Reading Update

Once again the busyness of life has distracted me from blogging.  Here's what I've been reading since my last review:

 Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring:  Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant.  Jacobs, an English professor at Wheaton College (IL not MA) is one of my favorite writers.  Wayfaring is a collection of essays previously published in various periodicals.  He's a fantastic essayist and writes on a delightfully broad range of subjects:  trees, Harry Potter (which he loves:  "the best penny-dreadful ever written"), Bible translation, friendship, and more.

 Stephen Mansfield, In Search of God and Guinness:  A Biography of the Book that Changed the World.  I love Guinness, but I only liked this book.  It tells the story of Guinness' founding in the 18th century all the way through to today but with particular attention to how much the Guinness family used their wealth for good, including providing wonderful benefits to employees (way before anyone else was doing it) as well as for the poor of Ireland.  The writing was competent but much less enjoyable coming off of Jacobs.

 Mike McKinley, Church Planting is for Wimps:  How God Uses Messed-Up People to Plant Ordinary Churches That Do Extraordinary Things.  Very good read on planting churches, or rather, one man's story of revitalizing an all-but-dead church.  Anyone interested in church planting should read and learn.

 Neil Gaiman, American Gods.  Gaiman is a fantasy writer.  At least I think so.  He's a bit hard to pin down for me, but not as hard as Neal Stephenson.  Anyway, American Gods tells the story about a battle between the old gods who came over to America with their former adherents (like the Scandinavian god Odin) and the new American gods like Media and the Internet.  I didn't find the story as intriguing as Gaiman's Anansi Boys and Neverwhere, and it was also a lot dirtier.  And, to my disappointment, it didn't give any substantial critique of our modern idolatries.  The gods in this book (including Media) are actual gods not false idols.

 J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.  This deserves a blog post all of its own.