Good Relational Reads

I find a variety of things influencing my art and life.  For a winter night may I recommend two books I have read as of late that I found good fodder for thought?  Here they be:

The Author Shusaku Endo

Title:  Deep River  Author:  Shusaku Endo

His book Silence  knocked my socks off many years ago with the harrowing dilemma of faith it proposed.  Deep River continues examining faith this time looking at it through our longing for resolution both relationally and spiritually.  Following a group of older Japanese tourists traveling to India, their back-stories unfurl before us revealing secret motives and hopes of resolution that are drawing all of them on the trip.  Profoundly aware of a God that pursues us like a lover, Endo paints a broad picture of humanity longing for hope, connection, and redemption or simply journeying to say thank you.

Title:  Doc  Author:  Mary Doria Russell

I fell in love with Mary Doria Russell with the amazing spiritual science fiction novels, The Sparrow, and Children of God.   Creating the western themed historical novel Doc was a wonderful surprise to read from her.  Still showing her skill in creating three-dimensional profoundly human characters, Doc follows the life of Doc Holiday, of the famous Tombstone Arizona gunfight.  The books surprised me as being a story of friendship and survival.  It’s worth your time indeed.

The Author Mary Doria Russell and her book “Doc” (Although unintentional with the photos I chose here, it seems to have your hand on your chin is a good move if you are an author getting your photo taken.)

 

An Excellent Summer Read

Last summer I couldn’t put down one of her books while traveling throughout Europe.  This last couple of weeks in New York I plowed through another novel of hers while on subways and in planes.  Mary Doria Russell is a wonderful writer.  Her work is smart, theological, challenging, and heart-felt; all recounted through the eyes of men and women that are all too human.

I don’t think I’ve ever directly recommended a book on “A Bigger World Yet,” but her works are really wonderful pieces of literary art that touch on the human condition and what it is to wrestle with God in the face of trauma and human frailty.  Topics that I think good art, no matter the media one is working on should be engaging in.

The first novel I read “The Sparrow” recounts a Jesuit mission in the future to a planet called Rakhat that scientists hear music coming from, just as the novel begins with the assembly of the team, it also jumps forward to the return of the single survivor of the trip a Jesuit linguist, Emilo Sandoz who has just arrived back in ship half dead, his hands torn to pieces.  And so the novel begins at two points of a story.

The second novel I just completed “Children of God” begins where the other left off and in some ways is even more harrowing as it wrestles with hope, forgiveness, and wrongdoing done in the name of good.

I can’t recommend these books more highly. Thank you Clint Baldwin for recommending them to me years ago.

Here are the links to the books on Amazon:

The Sparrow: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Children of God (Ballantine Reader's Circle): Mary Doria Russell: 9780449004838: Amazon.com: Books

Also: Here is a wonderful interview with Mary Doria Russell on the radio program and podcast Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippet: 
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/novelist-as-god/particulars.shtml