Book Choices-Reading for the first month of the new year

Posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 11:03 am

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One of the most frequent questions I am asked by those who see me once or twice a year is “Can you give me the three best books that you have read this year?â€? This question is somewhat akin to asking a pastry chef to tell you his three best deserts of the year or a newlywed bride to tell you her three best kisses of the year.  It all depends upon context.  With that in mind and in keeping with my new resolution to put up something new at least every other day, I thought that I would set out the categories of books that I try to read in.  These are particularly helpful during these times of break when I have a little time to actually read on my own with no deadline approaching.  I would encourage you to set up some sort of schedule for yourself and not allow your reading to simply be driven along by the whim of the moment or the important books may never really get read.  My categories are as follows:

Books for future Classes/Sunday School/Sermon Preparation -these are books that either I will be assigning for class and need to brush up on or books that will help me in a class that I will be teaching.  A book that I am reading now called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.  This is a new book by a very highly regarded New Testament scholar who argues (very well in my judgment) that the gospel writers either were eyewitnesses, or spoke to eyewitnesses to the events that they wrote about.  This brings to a close, if correct, the tales of oral tradition being passed along for many years before they were written down so that no one really knew the truth of the stories.  Don’t pass this book up.

Books for Classes that I am Currently Teaching:  I will be teaching a class that includes as its main reading assignment Dante’s Comedy.  This is quite a treat for me and for the students.  I am re-reading the Musa translation of the Comedy as well as a wonderful introduction to the comedy called A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy.  The Comedy is such a wonderful read, yet it is difficult to enter into without a guide.  This book is a fine guide for a beginner and will help answer many questions.  You will still need a philosophical guide, which is why we have the classes at Knox, but this book will help prepare you to make the most of these classes.

Books for Long Range Projects:  I am currently writing a book on Jesus and the use of the comedic.  I have a chapter roughed out and am working on several other chapters so I try to keep abreast of humor theory in all different areas.  One of the new works that I thought might be helpful and that I have just started reading is a book on the nature of comedy.  It tackles such subjects as “why people laugh?â€?  “Do animals laugh?â€?  “Where do bad (racist, sexual, etc) jokes come from?â€?  What actually makes a joke funny?â€?  Given the fact that much of the humor of ancient Greece and the Semitic humor of Jesus is lost on us today, we as “why is it that humor is so cultural?â€?  All of this will someday be in a book written from the very unique angle of a New Testament Scholar who paid his way though graduate school working as a comic magician.  The book is called Only Joking.

Reading for Enjoyment:  I also like to read a bit (often more than a bit) for enjoyment.  For Christmas my Daughter Charity gave me a book of Ghost Stories by Russell Kirk, the famous conservative scholar.  These stories are different in that they all take place in a God centered universe where people pay for their crimes, sometimes here on earth.  If you are a fan of good, well drawn characters and well written Ghost Stories Check out a side of Kirk that not many know about: Ancestral Shadows: An anthology of ghostly tales

That should keep you in books for a while.  Drop me a response and let me know what you like and don’t like about the site and I will try to do more of what you like.

Until next time,
Keep your lips wet and your jokes dry
DrSamLam