Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Finishing "God, No!"

The Garbage trucks woke me up, So I read the last chapter of "God, No!" Penn Jillette's latest book .  Joe and I have been going through the book together... I read, he listens and we talk... Books go a lot slower that way, but our conversations are one of my favorite things. ... it is kind of annoying finishing by myself, I keep wanting discuss it. ...so I ended up here.

I hate summing up .... but if you haven't  read it, the rest of what I am about to say will make little sense.
Penn Jillette uses the mental exercise of replacing each of the 10 commandments with a new and more meaningful / beneficial suggestion.  ... the  structure is nice because his writing is very ...hmmm...?   loose .....But that description hardly gets to the meat of the book for me.
 What I felt when I read it, was that this was a man, sharing with the world the bits and pieces that form him, his views ...his passions... his beliefs.  The biblical commandments seem distant and irrelevant in contrast. ... I imagine that wasn't unintentional ....
As I read ... I became involved in his stories because they had this sort of oblique pull to them ... not all ...some chapters had a knock you over the head , this is what I think you should reconsider and tell me why  if you don't.... kind of feel .... but the ones that really sucked me in were the ones that half way through I was like what the hell is he talking about....
They were  the kinds of stories I hold on to ... things I tell and re-tell ... sometimes not knowing why. The stories that stay in your brain when the details of bigger  and more important events fade....then  you wake up at 3am one night with a new clarity  and see that they shaped you in some way.
(incomplete will finish later)

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