Beautiful novel by the author of Cutting for Stone, and The Tennis Partner. Marney told me about it. It is 715 pages long! It is set in southern India, spanning almost the entire 1900’s. It concerns a family that lives on a small estate called Parambil, near the ocean on the southwestern side of India, the Kerala state. A young girl, 12 years old, is forced to leave her mom and family and move to Parambil to marry a man older than her. He is a widow and has a young son named Jojo. He’s a good man. He lets her grow up in his household, learning how to cook from the older women, and as she grows up, she falls in love with her husband and cares deeply for Jojo. The tale includes tragedies because many people in this family die from drowning. It’s called the Condition. Jojo dies drowning after he falls from a tree into a small amount of water. It breaks their hearts. They have a daughter of their own, Baby Mol. When she is about 5, someone comes to the house and says, What’s the matter with her! They take her to a doctor and find out she is a Down’s Syndrome child, I think, although that is never specified. They never saw anything wrong with her and love her so much. She is a beloved member of the family. Then, years later, they have a son together, name him Philipose. Philipose grows up and tries to go to college but he cannot hear the professors. He finally has a hearing test and discovers he is almost deaf. He returns home to Parambil and marries Elsie, a beautiful artist. They have a premature baby named Ninan. They nurse him and care for him and he lives and becomes a very precocious little boy. He dies very, very tragically, falling from the top of the tree that Elsie had asked Philipose to cut down when they first were married. Philipose finally has it cut part way down years later when Ninan is a little boy. But he doesn’t have the tree totally cut down, only partially – and it leaves sharp spikes all the way from top to bottom. Little Ninan climbs up and falls and is impaled on one of these branches. Tragic, ugly death. It destroys Elsie and Philipose. They each blame each other and grow to hate one another. Elsie leaves. Philipose becomes addicted to opium.
Wonderful novel, set in early 1900’s to mid-1900’s, about young Italian immigrants, Ciro Lazzari and Enza Ravanelli. Ciro was an orphan, dropped off with his brother, Eduardo, at the convent in Vilminore, when he was a child. The nuns raise him. He’s strong and handsome. Enza, short for Vincenza, is the oldest daughter of a large family in Schilpario in the Italian Alps. They meet at age 15, when Ciro is hired to dig the grave for Enza’s baby sister, Stella. She falls in love with him and never stops loving him.
The novel takes you from Italy to New York City, where the young adults meet again in the hospital. They have both immigrated. She almost died from sea-sickness on the way over. Ciro has apprenticed as a shoemaker in Little Italy and cuts his hand badly when he’s thinking of other things. They meet off and on through the years but it’s frustrating how they never quite get together even though you know they are meant for each other.
Ciro joins the army and serves in WWI, trench warfare. Enza, a most-talented seamstress, and her Irish friend, Laura, escape from the factory in Hoboken, NJ, and make a successful go of it at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC. Enza becomes the seamstress for Enrico Caruso. She is loved by Vito Blazek, a successful marketing agent for the Opera. He asks her to marry him, she says yes. The morning of the wedding, Ciro finds her outside the church, waiting, and tells her he loves her (finally) and she cannot marry Vito, she must marry him. He’s just returned from the war. She forsakes the life of a rich, socialite, and marries Ciro. They move to Minnesota and become shoemakers in the town of Chisholm. They have one child, a son, named Antonio. He is everything. They are partners with Luigi and Pappina, who have child after child, while Enza and Ciro only have the one son, but he is beloved. Ciro gets diagnosed with cancer caused from mustard gas. He dies young, leaving Enza and Antonio. Enza and Antonio love him and miss him the rest of their lives, but they go on. Pappina dies in childbirth years later and Luigi decides to return to Italy with his 4 sons, leaving his 10-year old daughter, Angela, with Enza in Minnesota. Enza raises her as her own. It’s beautiful. Antonio, a young man, gets drafted into the army for WWII. The recruiters tell Enza that since she is a widow and he’s her only son, she could get an exemption for him. She knows he wants to serve, so she lets him go. This is 1940. She spends the next 4 years worried, praying, living, raising Angela, who is a beautiful young girl with a voice like an angel. Enza gets her into the voice school in NYC and she lives with Enza’s old friend, Laura, who is married to Colin, who is now the manager of the Met. The day Antonio returns from the war, he stops in NYC first to see his mom’s old friend, Laura, and Angela answers the door. He loves her instantly. She’s loved him as long as she can remember, just like Enza loved Ciro from the moment she met him. They get married and the book ends with Antonio and Angela going to take Enza home to Italy.
