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mobill76

mobill76

Joined August 2021

I live off the grid in a woodlot in southern Kentucky with my bookshelf and an iPad full of eBooks. http://www.goodreads.com/mobill76
blurb
mobill76

This was my gift from the local church. It passed the censors by being an unimaginative tattoo of the idea that "the Messiah is among you. Choose to make each moment holy." That's not how it works. Nobody cares. I am evil but I could choose to be good. So what? Tell me a story, like... The Five People (YMiH). Give me a vision of how life might work and how my choices affect things. This is a common flaw in "inspirational" literature. No story.

2 likes1 stack add
blurb
mobill76

Yah. It's been awhile. I left the woods back in September to take another shot at being a productive member of society. So I'm not reading as much. Just the occasional piece of Glen Cook. But I did send someone a copy of The Puma Years this morning. And I sat down and read The Five People You Meet in Heaven. I'm not a fan of heaven books and I probably would've hated it if I hadn't also just re-read Holy Moments before tossing it. Cont. next book.

mobill76 I read this for Cindy Denny, a friend from high school who passed away. I'm probably not in your top five but, frankly, I think you get more than five. Talk to you soon. 2mo
2 likes1 stack add1 comment
review
mobill76
Pickpick

Brilliant, amazing book, life, statement, whatever it is. I'm not an "animal" person. I don't get them, never have. I certainly wouldn'tve gone through what Laura did to become one. But I understand the fascination better now. I wish I had it. I think Laura has written maybe the most important book since Silent Spring but it's so much better. This is a love story between two creatures, a woman and herself, and ultimately between us and our world.

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mobill76

"I miss you, too," I say, swallowing hard. The truth is I'm not sure if I do. It's not that I don't care, of course I do, but it's just that this place is like the tree roots that suck up all the water and don't leave any room for anything else. Any other thoughts I had, the anxieties, ambitions, the endless circling worries, they've gone. They've stopped breathing and all that's left is this.

2 likes1 stack add
blurb
mobill76

I've read a lot about urban life in Japan. This was about forestry. The story is ok. Typical stranger in a strange land type scenario. But the incredible attention to detail in their forestry practices was what moved me. So different from the rape and pillage of Kentucky forests. I love cedars and I thought I took pretty good care of them. There's a whole other level of care I was ignorant of. A very earthy, yet social, story - if you like trees.

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quote
mobill76
Mother Night: A Novel | Kurt Vonnegut

"'And the Republic's demands were framed so as to be educational, too - teaching that a propagandist of my sort was as much a murderer as Heydrich, Eichmann, Himmler, or any of the gruesome rest.
"That may be so. I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate..."

quote
mobill76

"But here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her?
But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair."

blurb
mobill76

Son of a Witch was kinda disappointing as sequels often are. It's hard to recreate the impact of such an innovative version of Oz. A Lion Among Men redeemed the series a bit, I thought. Tying up all the loose ends is at once satisfying and disappointing. It's bad enough that the story is over. I'd like a little bit of the mystery left to haunt me as I walk the woods at night. The first book is the best but the whole series is genius.

4 likes1 stack add
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mobill76
Mother Night: A Novel | Kurt Vonnegut

This was a comedy when I first read it some decades ago. Not funny now. Way too close to home. We've become this nightmare.

3 likes1 stack add
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mobill76

That's it? It's a drug odyssey? I thought it would be about the forgotten wisdom of the resilient native Americans. It's just a manual for spacing out on peyote and jimsonweed. Big deal. I thought Casteneda was supposed to be some kind of sage. From an anthropological perspective, it's a masterpiece. But I didn't learn much.

