The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester)

My friend Mike Perlowin considers this one of his favorite books.

It is very good classic SiFi, weird and ferocious.

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Quotes:

Any man was capable of jaunting provided he developed two faculties, visualization and concentration. He had to visualize, completely and precisely, the spot to which he desired to teleport himself; and he had to concentrate the latent energy of his mind into a single thrust to get him there. Above all, he had to have faith...the faith that Charles Fort Jaunte never recovered. He had to believe he would jaunte. The slightest doubt would block the mind-thrust necessary for teleportation.

It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways.

“Scientifically mated,” Moira said proudly. She pulled up the sleeve of her nightgown and showed him her arm. It was disfigured by four ugly slashes. “I have been inoculated with something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.”

a gold organ with robot organist by Tiffany,

“The Burning Man! Look! The Burning Man!”

Revenge is for dreams…never for reality.”

“Sensible, matter-of-fact, like good businessmen who’ve had bad luck,” Sheffield answered promptly. “That’s the usual attitude of the professional criminal. It’s obvious you’re an amateur, if you’re a criminal at all.

But I’m not a robot. I’m a freak of the universe...a thinking animal...and I’m trying to see my way clear through this morass.

“Because you’re alive, sir. You might as well ask: Why is life? Don’t ask about it. Live it.”

“I believe,” he thought. “I have faith.” He jaunted again and failed again. “Faith in what?” he asked himself, adrift in limbo. “Faith in faith,” he answered himself. “It isn’t necessary to have something to believe in. It’s only necessary to believe that somewhere there’s something worthy of belief.”

Bear In Love (Daniel Pinkwater)

Very cute, very good, as good as the best other Pinkwater picture books, really.

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Quotes:

“You are some cute little bear.”
“And you are quite the big strong bunny."

Rock Springs (Richard Ford)

In the stories of this collection, emotionally damaged characters cope with impossible odds by enduring and staying: "Things can be fixed by staying; but to go out into the night and not come back hazards life, and everything can get out of hand."

Thanks, Dale Wisely, for giving me this book.

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Quotes:

This is not a happy story. I warn you.

Things can be fixed by staying; but to go out into the night and not come back hazards life, and everything can get out of hand.

This was not going to be a good day in Bobby’s life, that was clear, because he was headed to jail.

And I thought Claude was a fool then, and this was how you knew what a fool was— someone who didn’t know what mattered to him in the long run.

But when you are older, nothing you did when you were young matters at all. I know that now, though I didn’t know it then. We were simply young.

The woman smelled like marijuana. It was a smell he liked, but it made him nervous. He wondered what the Army people would think. Being in the Army was a business now. Businessmen didn’t smoke dope.

Things you do pass away and are gone, and you need only to outlive them for your life to be better, steadily better.

Trouble comes cheap and leaves expensive,

Each of us had done something that night. Something different. That was plain enough. And there was nothing more to talk about.

Or maybe she thought this: that people can do the worst things they are capable of doing and in the end the world comes back to normal.

I began to date my real life from that moment and that thought. It is this: that situations have possibilities in them, and we have only to be present to be involved. Tonight was a very bad one. But how were we to know it would turn out this way until it was too late and we had all been changed forever?

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (Barbara Brown Taylor)

Not so much a sequel to Leaving Church, but a reflection on spiritual practices, grounded in auto-biography. Excellent.

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Quotes:

People seem willing to look all over the place for this treasure. They will spend hours launching prayers into the heavens. They will travel halfway around the world to visit a monastery in India or to take part in a mission trip to Belize. The last place most people look is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents, and encounters of their lives. What possible spiritual significance could a trip to the grocery store have? How could something as common as a toothache be a door to greater life?

I learned reverence from my father. For him, it had nothing to do with religion and very little to do with God. I think it may have had something to do with his having been a soldier, since the exercise of reverence generally includes knowing your rank in the overall scheme of things.

Reverence for creation comes fairly easily for most people. Reverence for other people presents more of a challenge, especially if those people’s lives happen to impinge upon your own.

I saw what dies so that I may live, and while I did not stop eating chicken meat, I began cooking it and eating it with unprecedented reverence.

Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.”

every spiritual practice begins with the body.

“Do this,” he said—not believe this but do this—“in remembrance of me.”

NOT EVERYONE is able to walk, but most people can, which makes walking one of the most easily available spiritual practices of all.