It’s a beautiful, lovely, heart-warming story about Italy, immigrants, war, New York City, opera, shoe-making, seamstresses, love, family, Minnesota. I loved it! I got it from a Little Free Library on our walk with Adam and Danette in Cooper Landing, AK, in August!!! I started reading it on the plane home but then had other books I had to read for book club, etc., and didn’t get to pick it back up until recently. It’s a wonderful book!
Adriana Trigiani has written other books, Big Stone Gap Series: Brava, Valentine; Very Valentine; Home to Big Stone Gap; Rococo; The Queen of the Big Time; Lucia, Lucia; Milk Glass Moon; Big Cherry Holler; Big Stone Gap.
It was good to read a classic again, but this one was more difficult than other Dickens novels. Here’s an example from Chapter 9, Final: “It is a dangerous thing to see anything in the sphere of a vain blusterer, before the vain blusterer sees it himself. Mr. Bounderby felt that Mrs. Sparsit had audaciously anticipated him, and presumed to be wiser than he. Inappeasably indignant with her for her triumphant discovery of Mrs. Pegler, he turned this presumption, on the part of a woman in her dependent position, over and over in his mind, until it accumulated with turning like a great snowball. At last he made the discovery that to discharge this highly connected female-to have it in his power to say, “She was a woman of family, and wanted to stick to me, but I wouldn’t have it, and got rid of her”-would be to get the utmost possible amount of crowning glory out of the connexion, and at the same time to punish Mrs. Sparsit according to her deserts.”
The city of Coketown is the setting. It’s an industrial town, covered in black smoke and noise, and the laboring class works all day, every day but Sunday, at machines. A weaver, Stephen Blackpool, is good-hearted, hard-working, but is mistreated and misunderstood and wrongly blamed for a crime he did not commit. There is a family headed by a Mr. Gradgrind, who believes only in facts, and his children are raised to not have any wonder or joy. Louisa grows up and is forced to marry Mr. Bounderby, a blustering fool of a man who owns the factories. He’s about 20 years her senior. Her brother, young Thomas Gradgrind, grows up to be a “whelp.” He loves no one but himself, and amasses gambling debts that he expects his sister to pay. He’s the one who arranges a theft of Bounderby’s money and has it blamed on innocent Stephen Blackpool. In the end, all is made right. The good guys win, the bad guys lose or repent.
Here’s where Stephen Blackpool is found lying at the bottom of a coal shaft, he was on his way back to prove his innocence, and he is discovered by sweet Sissy and Rachael, the love of his life, and rescued just in time to clear his name, without pointing fingers, and die. Here’s the end of that chapter: “They carried him very gently along the fields, and down the lanes, and over the wide landscape; Rachael always holding the hand in hers. Very few whispers broke the mournful silence. It was soon a funeral procession. The star had shown him where to find the God of the poor; and through humility, and sorrow, and forgiveness, he had gone to his Redeemer’s rest.”
It’s a beautiful tale about what is really good in life (nature, and light and air, and loving and caring for one another, and integrity). Contrast that with the evils of this world – dishonesty, pollution, injustice, greed, darkness. The father, Mr. Gradgrind, realizes late in life the harm he did to his children not letting them have any joy or wonder, only facts. Sissy, the circus girl he adopts when her father abandons her, is the first hint that there is a better way of life than just facts. She saves the day, in the end.
I was so excited to read this book! I heard about 10 minutes of an interview on the radio program, 1A, with the author and it was so intriguing. I was very disappointed. I thought it was going to describe people with super senses, but it ended up being so disorganized and convoluted, I’m not sure what I read. I tried to make sense of it, but the final chapters were so out there – people wanting to impart human consciousness into robots. Scary stuff.
I did take some tidbits from it – humans have better senses than we realize and by training them, we can become better at seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting. It’s important to spend time in nature. Meditation can augment our senses.
A retired Scottish nurse smelled COVID before it was known. She also smelled Parkinson’s Disease on her husband years before he was diagnosed.