1 like1 stack add
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mobill76
Snow Falling on Cedars | David Guterson

Re: A book set in winter for a reading program. I couldn't decide between the above, Left Hand of Darkness, Anna Karenina, Winter Garden, and Winter World, so I started them all. It came down to Snow and Left Hand leapfrogging each other with Snow finishing first. It's as long as Karenina but much closer to home, more focused. Winter Garden seemed like a sleeper at first. Then it just put me to sleep. I dropped Winter World after meeting everyone.

review
mobill76
Prozac Nation | Elizabeth Wurtzel
Pickpick

Very little about prozac. I read this to try and understand my P addicted 2nd wife but it ended up being more about narcissistic, n'er-do-well me. I'm sad she's gone. I wish there were more people like her. I think she gets it. We hate being depressed. We hate being narcissistic. But no one will show us the way out. Don't get me wrong. It's a terrible piece of writing. But if this is where you are, it's very comforting to know you're not alone.

blurb
mobill76

I had only read 'The Babysitter'. I was delighted to find that it wasn't a fluke. Coover is quirky, experimental, and very entertaining. The only thing was, like Flannery O'Connor, it's a little too macabre to fall asleep to. Just a bit.

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mobill76

Maybe the Church was right to index this on theological grounds. I wouldn't know. But there's nothing here approaching the simplicity of, say, Thomas Aquinas. I bailed when I read "articulation of the divine incarnational radiance". Or, As Rob Bell put it, "who God made you to be". Dude. If you want to spark a paradigm shift among religious traditions, you might want to look up Jesus. He didn't hand down an updated Deuteronomy. He told stories.

3 likes1 stack add
blurb
mobill76

Didn't take me anywhere. Devotionals have to do more than tell me what to do and how to feel about it. The good ones make me put the book down and get busy.

BookBabe Good review 🙌🏻 1y
6 likes1 stack add1 comment
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mobill76
A Song for the Road | Kathleen Basi

I read to Nebraska or Colorado. Lost interest. Too much going on besides music. I was hoping for something as moving as Elizabethtown.

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mobill76
A Song for the Road | Kathleen Basi

People of the Books: Hoopla is in rare form with it's Bonus Borrows this month - classic audiobooks! I got the title above, Macbeth, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Iliad, and Moby Dick, without using any of my six precious monthly borrows. That's over 75 hours of extra listening this month.

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mobill76
Stoner | John Williams

Way too close to home. Just an ordinary life, with ordinary disappointments. Living your life may take everything you've got but in the end, on your last day, in your final thoughts; what did it matter? Surprise! It does. This book made me re-examine my own life and re-evaluate my failures. They were actually worse than I thought. But, they are mine. And I will relish my battles on my last day, even if they were against myself.

BookBabe Great review. Sounds like a worthwhile read. 1y
Leftcoastzen I love this book! 1y
BarbaraBB Beautiful review 🤍 1y
8 likes3 comments
quote
mobill76
Stoner | John Williams

Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind... He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage. He'd had that, too. And he'd not known what to do with it and it had died. He had wanted love and he'd had love and had relinquished it; had let it go into the chaos of potentiality.

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review
mobill76
Cheating at Canasta | William Trevor
Pickpick

Psychological fiction masquerading as simple earthly vignettes. Trevor has a surgical precision that finds the tipping points of ordinary lives and reveals the quiet turmoil behind the pretended smiles. His prose has a luxury of detail but somehow he wraps it into the small frames of these stories where lives are altered beyond ever returning. Like a good album where every track works but in different ways. I wish I'd savored them more slowly.

review
mobill76
Last Stories | William Trevor
Pickpick

Sometimes I don't know what I feel. Sometimes my circumstances are so strange that I'm lost. I try to use more familiar contexts to give my thoughts some shape but they don't work. I've found something new. These are stories about those feelings. Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances give these lives an almost Kafka-like surrealism. And the reader gets such a beautiful perspective. Notes of Sherwood Anderson and George Eliot on the finish

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mobill76
The Story of Lucy Gault | William Trevor

"'The gift of mercy,' the nuns said... They would visit that church in Italy one day, they said. She smiles all that away. What happened; simply did... She should have died, a child. She knows that, but has never said it. Has never included in the story of herself, the days that felt like years when she lay among the fallen stones. It would have lowered their spirits, although it lifts her own. Because instead of nothing, there is what there is.

