What Book Are You Currently Reading? (2.0.)

[Kingpoleon]

The Journal of John Wesley. I must say, if anyone ever were to read it without the faintest clue of religion beforehand, there is no other book so convincing. It reads like a sequel to the Book of Acts, and if half the claims in it are true, I would be greatly afraid to oppose a word of Wesley’s - on multiple occasions, mobs attempt to kill him and cannot harm him; his prayers bring a man back to life; his frequent rebukes unto Christians are startling and terrifying.

He was, by several records, the first to ordain blacks and women, and his writings elsewhere on such subjects are astounding. I have heard some call him the Thirteenth Apostle, but to my mind, he seems to surpass even the apostles.

[Kingpoleon]

About to start The Big Sleep.

Finishing up White Fang and I swear to god this is the cutest sh!t i've ever read.

Speaking of schoolroom standbys, I'm also reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder "Little House" books. It's an...interesting series. The books are deeply racist and written in the service of a political project that's glaringly obvious as an adult reader, but you can also see why generations of children and parents have found them so endearing.

I’m not sure if you’ve gotten to the Rocky Ridge/Ozark books yet, but they add a great deal of context. I’d hardly call any of the books “deeply racist.”

“Why don’t you like Indians, Ma… This is Indian country, isn’t it? What did we come to their country for, if you don’t like them?”

The books also provide one of the earliest records of black doctors practicing on white patients in America, and I believe the first one recorded as a “settler doctor”.

[Kingpoleon]

I'm rereading The Lord of the Rings, but this time I'm reading it in Japanese (Yubiwa monogatari). I've never attempted to read something so long in Japanese before, even when I was majoring in the language, and I figured a story that I'm already intimately familiar with would be a good place to start, especially since this way I get the fun of seeing what makes the translation tick. It's going well so far.

I always like the fact that C. S. Lewis thought so highly of the LoTR when Tolkien famously criticized Narnia.