Book 6 – The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler.

This book really wasn’t for me.  Given how little reading time I get I probably should’ve aborted reading before I invested so much time in it.  I didn’t like the characters at all and I think they were supposed to be good friends to each other but they weren’t really and I found that depressing.  When fairly mediocre friendship is portrayed as good friendship that says a lot about the world.  Not to mention ending happened to fast as was way too Hollywod happy ending for me.  It might be some people’s thing though.

Book 7-8 The book of Mark which I read with Ched Myers et al’s commentary “Say to this Mountain”

I wish there were more commentaries like this one.  It was so helpful to read a book of the Bible with a commentary cause there is so much I don’t know about the context and thus so often miss stuff but most commentaries don’t get me fired up like this one.  Only other one might be Richard Rohr’s “The Good News according to Luke”.  Ched Myers and co-authors really make one aware of the centrality of the political message of Jesus in Mark.  They don’t sanitise at all.  Then at the end of each chapter they have a section titled “the word in our world” which encourages us to look at where Jesus would be directing his message today and what we can do.

It is the kind of book that would be best read with others over a long period of time so you could do all the  suggested activities and reflections.  I didn’t do any of those things as I wasn’t part of a group and it was on loan so I couldn’t have it for too long but I still got a lot out of it.  Even if uncomfortable at times.