The author is a tetrachrome – she has 4 visual cones, or something like that, and can see more colors. She talks about ‘synesthetes,’ who sense things through other senses, like seeing a color when you hear a name. Infants are all synesthetes. We can cultivate our senses. In Montessori schools, children walk on a white tape line to cultivate balance, they hold objects of different weights but similar sizes, they sit in silence so they can hear birdsong, ticking clocks. All of these things cultivate the senses. “Hearing grows subtler this way, and self-control is also enhanced.”
Examples of synesthete musicians: Chris Martin of Coldplay, Billie Eilish. Scientists – Richard Feynman and Nikola Tesla.
It’s possible that people who are picky eaters are really super tasters and the taste of the food is very intense.
Minfulness is a a way to grow our senses. Constantly taking pictures is not mindfulness, is not being present.
Talking about taste, the tongue has two to four thousand taste buds. We can identify sweet, salty, savory (umami), sour, and bitter, but also Kokumi (savory and hearty), and pungent, astringent, rough or harsh, oily or greasy, and winy. We can also taste fresh water. Makes sense – we would need super sensitive taste in order to survive in the world.
Talking about the sense of hearing, she describes Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who is deaf in his right ear. He trained the hearing in his left ear by using all of his senses.
There are more than the five senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. Some other senses are: Thermoception – the sense of heat, Nociception – the perception of pain, Equilibrioception – the perception of balance, Proprioception – the perception of body awareness.
The world has become so smooth – our screens and phones are all smooth. That might explain the popularity of tattoos now –people seeking the sensation. Not being touched could explain a host of mental illnesses – depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness. A study in 1960 by Sidney Jourard watched friends in a cafe for an hour. In England, the friends touched each other 0 times. In America, the friends touched each other twice. In France, 110 times. In Puerto Rico, 180 times.
Some people with Autism are hyper-sensitive to touch, sometimes to the point of not being able to swallow food.
This I find hard to believe, but she says ancient languages did not have a word for blue. She references a Radiolab report, “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue.” So if there isn’t a word for the color, it doesn’t really exist.
The goofy part near the end, talking about AI and people who are sensitive to machines, and wanting to impart human consciousness into machines, is where she really loses me. She talks about a man, Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president in 2016 and 2020. He is conservative and “transhuman.” He says, “While transhumanism is very broad in what it attempts to accomplish, achieving sentience in AI is paramount. The only way to really upgrade the human brain in singularity terms is to upload our consciousness, and once we do that, AI will be conscious. Of course, there’s the issue of AI becoming sentient before we merge with it, but most transhumanists advocate against this. The reason is that the AI might not want to merge with us or it even may want to eliminate us. So we’d better get it right.” No kidding. I do not want to live in that world. You all can have it.
When we die (as we all will) and go to Jesus, our Creator, our senses will be blown away by the beauty, the love, the joy, the amazing, all-encompassing, never-ending wonder of it all. We can’t handle it now – our human brains would explode at the experience this side of heaven. But this book did introduce to me the idea of becoming more present, more aware, experiencing more fully the senses we do have in this world, and thereby experiencing the beauty of this world more fully, and thanking God.
I liked the two quotes she chose for the opening:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” William Black, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“For I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” Psalm 139:14
It also reminds me of Sherry Yost’s tag line on her emails: To not pay attention is to miss the wonder of being alive. -Bob Welch
This book was the 3rd book selection for Old Town Library Book Club 2023-2024. Karen selected it. It’s about a family that had 12 children and 6 of them end up with schizophrenia. They lived on Hidden Valley Road, in Woodmen Valley, right next door to the Skarke’s! That was a huge surprise! When we were visiting the Skarke’s, who knew there was a family next door with 12 children and 6 of them schizophrenic!
The Galvin family, Don and Mimi, and their 12 children; 10 boys and then Margaret and Mary, the last two girls. Six of the boys become schizophrenic. The trials and tribulations of this family would have killed me. What a nightmare! One of the boys (Brian William Galvin) ends up murdering his girlfriend and killing himself in California on September 7, 1973.