2 likes1 stack add
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mobill76
The Road | Cormac McCarthy

"The kind of breakdown of civilized living that happens, and could occur in an even more terrifying way, is described in McCarthy's novel The Road... What is so disconcerting is the fact that it did not seem to dawn on so many who read and 'enjoyed' this book that something like this really could happen. We human beings are fully capable of bringing such a situation about and behaving as described." - Richard Harries, The Beauty and the Horror

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blurb
mobill76

Mark, you're plagiarizing the book you're criticizing so that you can nitpick dogma with a book that's trying to free us from it. This is why 'Love Wins' has people excited about Jesus again and your magazine isn't even interesting enough to compete with Car and Driver in the waiting room. The devil CAN quote scripture for his own purpose. So how do you know which one is the devil? I look for the love. You ain't got it. Your book reeks of hate.

3 likes1 stack add
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mobill76

"We see the needy suffer and become involved. Caught up in the net of need ourselves, we cannot get beyond it... Our worldly help serves worldly need to die another day, but spiritual work recalls lost souls to God."

Someone loaned me this unedited, rambling, ego-trip. Gimme a break. We all have our gifts but don't tell me that ignoring suffering to contemplate your navel is a higher calling. My life in the woods is my rehab, not my mission.

mobill76 "Even the spiritual life can become an arrogant trap if we do not realize that the spiritual life is not a game to be won by spiritual skills. The spiritual life is simply the God-life already at work in us. ¶ An obligation to human community and a dependence on God, then, become the cornerstones of Benedictine life." -Joan Chittister O.S.B., "The Rule of Benedict" 2y
BookBabe Yikes. I definitely won‘t be reading this one. Meanwhile, would you consider posting some pictures of your life in the woods? I never knew anyone living off-grid, it‘s fascinating. 2y
mobill76 @BookBabe There's a lot of that in Christian non-fiction. You either get the completely esoteric stuff by people who've been sitting on a pillar for 20 years. Or you get the blow-by-blow chronicle of 20 years of activism and leper colony ministry. Balance is rare. 2y
See All 7 Comments
mobill76 @BookBabe I'm kinda reluctant to post personal pics and risk turning this into another FB (https://www.facebook.com/mobill76) or YouTube (https://youtube.com/user/mobill76) or Blogspot (http://billmontgomery.blogspot.com/). I think people tend to romanticize about tiny houses and off-the-grid living. It's an extreme solution - like faith. When all else has failed you, it might fix some things. I never would've chosen to live this way voluntarily. 2y
mobill76 @BookBabe I do very much appreciate your interest, though. That's why I post videos like the hammock breaking. No sense wasting it. Somebody needs to laugh. Someone needs to know that they're not alone in being alone. And some just need to appreciate that at least it hasn't come to living in a garden shed. Yet 2y
BookBabe 😊 I get it. I‘ll check out the YouTube. I suppose anything can be romanticized… reading about broke artists in Paris made poverty sound romantic and wonderful (I found out otherwise when I tried it lol) 2y
mobill76 "You can be so heavenly minded that you are of no earthly use." 2y
1 like1 stack add7 comments
blurb
mobill76
post image

I don't do a lot of pictures but I found this at the local library. My ride showed up before I was halfway through. I thought this was a motorcycle on the cover, but no, this guy cycled from Vancouver to Patagonia (minus Mexico Norte and N. Columbia). Spectacular book. 46 bucks on Amazon, though. This is do-able. He lists his gear, his finances, his remote gigs, his lack of Spanish. Am I too old to try to see what he's seen? One way to find out.

review
mobill76
Imperfect Birds | Anne Lamott
Pickpick

I think this is the first fiction of hers I've read. It was, as her non-fiction is, very personal but illustrative of much larger themes. I can't relate to much of Lamott's interests or expertise but she can distill the drama of her characters into truths of such clarity that I do find myself moved by her 'ordinary lives'. I'm not a drug addict but maybe I was addicted to a lifestyle and the woodlot is my wilderness rehab - that sort of thing.

