To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua FerrisMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
If Joshua Ferris isn't slated for Don DeLillo's throne as modern life satirist king, I don't know who would be. He shares DeLillo's wry sense of humor and sharp observations about contemporary life. In this book, he explores religion--how much of our religiosity is based on wanting to feel like we belong to something bigger, older, greater than us? What if you crave that affinity but are an atheist? He draws interesting and provocative correlations between religion and dentistry and baseball. It's a funny, quirky book, but it I dare say it will make you consider belief, history, discipleship, family, and fellowship as much or more than a "serious" book on religion.
View all my reviews
The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected.
I'm talking about my need to bring someone else into my orbit the second I learned of Mercer's suicide, to reaffirm my existence through the presence and shared space of another person, to reach out and touch her if I had to, annoy her, flatter her, beg her forgiveness, even get her to insult me, anything at all to tell me I was alive and not alone.
Base ball is the slow creation of something beautiful. it is almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder how far it might go. It's the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable.