The youngest girl, Mary, ends up being the rock of the entire family. She cares for her oldest brother (Donald) even though he tormented her endlessly when they lived on Hidden Valley Road. When she was 7 and he was 27, he’d follow her around dressed in a bed sheet, like a monk, spouting religious nonsense. She would lead him up into the hills and tie him up and leave him there. Her 2nd oldest brother would molest her and her sister when she was sent to his house for the weekends. His name was Jim and he was married to Kathy and they had a little boy, Jimmy. Margaret and Mary didn’t know for sure that what he was doing was wrong, and they didn’t know he was doing it to both of them. It finally came out when they were adults and they confronted their Mom and Dad. How could they send them there when they knew he also was becoming sick. When she was 13, Mary finally was able to leave the madness. Wealthy friends of her parents paid for her to attend boarding school on the east coast. That was her ticket out. But she eventually comes back to Colorado and helps her family. At the end of the book (published in 2020), she is still helping her brother, Don, living in assisted living. She’s also helping her other brothers that are still living – 3 of them, I think, in various stages of dependence.
The author varies the chapters on the individual members of the family with the gradual progress of research on schizophrenia. Over the 50 years of history of this family, the research hasn’t progressed much. It’s painstakingly slow, and we still don’t really know what causes schizophrenia. Sad but true.
I remember when Cherie had her first psychotic breakdown, when she was paranoid about neighbors spying on her, I had a dream/vision from God. God first made me understand how close we all are to being mentally ill. It is only a very fine line separating us and them. Then, He told me not to talk about Him to Cherie at this stage of her life. She was dabbling in witchcraft because of Chris’s mother being a pagan witch. He told me that to associate Him with that world would ruin Him in her eyes.
Thankful to God for sparing me from this particular illness. Pray for Him to reveal answers to the researchers and caregivers and sufferers of this distressing illness.
Saddening, maddening book by the editor in chief of Christianity Today and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. It’s about the steep fall from grace of the Evangelical church. He writes with firsthand knowledge about the despicable leaders who want power and money at any cost. They have become a church of Satan. There is nothing Christ-like remaining in the church leadership. They support Trump and explain away his deep, deep character flaws and crimes, and they cover up their own horrendous wrongdoing, including sexual abuse and racism. Russell Moore was openly against Trump and refused to keep silent about sexual assaults. He was threatened, shunned, condemned. This book tells how far the evangelical church has fallen. He believes that true revival can happen when this sham of a church is destroyed. God will raise up in its ashes a church which is true to Him and the Gospel. God does not need us to fight His battles. The evangelical church has become a tool of Satan, using abortion and gay rights as weapons to destroy it – separating people from a loving God. The evangelical church in America has made God look so bad to unbelievers. There actions are only serving to entrench the very ideas they oppose. Why don’t we pray for God to change individual hearts instead, and love them and leave the judging to God?
There are two verses that come to my mind when I think of this church. First, Matthew 7:22-23: Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
Second, this verse which the Evangelical Church likes to use against the rest of America, but really applies to them, 2 Chronicles 7:14: ‘If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.’
God wins, has already won, and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, will make all things new again. Come, Lord Jesus, Come!
He describes in detail different events and they are even worse than I thought.
What a beautiful, amazing, wonderful, educational, painful, delightful book! I LOVED THIS BOOK! Thank you, Jan, for telling me about it. I never knew anything about Cuba and Castro. This biography, by a man who was born in Cuba in 1950 and had to leave in 1962, brings to life the joys and fears of a little boy in Cuba and how it all came to ruin when Castro took over. And by ruin, I mean ruin – destroyed, obliterated, horrified. Thank you, Carlos Eire, for a magnificent story. I’m so glad you won the National Book Award for this book. It is one of the best books I have ever read.
Fast read – 2 page chapters, short sentences. About young, 17-year old Jay, who dives Monastery Beach to try and find his dad’s bones, but ends up swallowed by a sperm whale. His dad committed suicide because he was dying of mesothelioma. He was a horrible father to Jay. Shaming him, humiliating him, scaring him. His dad was a consummate diver and loved the ocean and its creatures more than anything. He tried to impart that love to Jay, but failed miserably. Jay ran away from home at age 15, before his dad got cancer, and refused to go see him in the hospital, despite the pleadings of his mom and two sisters.
