Experience and Status as Earthly Treasures. Also, Book Count #27

The sermon today was largely about trusting God. One of the points brought up was “What have you done in the past week that other people would look at and say, ‘That person was really trusting God right there’?” When we don’t trust God, we make our own plans. But that’s proud because it’s saying our plans are wiser and more realistic than God’s, but really, whose thoughts are higher than whose here? So one of the take-home messages today was that it is prideful to set out to do anything God hasn’t called you to do.

I gave this one a good think. Anything God hasn’t called you to do? But there are these things called adiaphora. Adiaphora are things for which God has not made a ruling (and presumably does not care) one way or the other about. The Bible charges members of the church body not to quarrel with each other about such things. So for example, should the church purchase the blue carpet or the green carpet? Should I eat carrots or raisins with lunch? Should I cheer on the Cyclones or the Hawkeyes? God doesn’t care; please stop fighting about it. But wait, if God doesn’t care, then He hasn’t called me to do anything. So does that mean we should purchase neither carpet? Eat neither side dish? Support neither team? I mean, I don’t think God is ever really going to spell out what my weekly menu should be, but He does want me to eat. There are no Biblical calls to fast permanently until you starve. So… it must not be that prideful to make the decision yourself to eat the raisins, buy the green, and support the Cyclones or whatever.

I might not have given this one so thorough a thinking had it not been for a feeling of conviction I got as I was hearing it. I am excellent at justifying my actions, sadly, and often when I hear something that strikes a cord in me, I break out the logic to see how much of my current lifestyle is defensible (probably with the [sub]conscious hope that not much will need to be changed). I got this feeling regarding two things: 1) fund raising for my trip to Africa to help Jonathan’s House for Orphans, and 2) tackling my to-read list. So I asked God to show me if there was a different way for me to be raising the money for my trip than my current plan (read: tithing for real, raking leaves, other odd jobs, sending out a mailer), and as a matter of fact an idea came up today so we’re going to try that out. Keep your eyes peeled for ambigram merchandise.

And then I thought about my constant reading of books. For those unaware, since high school I have had a list of 100 books to read before I die. This is that list:

1. The Holy Bible
2. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
   
3. Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes
4. Ulysses, James Joyce
5. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
7. Selected Plays and Poems, William Shakespeare
8. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
9. 1984, George Orwell
10. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
12. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
13. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
14. Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
15. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
16. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
18. Selected Tales and Poems, Edgar Allen Poe
19. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
20. The Trial, Franz Kafka
21. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
22. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
23. Animal Farm, George Orwell
24. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
25. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
26. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
27. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
28. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
29. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
31. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
32. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
33. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
34. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
35. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
36. Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Göthe
37. Aeneid, Virgil
38. Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann
39. Gargantuan and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
40. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
41. Iliad, Homer
42. Odyssey, Homer
43. Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
44. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
45. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
46. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
47. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
48. Old Goriot, Honoré de Balzac
49. Metamorphoses, Ovid
50. Paradise Lost, John Milton
51. Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
52. Tragedies, Sophocles
53. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Thomas Hardy
54. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
55. The Ambassadors, Henry James
56. The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
57. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
58. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Stern
59. The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
60. The Red and the Black, Stendhal
61. The Stranger, Albert Camus
62. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
63. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
64. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
65. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
66. Beloved, Toni Morrison
67. Gilgamesh
68. Middlemarch, George Eliot
69. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
70. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
71. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
72. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
73. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, père
74. Plays, Henrik Ibsen
75. Medea, Euripides
76. Emma, Jane Austen
77. Fairy Tales and Stories, Hans Christian Andersen
78. Plays, Anton Chekhov
79. Essays, Michel de Montaigne
80. Parallel Lives, Plutarch
81. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
82. Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
83. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
84. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
85. Pensées, Blaise Pascal
86. Candide, Voltaire
87. Phèdre, Jean Racine
88. The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
89. The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
90. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
91. Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
92. Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis
93. Blindness, José Saramago
94. The Sound of the Mountain, Yasunari Kawabata
95. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
96. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
97. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, Denis Diderot
98. On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
99. Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih
100. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy

Why these 100 books, you ask? Well, basically so that I can say I have read them. These are supposed to be some of the greatest books ever written, but I wasn’t really choosing to read them for the enjoyment of it. I mean, I have enjoyed several of these books –Blindness? downright amazing–, but others I slogged through, only continuing to read them because they were on the list. Wuthering Heights? Terrible. Season of Migration to the North? What. The. Frak. I mean, it wasn’t a bad book, I guess, but wtf plots are you weaving together here? Your womanizing Doppelgänger fled to Sudan from England after murdering mid-coitus the seductress who (no joke) intentionally seduced and angered him so that he would kill her while they were having sex, and now you as the narrator feel compelled to intentionally decide you aren’t going to be the same guy even though you have now inadvertently killed your Doppelgänger’s widow because you didn’t heed her threats to commit suicide if you didn’t marry her? I repeat: What. The. Frak. Now, there’s an extent to which it is useful to read classics because if other people have read them and make allusions to them, now you will be able to understand. Or if a book has historical significance, reading it can help you understand what was going on in history. My old college professor who taught my Bible courses said this was a reason to read the Bible, even for non-Christians. The Book, after all, has probably had more historical impact than any other, maybe even more than all the others combined. Other classics… no one is going to be making allusions to them, and they are never going to be brought up in a context of historical significance in any way meaningful for my life. I mean, no one that I know has ever even mentioned the book Lord Jim to me. I own it. I haven’t read it. No idea what it’s about except I’m fairly certain someone gets thrown overboard in it. So for books like these (and really, for nearly all the books on that list) the main reason I’m reading them is to mark another notch on my bookshelf, so to speak. It’s a matter of pride. Of status seeking. And it’s a status I already have, for Pete’s sake! I’m not going to read these books and suddenly become a member of the Literati. There’s no entrance exam. I’ve read 27 books so far this year, most of them not on this list at all, and guess what? I’m a freaking member of the literati Right Now. Great new books are constantly being published. If I try to be the absolute best reader ever, it’s simply never going to happen. There will always be books I haven’t read, especially at my speed. But I don’t need to be on top of the publishing world to be recognized as a smart guy. Most people (I think it’s the glasses) consider me smart within the first 10 minutes of real conversation with me. No reason to keep hunting for a title here. I have better things to do.

So do I stop reading books? Certainly not. It’s something I love to do, and I don’t think God gave me this love for no reason. But now it’s like I have given myself (or God has given me) permission to read books for reasons other than “being a good reader.” God hasn’t called me to being a good reader. He has called me to being a good Christian. That means loving people, connecting with them, feeling compassion and taking action to help them. So from now on I read books for different reasons. I can read books that people recommend to me or have read because it will enable me to connect with them. I can read books to help me understand people, to enrich my faith, to inspire me to action, or for any number of reasons. But to build up a list of completed books? That’s not good enough for me. That list is a list of earthly treasures. Completing those all is nearly the same as filling a treasure chest with 100 experiences that I cannot take with me when I die. Okay, not exactly 100 because the Bible and other useful books are on the list, but you get the idea. I have no reason to build up treasures in my temporary life.

This does not mean I will no longer be making book count posts. I mean, the original plan was to count how many I read in a year and then restart the numbering every January 1. Maybe I will just stop numbering them when 2012 rolls around. The real point was that I will still be making posts of book reviews. No longer as a means to brag or anything, but as another means of connection. If you want to read some of the same books I have read and have a chat with me about them, wonderful. Let’s have fellowship together. In that light,

27. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, by David Sedaris. This is the second book of his that I have read (the other was Me Talk Pretty One Day), and I did like this book better. To be honest I picked it up because it was on display and I was caught by the cover illustration of a squirrel and a chipmunk on a candlelit dinner date. Neither book, however, left me feeling that great about the state of humankind. And Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk doesn’t even have that many humans in it. It’s all short stories featuring animals with shockingly real human emotions. If you are only going to read one of the stories in it, read “The Faithful Setter.” It’s profound, unsettling and pessimistic, like nearly all the stories therein, so it’s representative in that way but definitely this was a favorite (if you can call it that, because it left me feeling UGH) of mine. Overall, not a book for people who need their endings happy or their illustrations wholesome.