Coming: Book Conversations

I've decided to blog my reactions to some books and essays --- some that I've already read (even from long ago) and some that I have yet to read. My hope is that friends --- some that I already have, and some that I have yet to meet --- will find the blog posts thought-provoking, challenging, and good places to begin conversations.

My friends today aren't terribly diverse. They are mostly white middle-class people from my particular (not very large) religious tradition, the Stone-Campbell movement. By my count, there are six or seven households within spitting distance of my house that belong to four different congregations from two different sects within that movement. I hope that this blog can spark conversations that they're interested in, and I'll be keeping them in mind as I write and as I choose books to write about.

Part of my group of friends really is diverse: my school and work colleagues for most of the past 25 years have come from a wide variety of ethnicities, nationalities, and faiths. But this blog isn't about the conversations that I want to have with them. Most of the conversations that I foresee here are about who I've been and who I've become, and each "person" in that continuum from my birth until now has been fundamentally a white, intellectual, free-church Protestant who may now, at long last, have some insight into what areas of intellectual pursuit could be profitable for people like him. Others are welcome, but it's those most like me that I feel competent to lead.

There are a lot of books worth talking about. These are the ones that I'm most eager to write about soon:

• Cosmopolis, by Stephen Toulmin
• "Letter from Birmingham Jail", by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• The Politics of Jesus, by John Howard Yoder
• A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn
• The Souls of Black Folks, by W.E.B. DuBois

My desire to write about these in particular stems at least partly from the fact that several of the authors are only recently deceased (which reminds me that I might want to write some about Studs Terkel, though that may do a great disservice to the literary quality of his work). These authors' ideas have shaped me, and I don't want their ideas to die --- not when they are so likely to be of great use to other people like me.

And I suppose that middle age reinforces my sense of my own mortality. I've worked a lot to get to where I am intellectually, and I don't want my efforts to be for naught. I don't need disciples, but I welcome fellow travelers.

People who know me and think that I read a lot --- I am not a voracious reader when compared to a host of people I know --- might be surprised that I do little reading for the sake of pleasure or entertainment. I don't read novels and fiction. Now that I think of it, given how many people think of me as "very serious," I suspect that those people wouldn't be surprised at all. Nevertheless, I think that I could stray into discussing "fun" books, like Combinatorial Optimization by Bill Cook et al.

O.K., that was a joke, and a very bad one to those who actually know what the title of the book means. So be forewarned: you deserve to know what you're getting into when you start reading the blog of a guy who thinks math is fun. But that's what I am: extremely irregular.