantastic personal story teller, and his insights into his own spiritual growth are engaging, enlightening and motivating. One of the underlying themes is learning to love (God, others, yourself), which Miller introduces as being like learning to appreciate Jazz music – he didn’t like Jazz until he saw someone playing soulfully with their eyes closed, and then he loved Jazz. Being able to accept the forgiveness and grace that comes with salvation and a personal relationship with Christ is parallel to loving yourself (and everyone else).

He also spends a good amount of time recalling events from when he was auditing some classes at Reed College. I have an extended member of the family who went to Reed, and I’m now suddenly very interested in asking him about some of the more sordid events which supposedly take place there. I don’t want details, mind you, but an additional perspective would be fascinating.

There’s one story that sticks with me after turning the 181st page: Miller was part of a small group of Christians at Reed (a certain minority on one of the most secular campuses in the country). During the annual Renn Fayre celebration, the group put up a “confession booth” in the middle of the campus. Rather than accepting confessions, which was likely to cement them as the negative stereotype many viewed them to be, they did the confessing. They confessed their sins, the sins of the church and of Christians at large. They moved people and were changed by the simple experience of saying things like “Christ tells us to feed the poor, and I know I haven’t done the best job of that.” and “Christ said to love your neighbor, and I’ve certainly had a bad attitude when I’m woken up by loud noises from next door.”, etc. This sounds like such a profound experience.

Now that I’ve thought about it a little more (ok, the span of a few paragraphs), I did like Blue Like Jazz more. A little, anyway.

This was on sale for about two bucks in the discount bin at Barnes and Noble. It looks interesting. And short.

It was both of those things. This could easily be the end of my post, but I actually liked the book…

At 181 pages, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an incredibly quick read. Mohsin Hamid pens this tale in the first-person, speaking to an unidentified individual (who we are led to believe is a journalist) at a cafe in Lahore, Pakistan. This story of a young Pakistani coming to America and finding both academic and professional success only to reject it all and return home within five years is quite compelling. It’s not thrilling, and I make this point singularly because one of the praise notes on the cover is one that makes this book out to be some amazing work of thriller fiction, when in reality it’s not all that suspenseful. In fact, most of “the next page” is fairly obvious, even if it is an interesting story.

Hamid expertly weaves the theme of “fundamentals” throughout the book, and I have to believe that this was the purpose behind the title, using the oft-spoken phrase “Islamic Fundamentalism” as a mental trigger to engage the reader. In fact, there is almost no presence of said fundamentalism in this book, save the last dozen or so pages. Instead, the narrator experiences different aspects of fundamentals throughout this story: the life of an immigrant in America, the academic talents which propelled him into the business world, the business acumen which gave him professional success, love with a woman who was fundamentally unavailable to him, and then the return home to his family in Pakistan.

I really liked this $2 discount book, and I felt a bit insulted for the author that Barnes and Noble was practically willing to give it away.

This month has already started out as a fantastic reading month. Whether by choice or by circumstance, I’ve found 20-80 minutes almost every day to keep up on whatever I’m reading at the time. (This post is late by an entire book – I’ll post about The Reluctant Fundamentalist later.)

I’ve been meaning to read the rest of William Gibson’s books for a while now. Having read several a few Christmases ago, I’ve been nearly as hooked on his writing as on that of Neal Stephenson. Admittedly, Gibson’s books are shorter, easier reads. They’re also not quite as compelling. Win some, lose some, I suppose.

Virtual Light begins the Bridge trilogy, a trio of stories set around what has become of the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco, California. The environment, a more anarchistic version of our present, set “in the future” of 2004, is somewhat like the reality of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. It is different enough, however, to separate the literary works into distinct macrocosms.

The book is excellent, though not quite as dweeby as some of his earlier stuff. I’ve gotten the impression while reading each of Gibson’s books that he started out writing Cyberpunk and has been trending towards Conspiracy Thriller ever since. I don’t dislike the trend overall, even if I found his first books more interesting. I’ll have to pick up the next two in the series soon to keep the momentum going.

A semi-repeat from last year, when I aimed to read one book per month, I’ve set a goal for 2010 to read fifteen books, which seems/feels a tad ambitious. These are the first eight in my pile for the year:

Continue Reading

Two books in a week… had last January started this way, I would have been done with my 2009 reading by Valentine’s Day with room to spare. Sadly, not all books are as quick and interesting as Tom Brown’s The Wormwood Archive. Tom is a local (to my in-laws) author writing a set of structured criticisms of his home church’s rise to megachurch standing. This would probably be boring on its own, but Tom follows C.S. Lewis‘ epistolary style, and pens his thoughts as letters by or to Wormwood, as found in The Screwtape Letters.

Tom’s church underwent a transformation into a megachurch over the course of a few years. The transformation seems to have followed the methods produced by the Willow Creek Association, shifting its focus from its traditional, family-focused roots toward more contemporary, performance-driven styles of worship aimed at younger, more casaul seekers. Tom’s criticisms certainly are not the first of Willow Creek and their methods, but his hit a bit closer to home, having lived through the transition as a lay leader in a once happy, family-like congregation. Since Willow Creek’s admission a couple of years ago that they might have done it wrong, the criticisms seem more poignant.