Once Jay is swallowed by the whale, he starts having a conversation with the whale on how to survive. It ends up being his father he is talking with, and he remembers the love and understands his dad, and is able to forgive his dad, all the while trying and failing to get out of the whale. His dad gave him tips, ways to get out of the whale alive. There is unbelievable trauma to his body– stomach acid eating into him, broken bones, ear drums popping, his neck getting gashed by a giant squid, and on and on. Too much gashing and gunk and junk, but eventually, the whale is attacked by orcas and wounded and floats gently to the surface, where there is a whale-watching boat. Jay orchestrates the vocal chord and makes the whale scream, an unheard of sound, drawing the attention of the scientists on the beach. The whale drifts to shore and dies. Jay blows up a part of the whale using a Brillo pad (there was an unopened box of Brillo pads in the stomach), a 9-volt battery and the last bit of oxygen from his tank. He has to blow a part of the whale he is not in, so had to carve a hole through thick blubber using ‘Beaky,’ the part of the giant squid that he found. He loses his right hand but saves his life. The scientists on the beach are looking at a different, beached whale. They can’t believe what they are seeing after Jay has to claw through the heart of the whale, soaked in blood, so the scientists can see him. They save him. One of the doctors smiles at him and asks him his name. He says Jay. She says her name is Joy. “Hi, Jay. I’m Joy.” Yes, you are, Jay thinks.”
They carry his “broken body” onto the beach.
Jay is saved through the blood of the whale’s heart, and his broken body. Could this be we are saved through the blood and broken body of Christ? Could be. Very interesting book. Just love the young man, Jay.
I heard about this book on one of the best book of the year lists.
Excellent book. George Dawson, born in 1898, died at age 102, learned to read at age 98. Grew up on a farm in Marshall, Texas. Helped pick cotton at age 4. Oldest of children born to poor black farming couple in east Texas. He never got to go to school. When he turned 12, they had to send him to work on a white man’s farm to earn $1.50 a week, that his dad would pick up every other week, to help feed the family. He was so lonely – slept in a hot little shack out back by himself. Up until then, he was always cozy and cared for with his siblings.
Gene M. was reading this book and it sounded interesting. It was a fun, action-packed romp through 1890’s Cuba. The characters were good and the good guys win! Realize how bad the Spanish were to the Cubans. The Americans fought against the Spanish and won. The blowing up of the Maine was what started the war. It was never clear who did it, I mean it was possible the Americans did it to start a war and didn’t care that most of the sailors died because they were black. The cowboy, Ben Tyler, was the hero of the book. He went to Cuba to sell horses and falls in love with the place. He steals the heart of Amelia Brown, the beautiful young mistress of Rollie Boudreaux, a rich American sugar cane plantation owner, who is cruel and unfeeling. There are imprisonments and prison escapes and kidnappings and ransom notes and good guys and bad guys and really, really good guys and really, really bad guys. It was fun. It was 405 pages long and I read 81 pages each day to get through it fast, except the last day I read 162 pages. It was a page-turner. Would love for it to be a movie. Cuba Libre is a drink of Rum and Coke and a squeeze of lime.
Eminently readable novel about Lara Kenison, a young seamstress turned actress who was amazingly talented and beautiful but gave up stardom to marry Joe Nelson and work his cherry farm in Michigan. Lara’s all grown up and telling the story of her life as an actress to her 3 adult daughters while they pick cherries on their cherry farm near Traverse City. They are all together because of the pandemic. The story of her life is centered around her playing the role of Emily in Our Town. She was in summer stock at Tom Lake on the Upper Peninsula. She meets Peter Duke, a young, handsome, charismatic actor, and falls deeply, madly in love with him. He teaches her to smoke and drink and be wild. His brother is Sebastian, and he is good and kind and handsome and a talented tennis player.
They enjoy life immensely, young and free. The director of the play is Joe Nelson, and he is a steady, strong presence. It turns out Joe’s real love is cherry farming on his aunt and uncle’s cherry farm. He invites Lara to come see it and the whole crew comes along. Peter Duke falls in love with the farm. So does Lara. They all do. It is beautiful and peaceful. They never forget that day.
