The Shack: The Reader's Digest Da Vinci Code

So as I understand it, Amazon buggered up my neighbors book delivery, something about a botched address, so after a little song and dance from the squeaky wheel, he ended up getting the same delivery of books twice, the second of which he kindly passed along my way in the form of a literary care package.  I scored Steven King's new encyclopedia, a Vonnegut novel and The Shack by William P. Young.    

Thanks buddy!

I was anxious to read the latter right away, because my stolidly agnostic friend was ranting and raving about how his whole perception changed  thanks to the book, and how he wanted to start going to church (Still waiting...).  

I polished it off in about 3 days of casual reading when I should have been minding my children.  It was.... okay....

Here's the thing.  The Shack is not written particularly well.  Not really... It's not much good at all, except that it is, kinda.  It's written with a cadence Toronto Sun readers would probably find familiar, and while that might out me as a special kind of snob, that is shitty writing.  The whole time I couldn't help but think how better served the story itself and the themes it tackles (the nature of love, of the Holy trinity, of forgiveness) would have been in the hands of a gifted scribe who used words as more than a means to an end.  A great deal of fuss has been made over this book, and it pokes a few holes in the sensitive underbelly of religious dogma in plain down-to-earth english your reader's digest reading, Stephan Harper loving grandparents would probably find enlightening (not my grandparents though, they're sharp as all hell).   

That is not to say the book is not without it's strong points.  Alright, the guy's daughter gets murdered, and it just so happens I have a daughter, so if a fella gets sort of teary eyed when he's reading about it, that doesn't mean he's soft.  That point needs to be established.  The book tugs pretty hard at the heart strings but in terms of theology its nothing I haven't heard before.  I would have a harder time recommending this book if it wasn't such an easy read.  As it stands, it was a pretty bizarre change of pace after reading the Fountainhead, but if you've got the luxury of a cozy Christmas day to read Chicken soup for the lackadaisical Christian soul, this will do the trick.

2009 in Books

I went on a pretty good tear this year and knocked a few off the "You should have already read these" list.  I've harbored a pretty serious bias for dead writers my entire reading career.  I guess it's because you only get so many books to read, and  I want to get in all the classics I can, but that's dumb.  I want to appreciate contemporary literature and I pledge that in 2010 I will patronize writers above ground.  I'm going to try and read the Giller nominees and lots of small press numbers, when I do, you'll know about it.

Jeremy's 2009 Reading List

The Canada Reads 5
CBC darlings pitch their pet books and through a ridiculous "kick off the island" round table, systematically erase my favourites in order of preference two years running.  It's fun to follow what CBC radio is talking about and I love getting these for Christmas every year (Thanks Hunny!) but I always feel a little snotty afterwards.

The Fat Lady Next door is Pregnant by Michel Tremblay
Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards
The Outlander by Gil Adamson
Fruit by Brian Francis
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Birthday Books
I got a few Chapters Giftcards for me birthday, much obliged Mom and Dad!

Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Harlot's Ghost by Norman Mailer
Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
Call Me Ted by Ted Turner

The Paper Backs

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Les Enfant Terribles by Jean Cocteau
After Many Summer by Aldous Huxley
Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer
Faust 2 by Gothe
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Centaur by John Updike
The Shack by William P. Young








    

Week 13: WTF

As published on www.ongameday.ca

Week Thirteen had more twists than a Lost/Dr. Who crossover, and I’m thanking providence I never got around to calling the Vikings a sure thing before the weekend. 

It is absolutely killing me, but I’m going to finally have to start paying Arizona some respect.  The Bridesmaids of the NFC butted heads in Sunday Night and the Cardinals dusted off their loss last week to the Titans by kicking the shit out of a Vikings Team that never saw it coming.  It may not have been the upset of the season, but it’s a huge statement for a team that’s been on again off again all season despite being uncontested in their division.  The Cardinals secondary came up with some looks that were straight out of Vaudeville, nobody knew what to make of them, least of all Favre who threw two picks, and got sacked three times, Osteoporosis be damned.  The Arizona O-Line deserves medals of honor for the pass protection they pulled off against the meanest front four in the game.  Warner had enough time to check his investments via Blackberry before finding and hitting his receivers.  The Cardinals are the first team this season to consistently double team Jared Allen.  They did it and it worked, so you can bet number 69 is going to have to make friends with two Offensive Lineman for the rest of the year.  It must be flattering.  I’m looking for these two teams to renew hostilities somewhere in the playoffs and prove once and for all that not all old people are completely useless.

If that wasn’t enough to throw my Sunday in a loop, the Dolphins beat up a Patriots team that have now dropped three of their last four.  Anyway you slice it Boston’s finest sure ain’t what they used to be, but you can bet whoever’s lined up against them in the playoffs isn’t going to feel lucky.  The Dolphins meanwhile have four games to take over first place, and if Ricky Williams keeps playing the way he has, they are going to walk all over Jacksonville and finally take hold of the AFC East.

