Today during worship, I felt a joy I haven't felt in a long time. A sense of relief, and the feeling of having a veil being lifted off my eyes. It has been my preoccupation with so many worldly things that I have forgotton how to be still and focus on Jesus. It's great to be back.
I'm really happy that I now have the resolve to read the Bible, cover to cover. At Exodus now. During today's sermon, I realized the importance of the Word as well as the extent to which the knowledge of the Word that I gather during the other days of the week can actually aid my understanding of the sermon. The recollection of Bible stories from Sunday school can only go so far. So let not my spiritual walk be a 1/7 thing but the pillar on which my life centers around. As I tend to be a speed reader, let me not be a casual reader of the Word too.
Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is eluding me, each and every time I go to the library to source for it. (Yes, old-fashioned me relies on serendipity) Bah, humbug. I read 'When We Were Orphans' and I'm really drawn to his narrative style, though I have an inkling thatt the mystery genre doesn't suit him all too well, maybe because I didn't like the conclusion, which I found anti-climatic. I saw Nocturnes but I'm trying to diversify and read books from different authors once I get a good sense of an author's style. Scott says that Ishiguro is a misunderstood author, with readers having their expectations somewhat warped by the assumption that he is Japanese and therefore he must write differently from English authors. (See Murakami's poetic, slightly haiku style) In actual fact, though he was born in Japan, he moved to England when he was 6. Of late, I've been experiencing novels by great story-tellers including David Mitchell in Black Swan Green, so that's a joy.
Many people say that fiction is somewhat irrelevant but I beg to differ. It's rather pragmatic to think that non-fiction books are more relevant just because they provide more concrete facts when while attempting to present an objective viewpoint, a compromise is made on presenting the human side of the story. I got to know about the Roma problem in France through Black Swan Green.
Okay so booklist for the holidays is as follows:
Crazy Heart by Thomas Cobb
Et cetera The Unpublished Poems by ee cummings (Not E.E.Cummings as denoted on the cover page hrmph haha)
Staying Alive (Anthology of poems)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
and ta-dah catch of the day!
What the Dog Saw and other adventures by Malcolm Gladwell
and the afterthought:
Burma by D.G.E Hall
Kinda to appease the studious side of my self that says "Go study, Yiying!" But still, Burma is intriguing, as rogue nations usually are. The refusal of aid during Cyclone Nargis and the Saffron Revolution makes Burma an interesting case study, one that makes its history especially (compared to other SEA nations) relevant to today's context. And of course, never forgetting that the human side of it all. I wonder whether obstacles like ísolationism and xenophobia in international relations can ever be solved. As with the Russian Submarine Kursk Explosion, to refuse aid for reasons like protecting country's secrets, upholding the country's image, at the cost of civilian lives just baffles me.
Here's to a fruiful week (:
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