The Best Section of the Library

My favorite section of the library is the "young adult" section. That is the side filled with Mark Twain, Jules Verne, J.K. Rowling, Lois Lowry, Louis Sachar, C.S. Lewis, etc. Those are the books that kept (and still keep) me up at night because I can't put the book down. I like to browse the young adult sections of bookstores too because I know that some of them are classics waiting to be discovered.

I found a new one. It's called, The City of Ember, and Emma and I decided to read it aloud to each other instead of trading reading time.

*The movie version comes out tomorrow, and Walden Media, the company that made Ember and the movie versions of Narnia, picks some amazing books to turn into movies. So it's always a good idea to pick up whichever title they are working on. Your almost assured a great book.

Tim Keller's New Book

The Border's in The Domain is our favorite bookstore and place to read, so Emma and I went up there last night.

I picked up Timothy Keller's The Reason for God and was blown away. This looks like a must read.

From Publishers Weekly

In this apologia for Christian faith, Keller mines material from literary classics, philosophy, anthropology and a multitude of other disciplines to make an intellectually compelling case for God. Written for skeptics and the believers who love them, the book draws on the author's encounters as founding pastor of New York's booming Redeemer Presbyterian Church. One of Keller's most provocative arguments is that all doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternate beliefs.

Why I'm Reading Old Books

I'm reading Augustine's Confessions and rereading C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Confessions is difficult to read so I had to remind myself why I'm reading a 1500 year-old book. C.S. Lewis says it well in these two quotes from the same essay.

"It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books."

And

"keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."

C.S. Lewis, Introduction to Athanasius, On The Incarnation.

photo by Lin Pernille ♥ Photography