All this stuff is weird, but nothing could have prepared me for flicking the channel over to the Saints game to see them squeaking a win out in overtime thanks to a bum kick by one Shaun Suisham, a terrible person who should just fall on his sword and get it over with.  Regardless, that a consistently hopeless Redskins squad beat the spread like an enemy combatant and only lost on a last minute fuckup has to mean the Saints have a little more paper to their tiger than anybody thought.

It had to be a crazy weekend indeed for a Stars/Giants matchup to fly under the radar, but it might have been one of the better games of the year.  Romo was scoring with Witten like he was a skinny Jessica Simpson and still they couldn’t beat a Giants team that was making hungry touchdowns.  That NFC East is the tightest division in Football, and next Sunday’s meeting between the Giants and the Eagles is going to be the game for the ages.

In My Defense...

I set out to make this blog my Literary Soap Box, but for a reason unbeknownst to my waking conscious I've been thumbing through The Scarlet Letter for two months now and I just couldn't pull the goddamn thing to bed.  This hasn't happen more than twice before in my entire reading life, but a book mark is still sitting 200 pages in, creeping ever so slowly towards completion.

In the interim, I have broken another habit and begun another novel in in order to slip out of the funk.  I found the Fountainhead in a 50 cent bin at the library, and having read and enjoyed Dear Ms. Rand's hyper contentious "Atlas Shrugged" this spring, I went in with guns blazing.


This blog was started ostensibly because I read Atlas Shrugged, but I never wrapped my head completely around the book itself and the recent hoopla around it.  Even if I still haven't entirely, I wanted to address  the growing trend amongst otherwise clever writers of simply dismissing it out of hand as being fascist.  I think this book has received the popularity, not of Glenn Beck and his ilk, but of an impressive set young readers, because of a vision of the individual that is in keeping with the mantras they're inundated with about the virtue of hard work, character and discipline, without all the moral loopholes and caveats that render those same codes spineless.  Our culture, particularly but not exclusively, men of my generation, is besodden on all sides by Lotus Eaters, and it has become entirely too easy for men, educated or otherwise, to become comfortable both economically and socially without ever having been forced to excel at anything.  There is a wealth the likes of which the world has never experienced of smart, inspired energy evaporating into the ether with either monotony or complacency.  Atlas Shrugged for me was a call to arms against atrophy, an inspiration and instruction to pursue excellence and to flatly ignore the impulse to compromise.  It is the bible of ambition, and while you could lead a herd of elephants through the holes in her logic, there aren't any examples in literature with a more compelling argument for hard work that I'm come across.  

Rand's heroes are pitted against their world, which may only be a shaky mirror image of ours, but if you can't recognize a piece of her frustrations with elements of bureaucracy, elected government and our most artificial and hypocritical social script, then you simply do not pay attention.

Her Philosophy, though harsh, does not condone half truths any more than Christianity does on the other end of the Spiritual spectrum. It is a strict atheism, and has genuinely fair guidelines in terms of integrity, both social and economical. Hank Reardon doesn't ship his plants overseas to increase profits any more than Dagny Taggart hires scabs. To truly worship at the alter of objectivism requires personal standards a great many of her recent boosters do not in good faith possess. That is in large part, I think, the reason for the dismissal and intense dislike amongst her critics. A great many of her fans happen to be assholes.

Rand's style is entirely void of modern stylistic apparati and thusly is more in tune with Romanticism (thank you paperback preamble). I'm not at all adverse to that convention so I didn't have the hard time ploughing through Atlas as some of my peers confessed to. The author uses every word, every character, every symbol and every circumstance in her novel to promote her ideology and makes no bones about it. It is as focused a writing as you're liable to read, while still leaving room for excitement and heart-pumping page turning.
The stories I think are compelling, but that the characters are 100% archetypical is an adjustment; there are villians, heros, the unredeemably corrupted, the born again Objectivists and the sheep. Period. In my lifetime I have never met anyone who was just one of theses things, and the author herself certainly didn't walk the walk (pass the Amphetamines would you darling...). At any rate, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are books you should read regardless of your political leanings. If you start freaking out and plotting to take over the world, just take a cold shower. You got through the Grapes of Wrath without ever helping any poor people and reading Ayn Rand won't turn you into Ralph Klein.

Saints Go Marching, Colts Limp Towards Perfection

As first Published at www.ongameday.ca

It seems to me that between the NFL’s last two undefeated teams, there isn’t a lot in common.  The Colts, for the last handful of games, have had straight up barn burners, notably against the Pats and the Fourth and Short heard round the world, and now with the Texans, their division rivals. 