I mean God loves bodies. I mean that in some way that defies all understanding, God means to welcome risen bodies and not just disembodied souls to heaven’s banquet table. The resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God.

Popular religion focuses so hard on spiritual success that most of us do not know the first thing about the spiritual fruits of failure.

Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.

It can be difficult to be an introvert in church, especially if you happen to be the pastor.

“We have just enough religion to make us hate one another,” Jonathan Swift once observed, “but not enough to make us love one another.”

“The supreme religious challenge,” says Rabbi Sacks, “is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image,” 10 for only then can we see past our own reflections in the mirror to the God we did not make up.

The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead.

Earlier in my life, I thought there was one particular thing I was supposed to do with my life. I thought that God had a purpose for me and my main job was to discover what it was.
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“Do anything that pleases you,” the voice in my head said again, “and belong to me.”

While the world deeply needs people who will punch cash registers, enter data, empty bedpans, and take household garbage to the dump, these purposes are too small for most human beings.

And yet meaningful work is hard to come by. Not everyone can teach school or cure illness. Plenty of us do not get the kind of work we want, and plenty more can find it difficult to stay focused on the meaning of what we are doing.

In Buddhist teaching, right livelihood is one of the flagstones on the Noble Eightfold Path. Along with right speech, right intention, right action, and right effort, right livelihood is a key step in waking up to the true nature of reality, which includes the true nature of you.

The inherited wisdom is that certain kinds of work are bad for you. Being a hired killer is not so good, for instance. Neither is selling drugs, arms, or sex. The basic principle is to do no harm. Beyond that, you are free to do quite a lot of things for a living, but they are not all going to come with their own evident purposes. Supplying that purpose is going to be up to you.

while my chosen vocation gave me a really good job in the divine work of creation, it remained a subset of a larger vocation, which was the job of loving God and neighbor as myself.

work as spiritual practice,

Work connects us to other people.

Any worker with a good imagination should be able to come up with hundreds of people whom his or her work affects.

Yet it is always possible that one’s true work in the world is not what one does for a living.

In a world where the paid work that people do does not always feed their hearts, it seems important to leave open the possibility that our vocations may turn out to be things we do for free.

ONE COMMON PROBLEM for people who believe that God has one particular job in mind for them is that it is almost never the job they are presently doing. This means that those who are busiest trying to figure out God’s purpose for their lives are often the least purposeful about the work they are already doing.

The point is to find something that feeds your sense of purpose, and to be willing to look low for that purpose as well as high.

Some busy people cannot even tell the difference between relaxation and narcolepsy, because the minute they sit down in a quiet place alone, they nod off.

On day three, I decided that a power outage would make a great spiritual practice. Never mind giving up meat or booze for Lent. For a taste of real self-denial, just turn off the power for a while and see if phrases such as “the power of God” and “the light of Christ” sound any different to you.

Pain makes theologians of us all.

I am a failure at prayer.

I do not know anyone who prays very long without running into the wall of God’s apparent nonresponsiveness.

“If you ask anything in my name, I will do it,” Jesus says in the gospel of John, leaving a lot of us wondering what it is about “in my name” that we do not understand.

The problem, I think, is that divine response to prayer is one of those beauties that remain in the eye of the beholder.

The plan is to replace approval with gratitude. The plan is to take what is as God’s ongoing answer to me.

At the same time, I am aware that prayer is more than something I do. The longer I practice prayer, the more I think it is something that is always happening, like a radio wave that carries music through the air whether I tune in to it or not. This is hard to talk about, which is why prayer is a practice and not a discussion topic.

To pronounce a blessing on something, it is important to see it as it is.

Not many people know it, but both Martin Luther and Julian of Norwich did some of their best thinking on the toilet.

God has no hands but ours, no bread but the bread we bake, no prayers but the ones we make, whether we know what we are doing or not.

for reasons beyond anyone’s understanding, God has decided to be made known in flesh. Matter matters to God. The most ordinary things are drenched in divine possibility. Pronouncing blessings upon them is the least we can do.

So I end where I began, at the wedding of spirit and flesh, practicing reverence with the living and the dead. I hope you can think of a dozen chapters I left out of this book. I hope you can think of at least that many more ways to celebrate your own priesthood, practiced at the altar of your own life.

