I’m throwing in the towel. Maybe that’s not quite the right way of saying it, so let me say it this way: I’m shutting down the 10MillionWords project. Life has changed a lot over the past few months and I can see that something is going to have to give–at least something will have to give if I am to do and do well all that I’ve been called to. After talking to my wife, after talking to those who care for my soul, I’ve decided that 10MillionWords is going to have to go.

There are two broad reasons.

When I began this project I assumed that writing my second book would be a repeat of writing my first. That has proven naive. This second book, though I’m largely enjoy writing it, has proven a much greater challenge. I am genuinely grateful for such a challenge. It has taught me a lot about myself, about my own limitations, and about the way I presume ease and can react with despair against difficulty. I’ll conquer the book, I’m confident. But it is taking more thought, more effort, more time than I had imagined or assumed. Most of all, it’s taking more energy and more brain power. And I feel like all the reading of 10MillionWords is sapping my limited brain power reserves. If I am going to write an excellent book, I’ll need to tap the parts of my brain that are currently consumed with this project.

Secondly, last Sunday the members of my church called me to serve them as an elder. Though this was not entirely unexpected as I’ve been “under examination” for some time now, the reality and gravity of this new position have only just struck me now that it’s that close to becoming reality. That open-ended time line to move into leadership and to be responsible for the care of their souls has suddenly become a date circled on a calendar–May 16, the day I will be ordained. I want to be able to add that responsibility and that privilege to my life with as much ease and as little conflict as possible. And I don’t see how I could excel at that while still maintaining the reading load. If I am to be an elder who serves the Lord by serving the church, I’ll need that time back.

And so I am stepping away from it, just like that. Right now. Today.

This has been a fascinating project and I’m genuinely grieved and humbled to be giving it up. Partly out of genuine interest, partly out of stubbornness, partly out of pride (maybe mostly out of pride), I’ve wanted to hold on to it. But I am confident in the wisdom of walking away. I’ll miss the reading–truly I will. I enjoyed having a reason to read books that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. I’ve learned a lot about the world, about society, about culture, about worldview, about Ozzy Osbourne and Chelsey Handler. But I’ve also learned about myself and what I just can’t do based on the way life has changed even since January when this project kicked off.

And so I extend my apologies to the faithful readers who have been enjoying this reviews. And I bid you farewell. I’ll see you over at challies.com, I’m sure.

Asperger’s is a syndrome I know well. I have seen its social awkwardness, its lack of eye contact, its strange brilliance. In The Best Kind of Different Shonda Schilling, wife of pitching great Curt Schilling, shares how it has impacted their family through their son Grant. She lets the reader into the journey as they discover that their son suffers from it and as they seek to deal with its sometimes-harsh realities.

Let me be honest and say that in most ways The Best Kind of Different is a rather unremarkable book. It does not have the human interest of Born on a Blue Day, the story of an autistic savant; it does not have the personal flavor of Look Me in the Eye. Where the other two books tell of Asperger’s from the perspective of one who has it (and, interestingly, people with the Syndrome typically express themselves far better in writing than in speech), this one tells of it from the perspective of the mother of one who suffers from it.

And so I suppose the real value in this book will be for those whose families are adapting to a child with Asperger’s. I am sure that many mothers and fathers will be able to identify with the exasperation of the Schillings as they try to put an end to the poor behavior of their child and the sorrow they feel when they realize that the behavior was often caused by factors outside of their son’s control.

This book reinforces the lesson that I have learned repeatedly through this 10MillionWords project. Time and time again I’ve seen how a distinctly Christian worldview makes all the difference, that seeing things through a biblical lens changes everything. And as I read The Best Kind of Different I longed for Schilling to share something truly meaningful about the spiritual realities of disability. She learns to embrace her son’s disability and learns to see some of its manifestations as a blessing rather than a curse. And yet still she does not have that truly Christian perspective that would help her understand what disability is, why it exists, and how it will some day come to an end. At times she comes close, but she doesn’t ever actually get there. And in the end this leaves the book as incomplete as the author’s understanding of disability.