This Sunday Indy looked like a team that had finally underestimated an opponent.  Texans were hitting fast and hard, and even if they were down at the half, the Colts looked worried an the Texans were taking charge.  Half way through the third, a ridiculous interception by Matt Schaus set the stage for the Colts offense to put the entire affair to bed courtesy of One Mr. Manning.  The Texans D didn’t get the memo and shut them down to set up the touchdown in the early fourth.  But eventually the Texans succumbed to death from a thousand cuts.  Offside, False Start, one huge pass interference, and another interception and finally a blown onside kick all amounted to the white and blue rally from which Huston could not recover.  The Colts with a little help from their friends in the black and white stripes, squeeze by a team that had no real business making it so close.

 

On the other end of the world, the Big Easy got to watch their home squad beat New England and the point spread like a three-legged dog in a Toronto pound.  Brees and his merry band of receivers made a monkey out of Billichek’s revered defense and made sure everybody knows the Patriots aren’t the team they used to be.  Monday night was touchdown night.  Brees gave one to everybody who wanted one, he was throwing everywhere, five different receivers, two cheerleaders, his mom, the hot dog guy, people walking by the stadium, everybody.  Especially strange was watching Bilicheck say over and over to the press what a better team New Orleans was.  I wonder if you can smell a stroke coming on? 

 

The Colts are playing a tough Titans squad next week, Vince Young’s star power and Chris Johnson’s heroics might be the toughest thing left on the Indianapolis regular season to-do list.  The proline is paying really well for anybody bold enough to take the underdogs, and I’m checking the V just because I don’t think we’re going to see two perfect seasons. 

If New Orleans can be stopped this year, it’s not by the Redskins (it’s by the Vikings).  I’m looking for the momentum from Monday to carry over and for some scoring records to be smashed this Sunday.

There’s something to be said about the grit it takes to come form behind for the win constantly.  It means a team that takes “Never say Die” seriously, a team can play the clutch and laugh in the face of defeat.  There has to be something tangibly beneficial to hard fought battles that at the very least make for better games. 

But really, how can you compare a team that squeaked by the Pats on a bizzaro gamble vs a team that dominated them, start to finish, in every aspect of the game.  Maybe we’ll all get to see on February 7^th.  

Canadian Buffalo and the Hype that Wasn't

as first published at www.ongameday.ca

Time will tell whether canning Jauron will make a positive difference in Bill’s long term health, but winning one at home two weeks later sure helps makes the decision look smarter.  Even though their playoff hopes were all but scuttled in the last minutes of the first regular season game, the Bills have given a few cheery moments to their bedeviled fans, and none as thoroughly pleasing as playing spoiler in this Sunday’s whipping of their aquatic arch-rivals. Any die-hards who put their mark on H+ are looking pretty smart today.  The chemistry between Owens and Fitzpatrick keeps on rolling out tasty tasty goodness with 96 yards and a TD late when it really mattered.  The only way this revelation could make Trent Edwards look worse would be actually having him play some more.

All in all it was a great team effort in front of a home crowd that deserves that sort of win a lot more than they get it.  Miami was eyeballing a coup d’etat on their perpetual NFC leaders in two weeks, but thanks to Buffalo the Pats breath a little easier this Monday as they hold their grocery bags in front of the tank named New Orleans. 

And now, Ontario proper can look forward to hosting the most important game of the year as two teams with no prayer of playoff contention coming to Toronto this Thursday. After the buzz blared through the thousand-headed Roger’s Hydra failed to drum up the excitement.  TO in TO they cried, as if Terrell was going to perform ninety minutes of standup during the day-long festival of lead up.  Well, the big day is four nights away and tickets are still on sale, as of this writing 100 level seats are still going for around a “reduced” two hundred clams a pop.  I think Canada as a whole, being immersed in the NFL at no less a clip than our neighbors to the South, would appreciate a game more if it didn’t feature the bottom feeders of the AFC East duking it out for honour and draft picks.  After all, ninety percent of Canada is a good road trip away from a stadium and we aren’t losing our collective minds about the game because nobody is losing their minds about the game, but that’s just the cynic in me talking. 

 

Talk of the Bills migrating North to the Roger’s center for good had reached a fever pitch this summer, but it seems to have died down in the quiet way disappointment tends to.  Now good old At-Least-We’re-Not-Baghdad Buffalo is talking big, Bill Cower big, and I’ll be damned if the hope that runs eternal doesn’t actually feels less ridiculous from my Bill-fan acquaintances.

Cheering for the Bills this coming Sunday in Toronto should come pretty easy to a city full of underachieving teams that are ceremoniously fed to the lions in every professional sport thay participate in.  To be fair though, having two teams each coming off big wins might just make this one enjoyable and there are a host of reasons to expect an good performance.  After all, both teams have explosive elements, Buffalo has a wide receiver core that can stand against any, while the Jets’ defense is still ridiculously talented despite their salty record.  Now that Sanchez got the monkey off his back he might even swagger into Toronto and throw like he did the first 4 games.  Regardless, it should be every loyal Proline playing Canadian’s duty to have an opinion on this game and put their mark where it counts.  Maybe even shell out a hundred bucks on nosebleeds, they’ll close the dome and you can always PVR Private Practice
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