To me, however, Tom’s criticisms of his fictionalized self are the most interesting part of the book. He characterizes his own weaknesses as possible in-roads for negative persuasion by “Wormwood” and his minions. This level of honesty and objectivity, while criticizing what has been your faith home for so many years, cannot have been the most trivial of tasks. There is a strong sense of humility, even within such an obviously critical work.

Overall, this was an excellent book, and even if you haven’t read The Screwtape Letters, it’s quite a good read.

I’ve been working on Jesus For President since early October, having received it for my birthday a couple of weeks beforehand from my dad. My initial impression was something along the lines of “wow, this book sure looks cool!”, and while that impression surely stuck for the next few hundred pages, it was merely a sub-text for a book filled with in-your-face analyses of Judeo-Christian history and sharp challenges as to what true discipleship means as a follower of Christ.

The authors, Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, walk through the socio-political history of God’s Word(s) from Genesis to Revelation, and use it as a framework for discussing discipleship in the present tense. I spent much of the book thinking I’d approached parts of my life woefully backwards, and other parts of the book thinking “this is what I was raised to think – why does it feel so new?”.

Shane and Chris spin an excellent yarn here, and I’d strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in digging deeper into their walk with/for Christ. There is a lot more to say about this book, but my words would not do it justice. I do think, however, that I may read it again in a few months as a refresher.

I’m perilously behind on my goal of reading a book a month this year. This one almost feels like a cop-out, but really, I read (almost all the way) through this entire 200 page book in an afternoon over Thanksgiving weekend. Admittedly, I skipped a chapter that I couldn’t care less about, but we’ll count it anyway.

Jay Rossier’s Living With Chickens gives a great overview on raising these creatures, be they for food (meat), food (eggs) or fun (as pets). I can’t imagine folks keeping them as pets, but as I start to think more and more about living sustainably, I feel a draw towards raising a small flock for a regular supply of eggs. I even looked at some interesting coop designs over at Backyard Chickens. It looks like fun to raise chickens!

On the other hand, it also looks like a TON of work. I have a toddler. Gosh, that’s enough work by itself, and I’m in the office 50+ hours per week! Maybe the chickens will wait a few years.

I’m 3/4 of the way through the book I really should be posting about, Jesus For President, which my dad sent me for my birthday this year. I’ll probably write way too much about it when the time comes, so until then…

It caught my eye as I walked past my basement bookshelf last week. My favorite Stephenson novel, Zodiac, sitting squarely between The Big U and Snow Crash, looking particularly tempting, was too hard to resist. So, over the course of 3 or 4 shockingly long baby naps, I breezed through the 308 pages that make up this entertaining, thought-provoking and possibly overly informative eco-thriller.

It helps that I’ve read it before. The first-person narrator, Sangamon Taylor, is an asshole, and he’s hilarious. Every one of Stephenson’s focal characters is just a little bit of an ass, just a little too smart for their own good, and just precocious enough that the story almost happens to them solely because of who they are. (I suppose that’s the point, right?) This is a formula for fiction that I find incredibly entertaining, hence the repeat read.

I mentioned the first time I read the book on my old blog back in November of 2004:

I started reading Zodiac by Neal Stephenson at the airport, and was about 2/3 of the way through it by the time we landed at Midway. I gotta say, there isn’t a thing that I’ve read by him that I don’t like. I need to pick up The Diamond Age before reading his current trilogy set in the 17th century called The Baroque Cycle.

The book is set in Boston, which means that when the narrator says “We took the green line to Kenmore Square and took a bus to Watertown Square…” I know exactly what he’s talking about, and happen to know he probably took the 70 or 70A bus.

One of the things I like most about Stephenson’s books is that he throws in all of this semi-random, yet utterly useful background information about his characters and the science behind whatever it is they’re dealing with. This means that I learned a lot about Chlorine last night, which I don’t much care about, but was nonetheless entertained.

I highly recommend this book, based only on the first 250 of 308 pages. I’ll re-endorse it later, I’m sure… and on that note, I think I’ll go finish it.

This is actually the third time I’ve blasted through this book, I enjoy it so much. It’s still holding place as my favorite Stephenson novel of all time, just ahead of Cryptonomicon, with Snow Crash in at a close third.

Mona Lisa Overdrive is the third book in the Sprawl Trilogy, along with Neuromancer and Count Zero. I read the first two almost back to back a year or so ago, and only happened upon the trilogy’s conclusion this month. It took almost a third of the way through to remember some of the more pertinent details from the first two volumes — the Tessier-Ashpools, and their reclusive orbital spire for instance.

The book was a very easy read, much like Spook Country and the rest of Gibson’s books I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Again, however, I was struck with the single-person-on-drugs thematic element which I have yet to see anyone else take and interest in. Maybe it’s so minor that no one else cares, but every one of his books that I have read to date shares it. It is as if Gibson is a closet fan of substance abuse, or that he’s never experimented and wants to live its effects vicariously through one of his characters. Nevertheless, it was just as entertaining this time around. There is, again, an element of control loss when the addiction is in play.

I’m still psyching myself up to get started on The System of the World later this year. I think I’m going to cram in another book before the end of the month, and try to do another two in September so that I can spend October through December on the third tome of The Baroque Cycle and hit my “one book a month” goal, in number anyway.