As I read this book I asked myself, “Would this ever have been published if it did not describe the family of a celebrity?” It is a fair question, I think, when it comes from the pen of a celebrity (or a celebrity’s wife as the case may be). I suppose it might have, but I think it is safe to say that it would not have made its way to the list of bestsellers. It isn’t a bad book by any stretch, but neither is it a particularly good one. Still, it does do a good job of describing Asperger’s and introducing the reader to an increasingly common condition. And for that I am grateful.

Verdict: Read it if you want to better understand Asperger’s Syndrome and those who suffer from it.

Four new titles found their way to the bestseller list this week.

Starting out at #3 is The Bridge, a biography of President Obama and written by the editor of the New Yorker.

Right behind it at #4 is This Time Together by Carol Burnett. “The comedian describes her rise in show business and the people she’s met along the way.”

At #9 is Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity, a massive 1200-page history of the church. As the girl said at the checkout of the bookstore, “Of course it’s big! It covers 3,000 years!” If I can read 100 pages per day, it will still take me 10 days to get through (since there are 200 pages of end matter). Interestingly, I also received (separately) the accompanying DVD series.

And finally, down at #13 is The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein. This will be the sixth book I’ve read on the financial collapse and bailouts. And I still barely understand what happened. That probably speaks more to my own ignorance than to the skill of these authors in crafting their accounts.

Looks like another busy week!

If you have read a book by any of those people or listened to any of their radio shows, you’ll know roughly what Mattera is going to say. There is a sense in which this is two books–one that rehashes the same old conservative arguments and one that puts them into this new context of Obamamania. Now I don’t mean to use the word rehash in a pejorative sense–many of those arguments conservatives make are good ones and ones I agree with wholeheartedly. Global warming is a lot of nonsense, but a perfect opportunity to impose all kinds of laws and regulations while gaining political points; socialized health care really could become a nightmare; capitalism offers the nation far greater hope than the Democratic ideal of wealth redistribution; seeking to put to rest the threat of Islam through around-the-campfire dialog is a dead-end. And so on. You know the planks of that platform by now.

What Mattera does that is different, and what he does well, is showing how Obama’s Presidential campaign packaged and sold all of this to a whole generation of impressionable young people, many of whom have far more enthusiasm than wisdom. He shows how the campaign turned this young generation into a group of zombies, powerful but unthinking.

Three themes stood out above the rest. The first is the power of celebrity. Obama’s campaign understood that if they were to win the election they would need to mobilize this generation and they understood in turn that in order to do so, they would need celebrities on their side. And so they enlisted the Hollywood elite to laud Obama and pour contempt upon McCain and Palin. They were very effective in this, using every available means to show that the nation’s idols were firmly on the side of Obama. Millions of young people were swept up in the momentum, falling in lockstep behind the ultimate celebrity.

The second theme that stands out is the power of the media. We already know this of course, but it is interesting to see how the media impacted youth, especially through celebrity “news” personalities like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. These men were little more than shills for Obama and yet their shows are, for many young people, their only access to the news. They believe what they hear from such men and allow them to shape and mold their opinions. When Stewart and Colbert showed themselves firmly in the Democratic camp, millions of youth followed along.

And the third theme is the power of youth. What Obama’s campaign realized that McCain’s did not, is that in many ways authority structures are shifting in this digital world. Many people have written today about the wisdom of crowds and the power of crowds. When they discuss such things, they are generally discussing crowds of the young and technologically-adept. These are the people who are so easily mobilized today and who are so eager to be mobilized for what they perceive as a good cause. Obama’s campaign understood this and they roused that crowd. McCain’s campaign missed badly; their attempts to communicate with that generation fell completely and pathetically short.

