Reckless (Cornelia Funke)

Exciting and well written, especially intriguing in the way the "real world" and "fantasy world" interact and influence each other through the exchange of ideas and technology. Good ending, leaving the history open to a sequel but without an annoying cliffhanger.

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Quotes:

The first item he took out of the chest was a handkerchief made of simple linen, but when it was rubbed between two fingers, it reliably produced one or two gold sovereigns. Jacob had received it years earlier from a Witch in exchange for a kiss that had burned his lips for weeks. The other items he packed into his knapsack looked just as innocuous: a silver snuffbox, a brass key, a tin plate, and a small bottle made of green glass. Each of these items had saved his life on more than one occasion.

So what does that teach you, Jacob Reckless? he wondered as the first Dwarf dwellings appeared among the fields and hedgerows. That, on the whole, revenge is not such a great idea.

20000 Leagues Under the Seas (Jules Verne)

Read with Laura. Awesome. In as much as it is dated in some things, and the battle with the cachalots is just wrong :-), it's still as exciting to read this now as when i first read it in Brasil, as a kid.

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Quotes:

Initially, Verne’s narrative was influenced by the 1863 uprising of Poland against Tsarist Russia. The Poles were quashed with a violence that appalled not only Verne but all Europe. As originally conceived, Verne’s Captain Nemo was a Polish nobleman whose entire family had been slaughtered by Russian troops. Nemo builds a fabulous futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, then conducts an underwater campaign of vengeance against his imperialist oppressor.

“The deepest parts of the ocean are totally unknown to us. No soundings have been able to reach them. What goes on in those distant depths? What creatures inhabit, or could inhabit, those regions twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the water?

“Then we’re done for!” “Perhaps,” Conseil replied serenely. “However, we still have a few hours before us, and in a few hours one can do a great many things!”

“You love the sea, Captain.” “Yes, I love it! The sea is the be all and end all! It covers seven-tenths of the planet earth. Its breath is clean and healthy. It’s an immense wilderness where a man is never lonely, because he feels life astir on every side. The sea is simply the vehicle for a prodigious, unearthly mode of existence; it’s simply movement and love; it’s living infinity, as one of your poets put it.

I thanked Captain Nemo and approached the shelves of this library. Written in every language, books on science, ethics, and literature were there in abundance, but I didn’t see a single work on economics—they seemed to be strictly banned on board.

“Nautron respoc lorni virch.”

“Professor, when I proposed that you go hunting in my Crespo forests, you thought I was contradicting myself. When I informed you that it was an issue of underwater forests, you thought I’d gone insane. Professor, you must never make snap judgments about your fellow man.”

“The earth doesn’t need new continents, but new men!”

That day it was yuletide, and it struck me that Ned Land badly missed celebrating “Christmas,” that genuine family holiday where Protestants are such zealots.

On January 13, arriving in the Timor Sea, Captain Nemo raised the island of that name at longitude 122°. This island, whose surface area measures 1,625 square leagues, is governed by rajahs. These aristocrats deem themselves the sons of crocodiles, in other words, descendants with the most exalted origins to which a human being can lay claim. Accordingly, their scaly ancestors infest the island’s rivers and are the subjects of special veneration. They are sheltered, nurtured, flattered, pampered, and offered a ritual diet of nubile maidens; and woe to the foreigner who lifts a finger against these sacred saurians.

If you’re invited to hunt bears in the Swiss mountains, you might say: “Oh good, I get to go bear hunting tomorrow!” If you’re invited to hunt lions on the Atlas plains or tigers in the jungles of India, you might say: “Ha! Now’s my chance to hunt lions and tigers!” But if you’re invited to hunt sharks in their native element, you might want to think it over before accepting.

“That Indian, professor, lives in the land of the oppressed, and I am to this day, and will be until my last breath, a native of that same land!”

If this is the case and Captain Nemo still inhabits the ocean—his adopted country—may the hate be appeased in that fierce heart! May the contemplation of so many wonders extinguish the spirit of vengeance in him! May the executioner pass away, and the scientist continue his peaceful exploration of the seas! If his destiny is strange, it’s also sublime.

Thus to that question asked 6,000 years ago in the Book of Ecclesiastes—“Who can fathom the soundless depths?”—two men out of all humanity have now earned the right to reply. Captain Nemo and I.