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review
mobill76
Pickpick

Christian non-fiction is kindof all the same. "We should do better. So do better. You're welcome." Peterson is the author of The Message and Subversive Christianity so he's ok at that but this filled a weird niche. For over 1400 years, Benedictines have been reciting Psalms 120-128 every day, 6 days a week. Thanks, Ben. These are no one's favorite psalms. Boring, archaic. Why, Ben, why? Now, I understand the genius behind these psalms.

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quote
mobill76

"A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice, or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment, or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquility, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith."

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mobill76

"Which leads to forgiveness. The point of the cross isn't forgiveness... Jesus always orients his message around becoming the kind of people who are generous and loving and compassionate. The goal here isn't simply to not sin. Our purpose is to increase the shalom in this world... It's not about what you don't do...
...Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it."

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review
mobill76
The Queen's Gambit | Walter Tevis
Mehso-so

I'm not a genius but I think most books about geniuses get it wrong. Being a genius does not make you inherently good at math or physics or chess or anything. If you are gifted and have a passion and an environment that can encourage and recognize you, then the sky's the limit. This book was not believable. Even Bobby Fischer took longer than this to develop. And he ate, drank, and slept chess. The writing was ok. The chess was sloppy.

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mobill76
Speaker for the Dead | Orson Scott Card

"If I told nothing but what everyone knows -that he hated his children and beat his wife and raged drunkenly from bar to bar... then I would not cause pain, would I? I'd cause a great deal of satisfaction...
No human being, when you understand his desires is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins."

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mobill76
Sons and Lovers | D.H. Lawrence

Where was he? -one tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out... So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.
"Mother!" he whispered- ""mother!"

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review
mobill76
The Lives of Great Christians | Teaching Company, William Robert Cook
Pickpick

I don't think any two people would agree on the same 24, but I liked his picks (Not many Catholics would pick Hus and Luther) and I learned some things. But the last chapter was the clincher- what do they all have in common? I won't ruin it for you.

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review
mobill76
Blindness | Jos Saramago
Bailedbailed

I read till the misused punctuation became to much of an obstacle, it didn't make me feel blind, felt like I was grading papers and someone was on their way to a rewrite, if you want to make me feel blind maybe don't tell how the rooms are painted and furnished, I can hear just fine, I often close my eyes when I'm eavesdropping so I can concentrate, no quotes, no periods just destroy my ability to get inside your book and listen to your story.

review
mobill76
The Abolition of Man | C. S. Lewis
Panpan

No. I'm a huge (205 lb) C.S. Lewis fan, but this was nonsense based on a misunderstanding of 'feeling' and 'thinking'. Lewis throws up his hands and cries that man is doomed if we can discover no absolutes through our 'objectivity'. Sorry, my friend, we are by nature subjective and our man-made absolutes are too.

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mobill76

A feeling people often have about religion but are usually too polite to express, is that it is for failures..
It is possible to disparage the experience of such people: to be understanding but in the end dismissive on such grounds that if everything was going well for them they would have no need. The matter can, however, be looked at very differently..
As Monica furlong said, we can realize how petty and superficial our lives have been.

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mobill76

""...as a result of an argument with the ghost of my great grand-father. No sooner had I got there that my former self, the one that operated on my brain, popped into my head and said 'Go see Zarniwoop'...
"Mr. Beeblebrox, sir," said the insect in awed wonder, "you are so weird you should be in movies."
"Yeah," said Zaphod patting the thing on a glittering pink wing, "and you, baby, should be in real life.""