One day, Duke (as Peter is called) is too drunk to play a game of tennis with Sebastian because he has been rehearsing with real tequila for Fool for Love, so Lara plays tennis with Sebastian instead. She is playing out of her mind and goes after a serve and ruptures her Achilles. Sebastian carries her to the car, drives her to the hospital, and takes care of her. Lara’s acting days are over and she is fine with that, it turns out. But Duke moves on to Lara’s understudy within a matter of days. Her understudy is the beautiful black actress/dancer Pallace, who happens to be Sebastian’s love. Lara comes out of the hospital with a huge cast and is unable to walk for six months. Sebastian and Lara go to the opening night of the play Fool for Love, in which Duke and Pallace are playing the leads. The chemistry between them is so electric, everyone knows what is going on. Lara’s heart is broken, Sebastian is angry. He storms out afterwards, beats up his brother, and leaves in a rage. Lara gets herself back to her wheelchair, wheels herself back to her little cottage, and deals with her new reality.
All the while she’s telling her three daughters about her early days dating the famous actor Peter Duke, you get a lot of details about the cherry farm, and their current life, which is very happy. They are all together with Joe, their Dad, because of the pandemic. It’s 2020. The three daughters are wonderful characters. Eldest is Emily, age 26. She loves the farm and plans to marry next door neighbor, Benny, and take over running the cherry farm. When Emily was young, she was convinced that Peter Duke was her father and she was full of anger towards her Mom, convinced she was lying to her. She’s over it now, but she really needs to learn the real story behind Duke and her Mom. Middle daughter, Maisie, age 24, is in her final year of vet school. She loves animals and is helping all the neighbors with her veterinary skills. Youngest daughter, Nell, age 22, wants to be an actress, and she lives for the stage. She cannot believe her mom gave up the very thing she is hoping for her own life. Their dad, Joe, is a wonderful, kind, loving man. He was around back in the day – he was the capable director of the play Lara starred in, Our Town, and he fell in love with Lara, but knew she was in love with Peter Duke. He stayed caring and concerned and finally, years and years later, they run into each other in New York. And the rest is history. They buy the cherry farm and live happily ever after.
Tyler’s book. He really wanted us to read it. It is about a young man who answers an ad, Teacher Seeks Pupil. The teacher ends up being a gorilla named Ishmael. They talk telepathically for months. Ishmael teaches him his theory of the Takers and the Leavers. The Leavers were hunter-gatherers that let others live their lives. They didn’t destroy species or the planet. They lived at peace with the gods. The Takers started about 10,000 years ago. They are the Cain who killed Abel. They do not want to live at peace in the hands of the gods. They want to take matters into their own hands and plant more and more and store up more and more. They are destroying our world.
Once Ishmael has imparted all his knowledge to the young man, he urges him to teach others. Teach 100 people and they’ll each teach 100, and that way we can save the planet, once most of the people think and believe like we do.
Short, little book on death by Tim Keller, based on a sermon he preached at Kathy’s sister’s funeral, Terry Hall, on 1/6/2018. First he talks about how we fear death. One reason we fear it is because we don’t see it any longer. Our medical establishment has made it so we live longer and when we die, we’re away from family in hospitals or nursing homes. “Medicine and science have relieved us of many causes of early death, and today the vast majority of people decline and die in hospitals and hospices, away from the eyes of others.”
“If people three thousand years ago had a problem with the denial of death, as Psalm 90 attests, then we have an infinitely greater one. Medical progress supports the illusion that death can be put off indefinitely. It is more rare than ever to find people who are, as the ancients were, reconciled to their own mortality.”
“A second reason that we today struggle so much with death is the secular age’s requirement of this-world meaning and fulfillment.”
“The human race as a whole can’t not fear and hate death. It is a unique and profound problem. Religion gave people tools to help in facing our most formidable foe, and modern secularism has not come up with anything to compensate for its loss.”
This novel is the ‘Fort Collins Reads’ book for 2023, and our first Old Town Library Book Club book for 2023-2024.
It’s a page-turner, a mystery of who took the $10 million Stradivarius from Ray MacMillian, a young black violin prodigy.
Ray, born to a single mom, grew up in North Carolina. His Mom wants him to get a job at Popeye’s chicken so he can help pay the bills. All she does is talk on the phone and watch TV. Ray is in love with the violin. He is in band at school and uses a school violin. When he is in high school, his grandma, sweetest, most loving grandma in the world, gifts him her grandpa’s violin. He was a slave child and would play the fiddle to calm his master. The master gifted the violin to him when he freed all the slaves.
