Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
What if you wanted to send a message to someone in the future. Would you need a time machine? Would you have to reverse the polarity on your deflector array to transmit a message through a supernova? Maybe you would need to harness the power of a black hole to energize the system. That might …
One measure of how much I like a book is by how much I keep talking about it. In one way or another it has captured me, provoked me, stayed with me. Here are twelve, in no particular order, that I’ve read in the last two years which I keep thinking about. As they range …
One way or another we all fall victim to writer’s block. But it can come in many forms. It is not just a blank screen that sits forever mocking our lack of output. Sometimes it means we just move at a very slow pace. Our perfectionism kicks in so we fuss over every sentence before …
They say, America’s polarized in unprecedented ways. Is that true? Consider the election held in 1800 too. Just twelve years after ratifying the Constitution, President John Adams ran for re-election against his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson. The rhetoric was superheated by hyperpartisan media, making it one of the country’s most acrimonious episodes. Jon Meacham’s …
Matt Ruff’s fun supernatural novel, Lovecraft Country, is an homage to H. P. Lovecraft and his spooky, weird pulp fiction of the last century. Yet it is also an incisive critique of Lovecraft’s bigotry. Set in Chicago in 1954, the novel follows a series of exploits of an extended family and their friends as they …
Over my forty years at InterVarsity Press I crossed paths with J. I. Packer a number of times. This soft-spoken and steady British theologian, who died this past week, became something of an accidental celebrity when his substantive book Knowing God suddenly became a best seller. When, as a newly minted InterVarsity campus staff member …
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is famous for its albatross and for “Water, water, every where,/Nor any drop to drink.” In Mariner, Malcolm Guite gives us so much more in this first-rate biography of Coleridge combined with a masterful analysis of the work’s compelling story, vivid images, and powerful poetry. In …
The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz practiced the scales every day, even in his eighties. He wanted to continually master his craft so that he would be “be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.” The same is true for us. Here are two skills you can master. Don’t worry about …
I am always on the lookout for something good to read. By that I mostly mean books. I love browsing books at a library or at a bookstore or online, but that can be hit and miss. Sometimes the title or cover or back cover pulls me in, and then I am disappointed when I …
Books are better sources of information and insight than tweets or headlines. Two years ago I reviewed here The Myth of Equality, a book that gives more help and understanding than anything you will hear or read in the news today. Ken Wytsma was talking with a young man running his own landscaping firm who …