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mobill76
About a Boy | Nick Hornby

"'How can it not be possible to tell someone they've got your name wrong?'
'Because...' Will knew that sometimes it was not possible through personal experience. One of his neighbors opposite... called him Bill - always had done and presumably always would, right up untill the day he died. It actually irritated Will, who was not, he felt, by any stretch of the imagination, a Bill. Bill wouldn't smoke spliffs and listen to Nirvana."

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mobill76
About a Boy | Nick Hornby

"He was nearly shouting now. He was certainly angry. They had been talking for less than three minutes, yet he was beginning to feel as though this telephone conversation was going to be his life's work; that once every few hours he would put the receiver down to eat and sleep and go to the toilet, and the rest of the time Fiona would be telling him one thing and then it's opposite over and over again."

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review
mobill76
Panpan

Unreadable. There's so much commentary that the bible is sometimes hard to find. It's the same prosperity gospel spin-doctoring over and over again. I started just numbering the recurring themes: Thoughtcrime (your thoughts are bad and you should change them like underwear), Fear of fear (fear is something to be afraid of), I'm talking and I can't shut up (we should be listening to God's Word instead of our own commentary), and Prosperity gospel.

2 likes1 stack add
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mobill76

"Everyone seemed glad summer was over. Spring is sweet, the baby season; summer is the teenage season - too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they are cracked up to be. Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you instead of beating down on you. Clouds bobble across the sky, and there are fresh winds, and misty salmon sunrises, and then cool blue skies."

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mobill76

"Neshama got up and told a second story. It was about her late husband, and a pool he would hike to, where there was a single whiskery fish swimming around. Neshama stripped her story down to it's essence, because only essence speaks to desperate people."

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mobill76

"Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it has given me ME. It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for."

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mobill76
The Hobbit | J.R.R. Tolkien

""Thank goodness!" said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco jar."

That was worth it. They just don't write 'em like that any more. It has the marvel of a modern fantasy with the relish of life of a victorian novel. Dragons and elves and tobacco and tea. I think it may even be better than LOTR. I don't want everything explained from the beginning of time. Bilbo's corner of the world feels a lot like MY corner of the world.

10 likes1 stack add
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mobill76
The Hobbit | J.R.R. Tolkien

I am NOT reading this again. It's just the overture to a more epic struggle. I know everything happening in Middle Earth while the dwarves trudge through Eriador. I could anchor a Middle Earth news desk. I'm too old to keep reading the same books over and over. I've got to move on. I've got things to read and my time is short. I'm tossing this. I'll just read the first page.. "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit." [hooked again]

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mobill76

I don't consider Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to be fiction. But it could've been and it wouldn't have mattered. It just rocked my world. The whole Quality thing. The concept of actually thinking in a different way. Even Pirsig's narrative of how that concept was rediscovered by a post shock-therapy motorcycle rider on a cross-country trip with his estranged son.

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mobill76
Contact | Carl Sagan

Readers of the book will not find the same sympathy for faith that was exhibited in the movie. It's a good story. Sagan's writing shows a definite ivory tower disconnection with what passes for believable social situations. If you didn't enjoy the movie, you may be interested in the atheistic theme presented in the book. If you did enjoy the movie, you should read the book to hear what Sagan was really trying to say.

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mobill76

No one has ever walked the fine line between poetry and prose any better. The similarities I have with the hero are now painful reminders that fictional characters don't have to age but I do and I have. But there is still a hope suggested by Bradbury that the memories of my own life can be pressed and bottled, to be enjoyed again when they've been forgotten as my own Dandelion Wine.

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mobill76

Mixing poetry and science fiction wasn't such a bad idea. It's this book and Fahrenheit 451 that solidified Bradbury's reputation as a sci-fi author. He really didn't write that much of it. What he wrote, he wrote well, though. Modern exploration has long since made the Martian Chronicles rather implausible. But it's still a beautiful read.

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