Unwilling

A novel is not real life. We all know that, yet in the middle of a good novel we find ourselves engaged in the world of the novel as if it was our own, as if it were real. We may even enjoy the novel's world more than our own real world. We willingly suspend our disbelief to enjoy the novel's world. And sometimes not.That was the feeling I had as I completed Split Second.

    I began the book with high expectations. The author, David Baldacci, was someone my wife recommended. (She likes crime thrillers.) And the back of the book said Baldacci is the author of "fourteen consecutive New York Times and international  bestsellers." What could go wrong?

     Well, the plot for one.

    It started well, actually it started very well. Secret Service agent Michelle Maxwell is head of a detail guarding presidential candidate John Bruno. The candidate, who is on the campaign trail somewhere in rural America, demands they take a detour so that he can pay his respects to an old friend recently deceased whose body is at a really out in the boondocks funeral home.

     There are the usual bunch of innocuous-looking characters in  disguise hanging around the funeral home (which builds suspense), but agent Maxwell sees nothing threatening. She allows Bruno to view the body alone with the friend's widow.  Whereupon, Bruno is kidnapped.

     It sounds like an interesting story at this point. There are the appealing characters of agent Maxwell and former agent Sean King.  There are the ingenious bad guys. There is danger. There is a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter. And there are the usual smart, sharp shooters.

     That should have made for an engrossing and entertaining Christmas vacation read.  But it didn't. The plot was way too convoluted. The bad guy was unbelievable. And the author needed to repeatedly rely on deus ex machina to save the good guys and to advance the plot (like dropping a red herring into the middle of the action just to confuse the reader, two escaped convicts, who have otherwise no relationship to anything else going on.

     There is, of course, at the end the expected explanation of all the loose ends. as in most detective stories. There is the happy ending when the two unlikely but victorious sleuths walk off into the sunset hand in hand. But I found myself unsatisfied. I felt tricked. I entered the world of the novel and after 480 pages found it too unreal to believe. It was fun while it lasted, I guess, but I don't think I'll read another Baldacci novel.
    

Robinson Crusoe

What is the title and who is the author of the book? What is the genre? How many pages.

I began reading Robinson Crusoe last year as the English classes were doing independent reading. I had long been interested in reading it because it is considered one of the very earliest English novels. But its length put me off. It is, after all, 254 pages long in my edition, and the type is small. But nevertheless, I began.

Summary of the part read so far.  How many pages read in this reading?

I am now on page 147 having read about 4 today. Robinson after living a life of fun and adventure caring little about anything else, has been shipwrecked on an island in the Caribbean. The time period is the 1600s. The Spaniards and the Portuguese have settle in the Americas. But there is little development of civilization and certainly none on the remote islands of the Caribbean. So Robinson is alone and with little hope of ever seeing another civilized man.

He does have a lot of materials, which he rescued from the broken up ship, however. So he begins to build a home for himself in a cave. He plants some vegetables. He has a gun and powder, so he hunts, finding a herd of wild goats on the island which provide him with ample food.

Along the way with time for contemplation he begins to think about what Providence might have brought him here and cast him away. He recognizes the carelessness of his life, and reading in a Bible he salvaged from the wrecked ship, he discovers God's mercy for him and becomes a believer.

It is of note that Daniel Defoe, the author, is obviously intending this novel to be a morality play or story. There is a great deal of mention of spiritual things and lessons learned by Robinson.

In the few pages I read Friday Robinson is contemplating whether he should attack and kill the savage Indians who come regularly to the island. His reasoning is that they are violating God's laws by murdering their own kind. But after thinking about it some, he decides that they have not harmed him and that he should give them over to God for His judgment if there is to be any.

What do you think about the book so far? 

That is a serious observation for an Englishman in the mid-1600s. The English were at that time encountering Indians in their settlement of North America. How should they treat these people who seemed all too savage and without morality to them? Defoe is recommending tolerance. Let God be the judge if He chooses to be.

This is one of many moral and spiritual lessons Defoe has to illustrate in the book. They are good lessons for us as well as his original readers.

A Sample Independent Reading Blog 2

When you finish a book,  summarize the ideas that were significant to you in the last section you read. 

     What will Christianity look like in the future, given the growing church in South America, Africa, and Asia? That is the question Phillip Jenkins addresses in the last few chaptesr of The Next Christendom. The answer is that it will look much more like the church of the first few centuries than the Western church does today. It will have a greater understanding of supernatural forces. It will have a far greater understanding of the power of God in the church than we in the American church have. It will be more energetic in  taking the gospel to the yet unreached than the Western church is today.  For me that is encouraging.

     On the downside, there will likely be tensions between the Western church and the Southern churches. Southern churches are far more conservative than their mother churches in the West. Already division are showing over issues of morality. Southern churches reflect far more closely the morality of the New Testament. Western churches have compromised with the world. That renewal of biblical morality is refreshing to me, but it will come at a price.  It will also probably run into conflict with the other major religions, Islam and Hinduism. That is most likely to happen when there are already political tensions among nations with majority religious populations in power. That is concerning to me.

Conclude by making a personal recommendation. Is this a book you'd recommend to other readers. If so, why? If not, why?

     The Next Christendom is not an easy read. Is is chock full of facts and statistics and notes. It is not casual reading. But for someone really interested in the church - past, present and future - it is a worthwhile read. I recommend it to pastors and Christians with an interest in history. I don't think many high school students would enjoy it or even complete the reading.

    

A Sample Independent Reading blog

 
Your blog should tell me what the title of the book is, who the author is, how many pages are in the book and how many you have read, and the genre of the book. 

     The book I am reading is The Next Christendom by Phillip Jenkins. It has 288 pages, though only 276 are really the book. The rest are notes. I am on page 231.

     Phillip Jenkins is a historian and he has written several other books on Christian history.

     This book is non-fiction, but it is not strictly speaking history because it is more about what Christianity will be like in the next fifty years.

Your blog should include a brief summary of what you have read since the last blog and what you think about it.

     The main idea of the book is that Christianity will be very different in the next fifty years. First, most of the world's Christians will live in South America, Africa, and Asia. Right now we in America think most Christians live here. But that is wrong. There are more Christians in Africa than in America, even now .In fifty years the southern hemisphere, which includes Africa and South America, will have many times more Christians than America.

     Another change will be that the church will have a greater emphasis on the supernatural; it will look a lot more like the church in the first century than the church looks like in America today. There will be an emphasis on miracles and healing. There will be an understanding that Christians are in a real conflict with evil spirits.

     However, I did not buy the book to read about the future. I wanted to read about the past. What was Christianity like in the Middle Ages and in Asia? The author answered those questions for me. First, the church in the Middle Ages in Europe was a missionary church that was expanding among the non-Christian people of Europe. Some of those were the Celts in Ireland who are my ancestors.

     Secondly, the church in Asia was really larger than the church in Europe during most of the Middle Ages. There were churches in what is now Afghanistan, India, China, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and many other countries. That was a surprise. Another surprise was that when Islam appeared and began to conquer nations in the Middle East, Christians lived among the Muslims without many problems. It was not until the Mongol invasion of the Middle East in the 1200s that Muslims began to persecute the Christians who lived among them. That was because the Mongols were at least partly Christians, and the Muslims after that put all Christians in the category of enemies.

     I have enjoyed reading this book. I am learning a lot of new things about Christian history. That has helped me think about how I should live among people who are not Christians. If I would put that in one word, it would be "respectfully."