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Because I’ve been lazy and not keeping up:

The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies - and What They Have Done to Us by David Thomson An extensive trip through the history of filmmaking. I’m interested in movies far more than I get the opportunity to watch them, so this was an interesting read and gives me lots of movie watching gaps to fill in.

City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York by Tyler Anbinder This came on the tail of visiting Manhattan for a week for work. A really fascinating read starting with the first white settlers in New York and carrying on through the late 20th century.

The Believer by Joakim Zander A thriller novel that hits a little too close to home, including a wanna-be jihadist and shady government forces at work.

Last Year by Robert Charles Wilson A time-travel novel in which the present day has a gate into one possible past, but only to a specific time the 1870s. More thoughtful than I anticipated.

Dune by Frank Herbert Caught up with a classic I’d never read. Really enjoyed it. Now I suppose I’ll get sucked into the whole series.

Another random library selection, and a nice change of pace from history and theology. In Now, Cal Berkeley professor Richard Muller sets out to provide a layman’s-level discussion of the nature of time and how the domain of physics interacts with and helps explain it.

Muller provides an engaging discussion about relativistic time dilation, the big bang, quantum effects and “spooky action at a distance”, and his own thoughts about what it is that causes time to move only forward. It’s not entirely for the faint of heart, but he at least is good enough to leave his derivation of equations into appendices rather than embedding them within the body text. The Goodreads reviews of the book seem to be a bunch of physics nerds giving the author flack for his approach, but to this engineering nerd who isn’t deep into physics, it was just fine.

-- Now: The Physics of Time

I’ll confess I’d never heard of James Rhodes prior to picking this book up at the library. Turns out he’s about my age, and a British classical pianist who has had some amount of popular culture impact in Britain trying to make classical music less culturally stuffy and more accessible to the masses.

Instrumental isn’t nearly so much about music as it is about a man trying to come to grips with the effects of some horrifying abuse he underwent as a young boy in primary school. I’ve never read an account that so directly describes the horror and brokenness that an abuse victim can feel. One of Rhodes’ escapes is music, but he vividly describes others that are much less beautiful and much more self-destructive.

Rhodes does mention a couple handfuls of favorite classical pieces through the book, which someone has already arranged into a convenient Spotify playlist.

Instrumental is a worthwhile read but not for the faint of heart.

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Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music

Found this one on the New Books shelf at the library and figured hey, why not? Welky tells here the story of a handful of Arctic explorers who followed up on Robert Peary’s claim to have seen an Arctic continent he called “Crocker Land” (named after one of his financial sponsors).

Want to trek for multiple years living off pemmican, hardtack, and the internal organs of whatever bears and musk oxen you can hunt? Lose your toes to frostbite? Go (in some cases, at least) more than a bit loony? Early 20th century Arctic exploration might be for you!

Welky’s writing is engaging and the story is an adventurous one. After reading it, I think it’ll be at least a week before I stop feeling cold.

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A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier

Because sometimes you need some thoughtless entertainment. Even at that, Grisham is just coasting on his reputation at this point. Meh.

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The Whistler

The buzz on this one had been going around Twitter for a while, so I was glad to pick up a copy and read. Michael Wear is a young guy who, not even out of college, worked as the White House lead for evangelical outreach during President Obama’s first term. Reclaiming Hope is part memoir of those years and partly Wear’s suggestions for how to repair political engagement with religion.

On the whole, I think Wear did a good job of identifying points where both the right and left failed in opportunities to find common ground that could’ve made legitimate progress on issues important to religious conservatives. However, I think his admiration for President Obama causes him to pull his punches in the second half of the book.

In the first half of the book, Wear reveals himself as something of an Obama fan boy as he details all of the President’s speeches that reveal the depth to his personal faith. (I’m not disputing these - I have great admiration for Obama’s faith - but the tone is pretty fawning.) When Wear starts assigning blame in the second half of the book, though, the blame is never to Obama directly, but always to the “administration” or the “White House”.

Overall, it’s a good little memoir, and Wear has some good thoughts to share about how we might find progress forward on issues significant to people of faith.

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Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America

History, it is often said, is written by the winners. Zinn, though, undertakes to tell a history of America from the perspective of the losers, the poor, the oppressed. Think the arrival of the explorers from the perspective of the Native Americans. The colonial and early US history from the perspective of the slaves. The early 1900s from the perspective of poor workers banding together into labor unions.

Zinn is not trying to be even-handed here, but this volume would serve as an excellent companion to any more traditional history of the United States. It also serves as a good reminder that while things may seem bleak in our current political era, they have been much worse, and our country has withstood far more.

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A People’s History of the United States