The Mysterious Benedict Society - The Prisoner's Dilemma (Trenton Lee Stuart)

The final book of the series, wasn't as exciting as the previous two. But it brings things adequately to a conclusion. I kept expecting the "prisoner's dilemma" to become part of the story, and apparently it never did!

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Tears of the Giraffe: A No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Novel (2) (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) (Alexander Mccall Smith)

I'm now addicted to this series. It moves forward on the strength of its characters, the most important of which is the idealized Africa of Botswana.

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Quotes:

In Mma Ramotswe’s view there was God, Modimo, who lived in the sky, more or less directly above Africa. God was extremely understanding, particularly of people like herself, but to break his rules, as so many people did with complete disregard, was to invite retribution. When they died, good people, such as Mma Ramotswe’s father, Obed Ramotswe, were undoubtedly welcomed by God. The fate of the others was unclear, but they were sent to some terrible place—perhaps a bit like Nigeria, she thought—and when they acknowledged their wrongdoing they would be forgiven.

“If you have been feeding him so well, then why is he thin? A man who is well looked-after becomes fatter. They are just like cattle. That is well-known.”

FOR A few moments after her visitor had finished her story, Mma Ramotswe sat in silence. What could she do for this woman? Could she find anything out if the Botswana Police and the American Embassy had tried and failed? There was probably nothing she could do, and yet this woman needed help and if she could not obtain it from the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency then where would she be able to find it? “I shall help you,” she said, adding, “my sister.”

In traditional society there was no such thing as an unwanted child; everybody would be looked after by somebody. But things were changing, and now there were orphans.

A mechanic should be like a priest. He should not talk about what he sees.”

This is what Africa could say to the world: it could remind it what it is to be human.

The Americans were very clever; they sent rockets into space and invented machines which could think more quickly than any human being alive, but all this cleverness could also make them blind. They did not understand other people. They thought that everyone looked at things in the same way as Americans did, but they were wrong.

Mma Ramotse shrugged; she had never thought about it. “I suppose that it means that we can all give something,” she said. “A giraffe has nothing else to give—only tears.”

2BR02B (Kurt Vonnegut)

A short story by Vonnegut; a typical anti-utopia based on the control of population growth. Sad and fatalistic. The title refers to the phone number of a suicide hotline, and it reads as "to be or not to be" (get it?). Dreary, but it's still Vonnegut.

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Quotes:

The painter pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born and, once born, demanding to be fruitful ... to multiply and to live as long as possible—to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last forever. All the answers that the painter could think of were grim.

Zone One (Colson Whitehead)

Another "art" writer tackling a pop culture theme, similar to what happened with The Last Wherewolf. This is a very well written book. A little slow in the first two thirds, it picks momentum as it moves towards the end. Whitehead makes this more than a standard "shoot'em in the head" zombie story by turning it into a metaphor of 21st century life in New York City. It also invites the reader to decide who are the real monsters: the zombies, the equally carnivorous (and also cynical) government, or the zombie hunters. In the end, zombies and humans are just trying to survive. The book's contribution to the zombie fauna is the "straggler": the zombie who has become immobilized, mysteriously frozen into repeating one single gesture of his or her previous life. Very haunting.

This invites comparison with the other zombie book i read recently: World War Z. They both try to deal realistically with the impossible problem of how to dispose of the enormous amount of leftover zombie "biomass" after a zombie calamity, but Zone One is shorter, better written, and it refreshingly avoids indulging on the American military fetish.

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Quotes:

Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.

PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder.

New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example. The main difference was that there were fewer people.

Bring out your dead.

That’s the way we’ve always done it. It’s what this country was built on. The plague merely made it more literal, spelled it out in case you didn’t get it before.

“Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction),”

At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running.

He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.

He’d never met anyone in the camps or the great out there who had made it out of the city after the first couple of days. They left the doors unlocked.

Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. Only in the middle was there safety.

Mustn’t humanize them. The whole thing breaks down unless you are fundamentally sure that they are not you.

He’d always seen himself in them, the robots who roved the galaxy in search of the emotion chip, the tentacled things that were, beneath their mottled, puckered membranes, more human than the murderous villagers who hunted them for their difference.

She’d become partial to cachaça after a six-month thing with a Brazilian guy whose constant referencing of his nationality was a cornerstone of his personality,

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

“You know why they walk around? They walk around because they’re too stupid to know they’re dead.”