Just finished
Momentum is Your Friend, Joe Kurmaskie's story of the summer he spent bicycling across the continental US with his two sons, ages 5 and 7. It's vintage Kurmaskie -- a series of vignettes about the adventure, the people he meets along the way, and his life. If you like that sort of thing, it will probably work for you. If you don't, then you probably won't. I'm a long-time fan -- the copy I read is an autographed edition I picked up at one of his speaking engagements -- so I enjoyed it throughly.
I'm currently reading two books:
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer's story of Chris McCandless, a young man from a well-to-do family who graduates from college and becomes drifter, living by his wits and wandering across the Western US before heading into the Alaskan wilderness with minimal gear for his final, fatal adventure. Krakauer blends his story with those of others from earlier times and other places who followed a similar path, attempting to use the wilderness to quell their inner demons. So far, it comes across as extremely well-researched, and it's an excellent read.
The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Last Days by Richard H. Perry is not a joke, but rather a serious attempt by a competitor to the better-known
for Dummies guides to tackle the subject of the Second Coming of Jesus in a very accessible format. While it's a bit jarring to see scriptural references about the Apocolypse set off with the same graphical conventions used to highlight shortcuts to MS Word functions, the project seems to do a decent job of conveying a very complex topic. Part of the price of such simplification, of course, is not covering competing viewpoints. The author states up-front his belief in Biblical inerrancy and literal interpretation of Scripture, so omission of viewpoints I'm personally much more comfortable with (i.e. The Revelation to St. John concerns not the end of the world, but rather the end of the Roman Empire) seem reasonable in light of the book's self-described mission. However, I note that the negative reviews on Amazon beat the author up for giving short shrift to "pre-tribulation Rapture" which is apparently a big deal among fundamentalist-minded interpreters.
Perhaps unfortunately, it's confirming one of my long-standing prejudices against fundamentalism -- much like "strict constructionist interpretation" of the Constitution, "literal interpretation" of Scripture seems to be nothing more than a way for conservatives to say: "line of reasoning that reaches conclusions I agree with." Essentially, clothing a very partisan method with a veneer of objectivity it doesn't really deserve. For all his self-stated belief in the Bible's "literal correctness," it doesn't seem to bother Perry to launch off into some highly allegorical interpretation of various passages when it suits him to do so. And having looked up and read the surrounding text for many of his references, it seems to me that he plays really fast and loose with the original context much of the time.
Still, it seems to be a good and easily-digestible approach to a viewpoint I'm not all that familiar with.
Mods: Please EP-ize those links... (Just the idea of Steve Eley and Escape Pod collecting a comission on
The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Last Days completely cracks me up.)
Link Bandit strikes again