Saturday Library Post 1

It's Saturday morning, and I'm in the library. Only this morning I've brought my laptop, which seems a little disloyal to all these books surrounding me.

Anyway, I think I've probably mentioned (a million times) that I love the library. I love little libraries, like the kind in which I spent so much of my childhood
9and like the one I'm in this morning), and I love big ones, like the NYPL and the BPL. When I was a boy, my best friend George Knorr (where is he now, I wonder) and I used to walk to the library on just about every fine Saturday morning, each of us coming home with an armful of books more often than not. As I think of those days, they are always sunny. Why is that, do you suppose? For I'm sure it was not always so.

This morning, walking into my local public library (on a sunny morn, by the way), browsing the new books rack, I find this: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, of which Nicholson Baker said,

"Oddly inspiring.…This is the Super Size Me of lexicography….Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own.”

Speaking of reading, I've begun John Piper's The Pleasures of God. Just out of curiosity, I tracked down the single Amazon reviewer who gave this book a 1-star rating:

I read this for a theology class and found is crass, speculative, and self-serving. The picture of God as a pleasure-mongering hedonist was horrifying. It runs absolutely counter to the biblical data used to support it. I don't recommend this book even for a door stop - too light weight!

I will only say this: did you ever notice that people who take theology classes are always claiming books and authors are "too lightweight" for them, thus showing off their theological sophistication?

Anyway, here's a quote from the book itself:

I regard this book as a vision of God through the lens of his happiness. What the church and the world need today, more than anything else, is to know and love god--the great, glorious, sovereign, happy God of the Bible. Very few people think of God as supremely happy in the fellowship of the Trinity and in the work of creation and redemption. The volcanic exuberance of God over the worth of his Son and the work of his hands and welfare of his people is not well-known. God's delight in being God is not sung the way it should be, with wonder and passion, in the worship places of the world. And we are thepoorer and weaker for it.

I'll take Piper over aforesaid theology-student any day.