Wednesday, July 29, 2009

BOOK REVIEW: NOTES FROM THE TILT-A-WHIRL

I was going to read ND Wilson's new book on vacation. The problem is I started reading it three days before we left. I opened it one evening just to get started, and then I couldn't stop reading. I finished late the next evening...so much for that idea.

It's a unique book. Delightfully written. Funny (I laughed out loud at least a dozen times, and found my self reading most of its pages with a big grin on my face). But it's also smart. I read a lot of reviews trying to compare Notes to Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz. There might be some similarities, but Wilson is much more intelligent, and his book also has some measure of cohesion, which Miller's book did not. I should say I didn't dislike Blue Like Jazz. I just liked Notes much, much more. It suited me.

The book is a walk through the wonder of the world by walking through the seasons of a year, starting is Winter and ending with Fall. Further, he takes on the idea of God being the master storyteller, artist, playwright, etc... This is not a new tact, but Wilson really focuses on the ex nihilo creation as accomplished by God's word. In Wilson's view, as long as the world is turning (like a carnival ride) God is ever speaking. In addition to Creation there is much thought given to philosophy, Hell, the problem of evil and the resurrection. I told you he was smarter than Miller.

Wilson's writing style is borderline stream of consciousness, which can be annoying, but I think he pulls it off with a measure of charm. The language is a bit looser than most Christian books, which is, for some reason, refreshing. Overall, Wilson was able to take his subject matter (the earth and everything in it) and return the reader to looking at Creation and Redemption with a bit more wide eyed wonder. For this reason I would highly recommend this book. Particularly to those who get a little bored with the types of books Xian pusblishers normally churn out. I leave with this:

"If the world is fundamentally an accident, if in the beginning, there was no eternal personality, no eternal living being, merely super-hot, hyper-dense I AM matter (with no space and no universe outside of itself), and if, wandering those hyper dense, super tiny corridors of the Forever Matter, attending to its normal routine, there happened to be one little chemical that caught its toe and flopped into another very different chemical, and both of them said, "Oh, crap," in tiny voices and went deaf in the explosion, then when did the accident start making sense and why the hell do we have the Special Olympics?" (NFTTAW, p. 127)


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