Feature Titles
Reader's Guide to After The Flood
Lovers of books often complain that they read too slowly and wonder if they will ever take the time and effort to master the The Art of Speed Reading. My difficulty is that sometimes--strike that--often I need to acquire the Art of Reading Slowly to integrate what I read.
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The Broken Wall
People like WYSIWYG -- "what you see is what you get". There is something refreshing and straightforward about that idea, especially when people are so invested in image-control or in marketing their products which aren't what they seem. Even though transparency is good and safe, I enjoy the mystery of meeting a stranger whose nature is a puzzle that takes time to unravel. Markus Barth in The Broken Wall says that the book of Ephesians is an enigma, a paradoxical riddle.
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Shardik
"Wouldn't it be possible for some foolish person to try to argue that what took place was all a matter of chance and accident--that the bear was not sent by God?" These words echoed my own thoughts when I first heard about the book Shardik by Richard Adams. Then one day a friend told me about a photographer taking pictures of a bear when the bear suddenly reared up and started charging him. That shocking image of the rearing bear struck me.
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Oryx and Crake
"That was a really disturbing book," the optometrist at the store said when I asked if she'd read 'Blindness'. I've heard people say the same thing about 'The Road' and 'Oryx and Crake'. It's true; these books are disturbing. They are dystopian novels, dystopia defined as "a state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad as from deprivation or oppression or terror." I wondered what it meant that these kinds of books have a category. Is this category chosen because of the author's despair? Or hope?
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