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The Hunger Games, or: My First eBook

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This is a post about me succumbing to peer pressure in two ways at once.

For all my love of digital media--getting used to online-only course material, loving open-access journals, PDF articles, and all that--I had never read an ebook until this weekend. I'm not one of those staunch devotees of hardcopy print, though I do like the feel of actual books, the ability to scribble in the margins, and, yes, the smell. I just never got around to it. But with all the hype surrounding the Hunger Games movie coming out, and the fact that my mother has loved the books for years, and my student employees and friends were all raving about them, I figured I'd better have a read. At the very least because I fear irrelevance. I knew there'd be no way of checking out a copy from a library anywhere (San Diego County has over 300 in circulation, and surely they have holds lined up until the next Quarter Quell...harhar what I did there), so I decided I might as well venture into the world of ebooks and see how I like it.

Even though I know Amazon is supposed to be the bane of every library and librarian's existence, I knew I cold easily download the Kindle app for my iPad and be reading in five minutes. So that's what I did. Sure, sure, I could have done a bit more research, but I'm a slave to Zipf's Law.

Later, my boyfriend showed me this sweet deal where you can get all three books for about $3, so I downloaded Kobo (which is pretty much just as good as Kindle... maybe more "social") and got my read on.

I started Hunger Games on Thursday night and finished on Saturday night. I started Catching Fire on Sunday morning and finished on Sunday night. Woe is me, spring quarter starts today, so who knows when I'll finish Mockingjay. Hopefully sometime this week.

But you guys. I'm obsessed. It definitely lives up to the hype. Though I'm hesitant to see the movie, since, as everyone knows, the book is always better than the movie. I'll probably see it anyway. And reading an ebook wasn't so bad after all. I did end up tethered to the wall during my Sunday read-athon, but it was OK. I could even highight. I'm not about to abandon all print, but I'm far less skeptical now. This is the future, you know.

I also want to write a bit more about the book, and all the interesting themes going on there, but it will have to wait, since this post is already too long and I have yet to even look at my new course websites for the new quarter. Blerg.

Theologian Thursday: Julian of Norwich 1342-c.1413

I'm really enjoying Theologian Thursdays, and I hope you are too. It's so fun revisiting the stories and works of some of my favorite thinkers in church history and learning more about them.

This week, it's everyone's favorite anchorite--Mother Julian!

Image from Fine Art America. (Check out that cat!)
Julian was a mystic who lived as the hermit-in-residence at the Church of Saint Julian in Norwich, England.

When she was about 30 years old, she fell seriously ill, and received a number of visions, which she recorded upon her recovery. These "shewings" revealed a theology deeply rooted in God's love for all of humanity--a universalist idea not common in the middle ages. The visions also graphically depicted Christ's suffering, which she said showed his love and gave her strength to withstand her sickness.

Probably one of the most well-known and most powerful visions is one involving a hazelnut:

And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What can this be? I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.

Her conviction that nothing is too small or "mean" to be outside the love of God is comforting and refreshing, especially in a time when many people believed the black plague was God's punishment being meted out on the world.

What You Should Read:

I think the Middle English version is more fun, but it is a bit slow-going due to the unconventional spellings. Additionally, there are plenty of companion texts and annotative commentaries you can find on this work.

Ratings:
(To read more about my rating system, click HERE.)

Gender Equality:
The fact that she was a woman, writing and participating in the life of the church in the middle ages is evidence enough. Plus, her insistence that God abundantly showers God's love on all people certainly includes men as well as women. AND, she uses many images of Christ as mother--feminine God-imagery that has unfortunately been popularly discarded.

Environmental Sensibility:
Julian's theology of God's all-encompassing love has often been used to support an ethic of environmentally consciousness. She employs numerous nature metaphors (like the aforementioned hazelnut) and would definitely be at home in a conversation about humankind's responsibility for loving creation.

Heretical Tendencies:
Granted, some of her visions (and maybe the fact that she had visions) are a little out-there, but other than that and the fact she was a woman writing about spirituality, she was committed to a life in the church (literally, she lived in the church) and happily remained there.

General Badassery:
Those visions were pretty intense. And she survived that crazy illness and lived to tell the tale--and tell it to the benefit of the church for centuries to come!

And, as always, a quote:
"All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well."

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

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How Can You Not Have a Website???

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Originally, this post was going to be about my trip to Julian, a little old-fashioned, touristy mining town in the hills, and how I visited with some guys from their historical society, and how cool their work is, and how they're digitizing all their stuff. But then I Googled Julian Historical Society to get some info/pictures to use for said post and found out that they don't have a website. Just a blurb on the Julian Chamber of Commerce website,which is, itself, rather... quaint. I was kind of shocked. Even the cemetery has a webpage (literally, one page).

It led me to wonder what exactly they're planning to do with all the data they're digitizing, and how they're going to make it accessible.

It also got me thinking about how the internet has changed marketing and consumption. If you don't have a web presence, you might as well not exist. I, the consumer, cannot find you (OK, full disclosure: I did find a mailing address for the historical society. So I guess I could get in touch with them. But that would require buying stamps.) and because I am a product of a fast-paced, gimme-gimme society, when you don't show up on Google, I give up.

Really, though. Historical societies are, like, my favorite thing. And they make me want to go into archives real bad. I just wish the Julian Historical Society had a way to check out what they're doing when I can't hang out in their little 100-year-old school house office. For now I'll have to make do with the San Diego History Center website. They have a cool historic photo collection.

Anyway, here's a photo of me in front of the Julian Library (which was closed, unfortunately) and cute boyfriend being cute.