I read it.

I just finished Mindset by Carol Dweck. It is a book that has challenged me to change the way I parent, communicate with my spouse, approach my longterm goals, teach, read, and write. Dweck's main thesis is that you can choose a mindset that adopts growth and learning, or one that is fixed on traits and talents.

If you are struggling with change in some part of your life, I highly recommend it. It is not the same old you can do it motivation speech. Instead, she builds a case for changing your mind. Then, she outline practical everyday steps for living a life of learning.

Like my other recent reading, it comes back to the notion that beliefs change the way we behave. All things, we learn once again, are subject to change. That is the closest thing we have to hope.

Yes. I am starting mindset, a book that begins with the notion that there are two mindsets: fixed and growth. People with fixed minsets believe that they have some given traits that are nearly impossible to shift. Those with growth mindsets believe in continuous transformation through effort. I'll post more on this later.

I began the summer by reading Judith Kitchen's examination of William Stafford's poetic works, Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford. There is simply not enough critical writing on Stafford's voluminous body of work. Here it becomes clear that his crisp, yet complicated, approach to writing grew from a lifetime of peaceful engagement with ambivalence. Ambivalence? Maybe that is the wrong word. It is more like Stafford was resolute in his commitment to not pushing himself or others around. He was a pacifist inside and out, and that included not being pushy about pacifism.

Like so many literary critics, Kitchen has the ability to crack open a poem. Her comments on internal sound relationships between words in "Traveling Through the Dark" is worth the price of the book (by the way it is on remainder at Powell's Books).

In the end, it fits with my summer theme because it is a story about beliefs. Stafford believed that language matters and it is important to teach language to incline toward peace. He brought about peace by reminding all of us of our own humanity, fragility, and open-ended mystery. He was not an Oregon poet, Kansas poet, or U.S. poet. Stafford was a poet-philosopher who helped the world understand what it means to be a human being.

In an apparant contrast to Kitchen's book, I finally read Sam Harris' The End of Faith, one of my new favorite books. Like Letters to a Christian Nation, Harris is rough on liberal theists for their blind tolerance of irrational thinking from their more radical bretheren. To that end, he actually defends more extreme theologies as a more adequate representation of the texts that they celebrate.

Some people my criticize Harris as being anti-spiritiual or angry. These people have not read the entire book. Harris, like Stafford, is a passionate advocate for love, compassion, humility, mystery, and spirituatlity. What he really wants to see is a world in which people use their heads and openly invite civilization forward. Also, he makes a compelling argument supporting the dangers in not helping the world abandon theism. For anybody concerned about the rold of religion in current affairs, this book is a must read.

For me, the most challenging section of the book was Harris' critique of pacifism. I will write about pacifism in a seperate blog post. It is an issue worthy of its very own mini-essay.

Last night I finished Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams. I am reading it as part of a book club at work. Like the Kitchen and Harris books, it dealt with how people fold belief into their experience of suffering. Kingsolver seems to take a more mythopoeic approach to faith than Harris, Stafford, or Kitchen; though, she does seem a bit like Stafford.

A chapter toward the end of the book called "Ground Orientation" dragged as a muddled through the history of one of the main character, but the rest of the book chugged along like a fast train in the barren desert. I liked it, but I did not love it. I'll tell the truth, it made me cry. It had the quality of a really well made Hollywodd film, but it did not bring me toward seeing the world in any kind of new way. It did remind me of the power of love, death, and family. Three things that we cannot forget when we want to find love in a world that offers up question marks and suffering alongside sunrises and open sky.

I just finished this up. I really can't get enough Murakami these days. Someday, I will write a Murakami essay and post it here. Until then, let's leave it at this: If you are interested in the human predicament as it emerges in our time, you must be reading Murakami. If you are not, you are missing out on our generation's Kafka.

My best understanding of his intentions is that he is taking aim at our mutual and collective urge to construct a unified narrative when that effort may not adequately square with reality. His copious use of surrealism, minimalism, and repetition mocks our efforts to tell one tidy story about the human experience. Every time I read one of his books, I get the same feeling that I derived from my first exposure to albums like Bitch's Brew and Love Supreme. Each book invites subtle transformation.

Try on Murakami in the new year.

I started this, but I have not finished it. In fact, I am putting it to the side with the intention of reading a chapter in between each Haruki Murakami Story that I devour. Still, this is a great book that I need to finish. It reminds me of the importance woven into humans for strong archetypes and a better story. I'll make another post about it soon enough.

If you are a regular reader of Cormac McCarthy's fiction, the first thing that will strike you in this novel is the profound sense of human goodness and love that permeates this bleak landscape. I read this book as my mother moved toward death. It was close to the balm I needed.

In McCarthy's postapocalyptic world, there are no more "godspoke men". He imagines a world where morality is limited to small acts of love toward kin. Nothing else matters. Only a father and a grieving son can feel this in the deep-gut. Fortunately, there are many of us.

McCarthy finds and names our ash-soaked creosote landscape.