Well, once the violin is cleaned up and repaired by a non-racist repairman, it is discovered that it is a Stradivarius worth about $10 million. The family of Ray (except Grandma, who has passed) and the Marks’s, the descendants of the original owners, all hound Ray demanding that the violin is rightfully theirs. He has to practice for the Tchaikovsky Competition amidst all the turmoil this priceless violin has caused. He has a beautiful, loving girlfriend named Nicole, and a mentor, his violin teacher in college, Janice, who are devoted to him.
Very engrossing tale of Gary Paulsen’s first time running the Iditarod race from Anchorage to Nome. He loves his dogs! Cookie was his lead dog. He describes the different aspects and legs of the race so well. The whole thing is crazy like hell. He made almost fatal rookie mistakes – switching his lead dog at the last second, right before the start was one. He put Wilson in the lead instead of Cookie. Wilson took a wrong turn in Anchorage and they tore all through the town, taking down fences, signs, even tearing the bumper off of a car when he threw his snow hook on it to try and stop the team.
Interesting that the start of the Iditarod in downtown Anchorage is all a sham – a made for TV event that is really dangerous because the dog teams are made to be close together in harness for a long, long time – very unnatural. At least he put his in harness too early and once they are in harness, they want to run. The real start is out of town a ways.
Because he was so far behind after going on a mad dash through Anchorage, he also didn’t realize that Cookie, back in as lead dog, followed a snowmobile trail instead of the real trail. They led 20 other dog teams off trail and when he realized it and turned around, the dog teams meet head on and fight at each meeting. Then, another dog team got attacked by a moose that killed the musher’s lead dog. Heart-breaking.
Then the terrain and weather is mostly horrible. The lack of sleep, the hallucinations, the wind, the brutality he witnessed of a musher kicking one of his dogs to death, just awful. Why he kept going, he doesn’t even know, but he did, and I guess he ran it again, too, because the end of the book is him being told by his doctor that he has heart disease and can’t run the Iditarod a 3rd time. He gives all the dogs away except Cookie.
Excellent book. Don’t know how he lived through it. There are so many times he is dragged – down streets of Anchorage, down icy cliffs. The wind and cold in the Yukon were horrible. He learned quickly to run along with the sled to get his heart rate up. He considered minus 20 to be warm, so these had to be minus 60 or worse with the wind chill. But he loved being with his dogs and he loved the beauty of Alaska.
Another AMAZING book by Tim Keller. What a blessing he was! Thank you, God, for Tim Keller. What a teacher of your Word. This was his last book, and it is everything a person needs to know about forgiveness. Forgiveness is only possible when a person is humble and realizes how much they need forgiveness themselves, and then joyful enough to realize that Jesus loved them enough to pay the cost and free them from the guilt and shame.
For me, the idea that every sin has a cost, it can’t just be brushed away, God’s forgiveness of us was not easy or cheap, is the A-HA idea of this book. He gives the example of someone breaking your lamp. You forgive them but there is still a cost you have to absorb. Either you buy a new lamp or you go without light in that spot. My sins, each and every one of them, have a cost that must be borne by someone. Jesus bore that cost.
Exodus 34:6-7: “And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; [Keller leaves off the rest of the verse: “he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” Wayne and I discussed this, the meaning of the third and fourth generation allegorically shows the completeness of God’s justice. Also, the household, culturally was a unit – “As for my and my house, we will serve the Lord.”] But Keller says, “Not until Jesus do we see how God can be both completely just and yet forgiving; it is through his atonement (1 John 1:7-9). In the cross God satisfies both justice and love. God was so just and desirous to judge sin that Jesus had to die, but he was so loving and desirous of our salvation that Jesus was glad to die.” So, every sin of every person throughout time has been punished – Jesus was punished for them. God does not leave the guilty unpunished, we are the guilty, and He punished Jesus for our sins, and Jesus went through hell, literally, for us on that cross.
Some people say, “Why did Jesus have to die?” Because there is a cost to every sin, they cannot just be waived away, forgotten. There is a price. You feel it yourself when someone sins against you. You want to hurt them back, you want revenge, you want them to pay. Wayne says, “If there’s no penalty for it, there’s no justice, and we badly want our universe to be just.” Jesus paid for them all. Jesus bore the cost. “On Him was laid the iniquity of us all.” When a person realizes this in the very core of their being, then they know the immense richness of forgiveness and how much they need it. Only then can a person forgive others. Because, the second part, knowing how much Jesus loves you, that He was willing to come down to earth and pay the price for you, makes you so joyful and you are less likely to be hurt by every little slight you receive from fellow human beings. Humility and joy over the gospel – that’s what allows a person to truly forgive.
