Books

It was either Arthur Schopenhauer or Warren Zevon who said that the reason we love to buy books is because it gives us the illusion that we'll have time to read them. I love books but I constantly feel the pressure and guilt of having more books than time. I'm a sucker for Half Price Books, a chain of stores that specializes in used books.

I bought my wife a new Bible for Christmas (NRSV) which forced me to have to go to a few Christian bookstores. This is something I generally try to avoid due to the cynical reaction it causes me to have. But I visited a couple of Family Christian stores as well as one called Evangel and one called The Living Word. Predictably, the preponderance of floor space in these stores was devoted to "Jesus junk". The lesser portion of space that was given to books provided an abysmal selection. Lots of "5 Steps to..." and "7 Keys to..." and a hodge-podge of current "best-sellers" by Christian celebrities with varying degrees of orthodoxy such as Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer and T.D. Jakes.

N.T. Wright? Yeah, right.

What was really pathetic was the anemic selection of Bibles in these Christian book stores. I eventually found the perfect NRSV Bible for Carla... at Borders.