Intro to Reading: Blog 9

I read Let Your Life Speak:  Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker J. Palmer.  I read this week for 3 hours. 

This book focuses on finding one's vocation through listening to one's heart and the inner voice within.  It talks about understanding your limitations and potentials and learning to really listen.  It goes on to talk about how we often have to suffer and journey into the darkness of things before we can reach the light and be made stronger.  This only makes our relationship with God stronger and is a necessary part of life.  The book also has a segment on depression.  It talks about the meaning of depression, the author talks about what it is like for the person in depression, and what it's like to be the onlooker into another's depression and how an onlooker can sometimes only make things worse through encouragement.  The result of depression is meant to be a journey towards God.  The book also talks about leadership and community.  It tells how in order to be a good leader you can't be power hungry, rather you have to lead and serve those your leading from your heart, and that is where your power as a leader lies.  Also being a good leader means taking risks and seeing failure as a learning opportunity.  Book emphasises how community is meant to help encourage one another in their inner works to the Lord (such as meditation, journaling, silent prayer...spiritual disiciplines) and be with one another in their aloneness.  The author ends the book with a reflection: our lives are like the four seasons in that it is a never ending journey one that we can not control, thus we need to learn to let go. 

This book was very inspiring to me and really was something that I could relate with a lot at this point in my life. 

Intro to Reading: Blog 8

I continued to read from the book, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk for 1 hour and 40 minutes. 

The next part of this book focuses on how the author’s involvement in fight club is affecting the way he carries himself and interacts with his boss and co-workers.  The author wants everyone to know that he is tough and it brings out this whole new side of his personality.  Tyler and Marla’s “relationship” develops into one that exists primarily in the bedroom; outside the bedroom they can’t even stand to be in the same room as one another.  At the end of the chapter, Marla talks more directly to the author (rather than Tyler) basically begging him to call her and even though she doesn’t say it, to love her.  This makes for an interesting twist as Tyler is the one suspected of having Marla’s affection.  The next portion of the book Tyler takes the author a step closer to hitting rock bottom, which at this point seems to be the goal.  When the author approaches Tyler about needing more soap, Tyler teaches the author how to make soap.  But through this task, he also teaches the author about a little bit of history.  He teaches the author about experiencing pain and how without sacrifice and pain, we would have nothing.  

This book is very different from anything I have read before.  There are so many different elements and little stories within this story that it is very interesting; you have to play very close attention or else you'll miss something important.  I think that it really helps to have seen the movie, because even though the book has parts that the movie doesn't and is a little different, the movie helps me to better understand the book.   This book also adds a lot of interesting ideas and perspectives on different elements of life.  I like it. 

Intro to Reading: Blog 7

I read from Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk from .5 hours. 

I read about how Tyler has a "thing" (romance) with Marla Singer, while the author dreams about her.  The author is frustrated with himeself and doesn't know how to compete.  He is wallowing in self-pity, wondering what he could of done differently and how suddenly things have changed.