A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan)

Wonderfully written, a punk-rock novel of many intertwined lives, with lots of mistakes, growing up, and some redemption thrown in. It's probably good enough that even people who don't like music will like the book.

Read in Glen Arbor, MI

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Quotes:

It began the usual way,

“Don’t you get it, Steph?” Bosco finally exploded. “That’s the whole point. We know the outcome, but we don’t know when, or where, or who will be there when it finally happens. It’s a Suicide Tour.”

Time’s a goon, right?

It was several weeks before the general’s picture appeared again. Now the hat was pushed back and the ties were gone. The headline read: EXTENT OF B’S WAR CRIMES MAY BE EXAGGERATED, NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

Word had gotten out, and Dolly was deluged with offers of work from mass murderers hungry for a fresh start.

“That wasn’t me, in Naples,” she told you, looking out at the crowded bar. “I don’t know who it was. I feel sorry for her.”

“We’re going to meet again in a different place,” Bix says. “Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us.”

Because he never could quite forget that every byte of information he’d posted online (favorite color, vegetable, sexual position) was stored in the databases of multinationals who swore they would never, ever use it—that he was owned, in other words, having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when he’d felt most subversive?

Her confidence seemed more drastic than the outcome of a happy childhood; it was cellular confidence, as if Lulu were a queen in disguise, without need or wish to be recognized.

“I’m fine. I just get tired of talking.” “Ditto,” Alex said. He felt exhausted. “There are so many ways to go wrong,” Lulu said. “All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can’t ever just Say. The. Thing.”

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words—“friend” and “real” and “story” and “change”—words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity,” “search,” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever

Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.” Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. “You grew up, Alex,” he said, “just like the rest of us.”

th blu nyt
th stRs u cant c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy

A sound of clicking heels on the pavement punctured the quiet. Alex snapped open his eyes, and he and Bennie both turned—whirled, really, peering for Sasha in the ashy dark. But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

The Tiger (John Vaillant)

Fascinating and exciting ecological thriller, set in an area of the world that is so remote that it might as well be another planet. My only complaint is that the author spends way too many paragraphs telling and explaining just how messed up Russia is. I felt like saying "i get it! Russia is messed up! can we talk about tigers now?"

Read in Glen Arbor, MI

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Quotes:

Between 1992 and 1994, approximately one hundred tigers—roughly one quarter of the country’s wild population—were killed.

In his professional capacity as senior inspector for Inspection Tiger, Trush acted as a medium between the Law of the Jungle and the Law of the State;

Tigers go by several different names here, and one of them is Toyota—because, during the 1990s, that is what you could buy with one.

After studying the files of Stalin’s political prisoners, historian Roy Medvedev concluded that 200,000 people were imprisoned for telling jokes.

In 2008, nineteen of the world’s one hundred richest people were Russians.

Ongoing in the debate about our origins and our nature is the question of how we became fascinated by monsters, but only certain kinds. The existence of this book alone is a case in point. No one would read it if it were about a pig or a moose (or even a person) who attacked unemployed loggers. Tigers, on the other hand, get our full attention.

“Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.”

Jewish Autonomous Region, a little known creation of Stalin’s intended to serve, oxymoronically, as a Soviet Zion for Russian Jews.

At the beginning of the last century, it is estimated that there were more than 75,000 tigers living in Asia. Today, you would never know; within the fragile envelope of a single human memory 95 percent of those animals have been killed—for sport, for beauty, for medicine, for money, for territory, and for revenge.

On a daily basis, Trush manifests the verity that faith is a physical act.

Leaving Church (Barbara Brown Taylor)

A beautifully written autobiography that rings true.

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Quotes:

This is not the life I planned or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me—that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human—seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that.

Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again.

“If we don’t leave the city, I’m going to die sooner than I have to.”

As one of four priests in a big downtown parish, I was engaged in work so meaningful that there was no place to stop.

The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is.

If I had been born in another time and place, I might have headed to a convent or to a small beehive-shaped hut made of stone on a holy island. I might even have found a shaman to lead me deeper into the mysteries. In my own time and place, I was not aware of so many options. When I put my strong sense of the Divine Presence together with my irresistible urge to help hurt things, seminary kept coming up as the next stop on my map.

being ordained is not about serving God perfectly but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall.