Forgiveness is not dependent upon the other person’s repentance, but reconciliation is. We are to forgive someone in our hearts immediately, and then work, as far as it is possible, to reconcile the relationship. There must be justice and love, both. Just as God is both just and loving. The person who sinned against you must be approached lovingly with the truth, as Jesus says in Matthew 18. Go privately and talk to them, maybe more than once. Be open to the fact that they may need time to process first.
Another A-HA moment was about the verses, “Vengeance is mine,” and “Save room for God’s wrath.” This isn’t permission to harbor malice in your heart towards a person. Jesus says in Matthew 5:22, “But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” God knows that the seeds of murder begin with that attitude. We need to ask forgiveness and pray for our enemies. We need to be humble. We need to be joyful. The gospel, over and over, each and every day.
What a sweet, sweet girl Jinger is! She grew up one of 19 children, on TV shows called, 14 Children and Pregnant Again, 17 Kids and Counting, 18 Kids and Counting, 19 Kids and Counting, Counting on. Her parents are good and loving people but they followed the teaching of Bill Gothard and his Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP). These teachings profess to be Christianity but they are not. They are a bunch of man-made rules that you must follow in order to be successful in life. Health and wealth gospel at its worst. Not the love of Jesus and His saving grace. It made her life one of fear–a bunch of meaningless rules to follow from the moment she woke up until she went to bed. When she met her sister’s boyfriend, and then her own boyfriend, she began to see a different life, free from fear. She started to really read the Bible and learned the truth, that God loves us so much He sent his son to die for us, taking our punishment on himself and making us righteous. The Gospel, pure and simple. We cannot be good enough to earn our salvation. She has spent many years trying to “disentangle” what is true from what is false and in the process no longer lives a life of fear.
Beautiful book, beautiful author! You rock, Jinger!
Another excellent book by Tim Keller. Kathy, his wife, helped him with this one. Marriage created by God in the Garden of Eden. When God created woman and presented her to Adam, he said, “At last!” Woman completes man. Man completes Woman. Marriage brings us closer to the union God the Father and Jesus the Son have experienced for eternity.
Our culture has perverted marriage and sex. Woman look for men who can take care of them financially. Men look for women who are attractive and also won’t make them change-compatibility. Pressures of life, disappointments, resentments can easily destroy a marriage based on those factors. Instead, look for a mate who is a friend and sees the glorious person you are destined to be in Christ. Look for someone with similar interests, who is a person of faith.
Sex is the way a man and a woman can physically become one flesh and serve one another.
Singleness was validated by Christianity for the first time. To be single is not a curse. You are free to serve God without the constraints a spouse entails.
Ephesians 5 and Genesis 2 are the source texts. Ephesians 5:21-33 says women submit to their husbands and husbands love their wives as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself up for it, washed it and made it holy. To submit to a man who loves you so much he would die for you and do anything to help you become the glorious person you are meant to be is not a burden, it is a delight. Women, look to Jesus to see how submission works. He was God Himself, yet he submitted to God’s will and did the unthinkable–took the crushing burden of all our sins upon Himself, so we would not have to suffer, and then gave us His righteousness. Kathy’s chapter is all about that.
Excellent book! I heard about it at Two Rivers Church from a woman who was giving her resurrection story. It sounded like me – care more for what people think than what God thinks. I requested it from the library and they had to get it from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis! And now, I really need to buy it because every page is tagged.
He takes you into the fear of man and how prevalent it is throughout humanity. It leads to all sorts of problems, too. And the cure is to realize how much God loves us, and to seek to bring glory to Him. The chief end of man is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.
Christian self-help book for people-pleasers. She mainly focuses on one’s to-do list and learning to say no to others. What finally drove her to a summer of “no and necessary” was when a dear, dear friend of hers asked if her adult son might be able to stay with her once in awhile when he couldn’t make the commute home. She said yes but then immediately regretted it. She listed all the reasons she couldn’t do it. Mainly that she wouldn’t be able to just let him stay there – she’d want to wait up for him, give him a snack, make sure he had everything he needed. And also she was having her house remodeled.
