Conquered Words: August

This is my monthly post where I tell you what I have read and (ever so briefly) what I thought about each work. If you haven't read these books, then read this blog and pretend that you did!

Well I'm a month plus into marriage and I couldn't be happier. A little less reading this month, but enough has been conquered to write home about.

1) Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (Anchor, 352 pages). I did NOT finish this book, mainly because after high hopes and 63 pages I discovered it was very tough to read. Not like, "I can't read your language little boy!" unreadability, but more like, "I don't get your voice because it is at times inconsistent" type of thing going on. Whitehead comes highly recognized and recommended, but I'm afraid the voice and slow moving plot was simply not enough to keep me. It's probably because I'm not civilized enough to get it. It's not you, Whitehead, it's me.

2) Revival by Dr. D. Martin Lloyd-Jones (Crossway Books, 316 pages). Simply called, "The Doctor," Lloyd-Jones is one of my intellectual mentors. He was perhaps the most influential preachers in all of Europe in the 50s and 60s and he held the Westminster Chapel in England for most of his life as a minister. Before stepping into preaching, the Doctor was exactly that, a physician. His writing and preaching is some of the best and he has such a unique way of describing the things and commands of God I am consistently astonished. I had already read part of this work, a study on revival (duh), in previous years, but only have recently picked it up in order to understand more fully what God does when he works immediately and deeply at the same time. Finishing his series and closing the last chapter, the Doctor is profound in his charge to his church: "Seek him, stir yourself up to call upon his name. Take hold upon him, plead with him as your Father, as your Maker, as your Potter, as your Guide, as your God. Plead his own promises. Cry unto him and say, "Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down!" He was a true man of God and a true scholar, one of the few people I can safely call a passionate genius.

3) Selected Stories by Andre Dubus (Vintage, 496 pages). Ali and I are both reading the short stories of the great Andre Dubus and we're both floored. You might have heard of his more famous novel, In The Bedroom. These stories in Selected are simply phenomenal. They have a strange calming madness to them, where the emptiness of sin is astonishingly prevalent. Dubus has a pen for the lonely. I've never read anyone who can capture as much emotion as he can is such few words and, at times, such simple prose. It certainly has to do with his own experience, Dubus was diagnosed with multiple psychological disorders including deep clinical depression from an accident that left him unable to walk. He was assisting some disabled people on the side of the road, trying to help them to safety, when an oncoming car hit him and one of the disabled persons. The disabled man was killed and Dubus lost the use of his legs. The woman was saved because Dubus pushed her out of the way. His own story and mind tend to bleed through the pages of his short prose work and it's humbling. I'll be reading his novels in the future.

Well, that's what's happening.

Keep reading, my friends.