“Think hard before you do this,” one said to me when I told him I wanted to be ordained. “Right now, you have the broadest ministry imaginable. As a layperson, you can serve God no matter what you do for a living, and you can reach out to people who will never set foot inside a church. Once you are ordained, that is going to change. Every layer of responsibility you add is going to narrow your ministry, so think hard before you choose a smaller box.”

Sometimes, when people were busy adoring me or despising me, I got the distinct impression that it was not about me at all. I reminded them of someone else who was no longer around but who had made such a large dent in their lives that they were still trying to work it out.

“Eating forbidden fruit makes many jams,” read one church sign. “Give Satan an inch and he will become your ruler,” read another.

Because this is a love story, it is difficult to say what went wrong between the Church and me. On the one hand, it was the best of parish ministry that did me in.

On the other hand, there was a definite hardening taking place, not only at Grace-Calvary but at every church I knew. The presenting issue was human sexuality. While the Episcopal Church had gladly received the ministry of gay and lesbian people for as long as anyone could remember, it had done so without blessing the “gay and lesbian” part. The unspoken deal was that the ministry could continue as long as the sexuality stayed under cover.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.

Because church people tend to think they should not fight, most of them are really bad at it.

Once I had begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs.

The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy…” “Behold the Lamb of God…” “Behold, I stand at the door and knock…”

If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common? Or that coming together to confess all that we do not know is at least as sacred an activity as declaring what we think we do know?

By my rules, caring for troubled people always took precedence over enjoying delightful people, and the line of troubled people never ended. Sitting there with corn stuck between my teeth, I wondered why I had not changed that rule sooner.

Remember the Sabbath, the rabbis say, and you fulfill all of Torah.

A man standing in line with me at a grocery store in Atlanta once asked me if I were headed to a costume party as a cross-dressing priest.

In Clarkesville, the collar had a more sobering effect, especially among church members. When people saw it in public, they shifted from normal gear into the most reverent gear they could find.

“The people you think love you don’t love you as much as you think they love you,” Frank said to me, “and the people you think hate you don’t hate you as much as you think they hate you.”

my soul did not operate on a solar calendar. My soul operated on a lunar calendar, coming up at a different time every night and never looking the same way two nights in a row.

As Christians, we were especially vulnerable, since our faith turned on the story of a divine human being.

We needed a different way of being together before God, shaped more like a circle than a pyramid. We needed to ditch the sheep paradigm. We needed to take turns filling in for Jesus, understanding that none of us was equal to the task to which all of us had been called. We needed to share the power.

The second thing that happened when I lost my power was that I got a taste of the spiritual poverty that is central to the Christ path.

With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.

Gradually I remembered what I had known all along, which is that church is not a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God’s presence in this world. By offering people a place where they may engage the steady practice of listening to divine words and celebrating divine sacraments, church can help people gain a feel for how God shows up—not only in Holy Bibles and Holy Communion but also in near neighbors, mysterious strangers, sliced bread, and grocery store wine. That way, when they leave church, they no more leave God than God leaves them. They simply carry what they have learned into the wide, wide world, where there is a crying need for people who will recognize the holiness in things and hold them up to God.

Although I never found a church where I felt completely at home again, I made a new home in the world. I renewed my membership in the priesthood of all believers, who may not have as much power as we would like, but whose consolation prize is the freedom to meet God after work, well away from all centers of religious command, wherever God shows up.

He was so immersed in the life of the Church, he said, that he occasionally forgot that the life of faith was not always the same thing.

I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty.

It’s only wilderness if there’s something out there that can eat you.”

Once I understood that the gospel writers had not told me the whole truth about the Pharisees, I wondered what else they had not told me. Once I noticed that Luke said things about Paul that Paul denied, I wondered what other quarrels Luke had hidden from my view.

I felt like someone who had strolled into the feeding of the five thousand on a casual walk around the lake.

A priest is a priest, no matter where she happens to be. Her job is to recognize the holiness in things and hold them up to God. Her job is to speak in ways that help other people recognize the holiness in things too.

My priesthood was not what I did but who I was. In this new light, nothing was wasted. All that had gone before was blessing, and all yet to come was more.

the central truth of the Christian gospel: life springs from death, not only at the last but also in the many little deaths along the way. When everything you count on for protection has failed, the Divine Presence does not fail. The hands are still there—not promising to rescue, not promising to intervene—promising only to hold you no matter how far you fall.