Category: Reading

On November 3, I was honored at the annual InterVarsity Fall Leadership Meetings in recognition of my 42 years with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and my upcoming retirement in February. About seventy key people from across the country in InterVarsity attended. After hearing some generous comments from Interim President Jim Lundgren and IVP Publisher Bob Fryling, they let me offer a few words. Here is what I said.

Continue reading “Books That Can Change Lives”

Once again another survey has emerged noting the decline of book reading among Americans across all formats–print, digital or audio. The new Pew Research Center Survey confirms a long-term trend. As more forms of entertainment arise and as education levels decline, reading goes down.
Continue reading “Lighting a Candle Instead of Cursing the Lack of Reading”

What books have shaped me the most? Taking IVP books out of consideration (to keep bias to a minimum), the books below have formed my thought life, my spiritual life, my sense of aesthetics, and how I view and interact with the world.

After making the list I noticed that I read most of them before I was twenty-five. And I suppose that’s to be expected. In midlife and beyond, most people have already been shaped, and it’s harder for any one book to have a significant impact. The last book in my list (presented here roughly in the order in which I read them) is the exception.
Continue reading “Six Influential Books”

My first exposure to InterVarsity Press came when a friend, George, handed me a copy of Escape from Reason by Francis Schaeffer over forty years ago. It was the original edition imported to the U.S. from Britain. I was in high school at the time and had heard of some of the philosophers and theologians and artists he mentioned. (Being raised Catholic, Aquinas was at least familiar.) Many were completely new, however. Even though I only had a vague sense of what he was writing about, I devoured the book.
Continue reading “Schaeffer’s Gift”

“Corbin and Eric want you to read to them, Mimi.” It’s not unusual for our son, Philip, to let us know that his sons want their grandmother to read to them. So this last Sunday Phyllis pulled out The Magic Bicycle by John Bibee. And as they sat quietly and attentive, she read to them—via Skype.
Continue reading “Lighting a Candle of Technology”

Maybe you’ve noticed the “What I’m Reading” list on the right-hand column of the Andy Unedited homepage. Of those books I finished this year, by the numbers they represent fourteen novels, seventeen nonfiction books, eleven audio books, six books purchased, one given to me as a gift, seventeen from the library, one borrowed, five read for our neighborhood book club, four I blogged about and five published by InterVarsity Press (books I read off the clock after publication).

Here’s the full list for the year:
Continue reading “What I Read in 2010”

It’s the smell I remember.

When my older sister was in high school she got a summer job at the local bookstore in the center of our town. It was only about a mile from home, so I would sometimes walk or ride my bike there to visit her. I tried not to interrupt her professional duties too much. It was there that I first learned to browse.
Continue reading “It’s the Smell I Remember”

The book, as Nicholas Carr notes in The Shallows, has so far proven extraordinarily resistant to computers and the Net. While book sales and book reading have plateaued, this “long sequence of printed pages assembled between a pair of stiff covers has proven to be a remarkably robust technology for more than half a millennium” (p. 99). But what about now?
Continue reading “The Shallows 8: The Future of the Book”

Something’s gained: Everything is on the web. It’s an external hard drive for the brain, relieving us of the responsibility to remember mindless lists of facts or extended passages of literature. We free up our brain power so we can do other, more important things.

Something’s lost: Because of the way the brain works, when we cease exercising our memory, we don’t merely lose isolated bits of information. We actually lose the ability to gain insight and understanding.
Continue reading “The Shallows 6: Try to Remember”

The Net distracts. But not all distractions are bad. As I’ve written here before, taking a break from a problem and letting your brain do something totally different can provide an opportunity for fresh ideas to emerge. The problem is that the constantly distracting state of the Net, contends Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, changes the way we read and think. (You can find the first in my series on this book here.)
Continue reading “The Shallows 4: The Net Effect”