[spooky music]
Hey guys, it's Jane.
It's Wednesday today,
and I thought I'd have a go at
this week's Top 5 Wednesday
topic, which is: Top 5
books that make you think.
There's no way known I could come up with a
top 5, absolute top 5,
but I've come up with five.
I could easily have turned this
into just another
all-Neal Stephenson edition,
but I decided that I've
done that really, I've done that, not that
long ago, so, no Neal Stephenson
this week. The other thing I'm leaving out is I'm leaving out
the Bible, because I don't think I've
actually got anything especially new
or interesting to say about it,
so that's not there. So here
are five other books.
[laughs] that make me
think. The first one
that I've picked today
is called 'Island of the
Lost' and
the subtitle is 'Shipwrecked at the
Edge of the world'. It's by Joan Druett.
This is a non-fiction
book, and it's a cracker of a read.
It's a history
of two
shipwrecks,
in the mid 1800's
right at the end of the age of sail,
2 boats, two ships
(sorry), that
managed to get themselves
wrecked
on the same sub-antarctic
island,
at the same time.
On different ends of the island
and
neither group
was aware that the other
group was there at the same time, so
y'know, way, way south in the
Southern Ocean, past
New Zealand, on the way
to Antarctica, these two sailing
boats and their crews are wrecked
And the thing about the story
is that the two crews
handled the experience completely differently,
and the outcomes
of the two groups, who were
wrecked at the same time, at the same place
are completely different.
It's just, it's
all true, 
it's all based on documentary evidence,
and it's just a fascinating
fascinating story. The second
one, I actually have the book
here. This is
Ruth Ozeki's
debut novel, My Year of Meat.
Ruth Ozeki is
getting all sorts of buzz on booktube at the moment
for her new book,
'A Tale for the Time Being', and
this is her first book, and it was published
in 1998,
so a few years ago now.
This is the story
of two women.
One a Japanese-
American woman named
Jane Tagaki-Little,
and she
gets a job
making a TV program
for Japanese
television about American
housewives
and their cooking.
Their cooking of meat,
because the program is sponsored by
an American beef export
organisation.
And the other
woman is a
Japanese housewife, who
is 
the wife of
a Japanese salaryman, who
is connected
to the business behind the TV
show as well, and
she is tasked
by her husband to
asiduously follow the television show,
make the recipes as 
described, and
give feedback to him.
And so, these two women 
who don't know each other
are both
thrust into this
world of cooking and eating
meat the American way.
I'm not a vegetarian,
but
it would be completely wrong to say that I have
an unproblematic relationship with eating meat.
And
this book
is so thought provoking
about a whole bunch of things,
but especially about
Western
relationships with meat.
Yup.
On the back it says:
'Suitable for Vegetarians!'
and I think that is entirely true
about this book. [laughs].
For the third one
we're back to non-fiction.
And this is Francis Spufford's
recent
book, 
which is sort of basically an
extended essay or opinion 
piece, and it's called 'Unapologetic',
and the subtitle is: 
'Why, despite everything
Christianity can still make 
surprising emotional
sense.' (something like that.)
He title's the book 'Unapologetc'.
In philosophical and
Christian circles, an
apology has got a technical
meaning, and it doesn't simply mean
to say you're sorry,
it means to defend
a position, and
in particular to defend Christianity
against
somebody who's not
a Christian. But this book
is not an apology, in
the sense that it's not
intended to be a defense
as in a rational
defense of Christianity.
What it is, is an
attempt
at describing
what the internal experience
of being a believer is like.
One of the things that I find
about the way
that people of faith
and 
athiests in particular, communicate with one another,
is that it feels
quite like each
party finds it very difficult
to actually imagine
what it's like to be in the other
person's shoes.
What the actual lived 
experience of being in that
 other position is like,
and the project that Francis
Spufford has set himself in this book is
for the benefit of a 
non-believing audience, to
write about what it feels like
to be a believer. I am a believer,
but I found it very thought provoking
in just
thinking about what
is involved
in that sort of project
of actually making
honest communication
about lived experience. 
The fourth book that I've chosen
is Philip Pullman's
'His Dark Materials'
series. It's a trilogy 
of middle grade
(I guess) fantasy.
These are amazingly well
written, and
really gripping reads.
The reason why I found
them so thought provoking, and probably
particularly the third one,
is that Philip Pullman
is making some really quite
explicit theological 
claims. Essentially
he's writing a world
in which
the creator god is evil.
That is a really challenging
world view to wrestle 
with, as a Christian.
So,
I found those books amazingly
thought provoking.
And finally, number
five is 'Infinite
Jest'. 
And, there's
so many ideas in Infinite Jest,
but the thing that really
struck me about his book is
all the stuff
about addiction.
The second half
of the story is largely 
set in a,
something between rehab and
a half-way house kind of
place, where there's basically a lot of recovering drug 
addicts living.
And,
that setting of that house
and the
people in there and
their day to day struggles, and
their interactions, I just
found that so compelling
and interesting and thought provoking.
And one of the things it actually
made me think about is church,
living in
a community of broken
people, and
how that
impacts on a whole bunch of
stuff. I found
this book to be so
fertile in terms of
sparking ideas about
different things. It is a bit
of a mammoth task,
but I found it to be
really worthwhile, and one of these years
when, y'know, I'm
shipwrecked on a desert island, I'm gonna
re-read that one and think about them all
again. 
OK, that is five
books that I came
up with when I sat down to think what are five
of the most thought provoking books
that I've read in the 
last, I dunno, ten years
or so. What about you?
What are some of your most thought provoking 
books? I think this is a
really interesting topic, and
I'd love to hear some other people's
suggestions. So anyway, I hope you're well,
and I'll talk to you later. Bye!