All of this makes Obama Zombies an interesting book and one worth reading. It explains the recent past but also helps us project ourselves into the future a little bit. We can see a glimpse of how the 2012 campaign will come together and how the Democrats will have the immediate upper hand in reaching that same generation. I really hope the Republicans are reading it so they can learn a few lessons and at least make it interesting in 2012.

Verdict: Read it for its interpretation of the past and its importance to the future

After making barrels full of money through the sale of his company SnapTrack (which he sold to Qualcomm for a cool billion after inventing a way of cramming a GPS unit into a cell phone) Poizner was looking for a new kind of challenge. He had conquered the business world, proving his mettle there, and had served a year at the White House, doing his bit for the nation during a tumultuous time. Having succeeded at everything else, he decided to try his hand at teaching. If he had been so successful in the business world, couldn’t he transfer that success to the classroom?

He approached a list of schools, providing his credentials and expressing his enthusiasm. Only one school replied to him–Mount Pleasant High School in San Jose. Not quite the stereotypical inner-city high school of so many popular movies, neither is it the posh and chic kind of school he would send his own child to. Eventually he was given the opportunity to teach a class for a year–a class on American government. And now he has written a book about it.

Mount Pleasant is not much of a book. I suppose at this point, after he has announced his candidacy as governor, it is easy to question Poizner’s motives. Did he really take on this challenge for the sake of the kids? Or did he have a book contract and the governor’s mansion in mind already? Perhaps those are not fair questions. I suspect I would be less likely to ask them if the book had been better or at least more interesting–if it served a purpose beyond being an advertisement for Poizner. The book even has a strangely awful cover, especially for one that lands on the list of bestsellers. Couldn’t they have tried to be at least a little bit creative? Seriously. It’s a head shot stuck beside a random picture of a random desk. The proportions are wrong, the font is cliche, the colors are boring. Maybe he had one of his students design it.

The book passes like, well, like a twelfth-grade course on American government. It has its high points but mostly it just plods along and conveys the pertinent points. This is no Dangerous Minds. It’s just the story of a guy trying to teach a mostly-unremarkable group of students. I admire him for what he did and for his attempts to teach them well. But he didn’t do anything much more than countless thousands of teachers do every day. And they don’t get book contracts for doing it. Though if they did, I hope the covers would be better.

Anyway, Mount Pleasant is not too bad, but it’s not too good either. It’s mostly just unremarkable. It’s like going to Ben & Jerry’s and walking out with vanilla. There’s nothing wrong with vanilla, but why would you choose that over the Cherry Garcia or Chunky Monkey? I guess I just can’t think of too many reasons I’d want to recommend this one.

Verdict: Read it as a tribute to the GPS in your iPhone.

In The Big Short Michael Lewis, best known for authoring The Blind Side and Moneyball, takes a look at the crisis from a slightly different perspective. He looks at it from the perspective of those who saw the crisis coming and who shorted the market, making themselves rich in the process. As he does in Moneyball and The Blind Side, he writes about people more than events. He tells the story of the coming crisis through men like Steve Eisman, who saw the derivatives market for what it was–a whole lot of fictitious wealth that at one time or another would have implode. Both outraged and greedy, he went all-in against it.

Lewis may not come down entirely against the derivatives market in The Big Short and yet he certainly does seem to offer criticism of those who caused billions and billions of dollars to evaporate into thin air. (If money can evaporate into thin air, did it really exist in the first place?) But in doing so he seems to forget that just a few years ago he was championing these very derivatives. In a 2007 article he wrote “None of them seemed to understand that when you create a derivative you don’t add to the sum total of risk in the financial world; you merely create a means for redistributing that risk. They have no evidence that financial risk is being redistributed in ways we should all worry about. They’re just …worried. But the most striking thing about the growing derivatives markets is the stability that has come with them.” Some stability. Not surprisingly, he does not mention that he himself was once enamored by the very means that brought about the crisis. Take that as just an interesting little historical footnote.

The men who are the protagonists in this story are people who are outrageously greedy. It was not good motives that drove their action. It was not concern for their fellow man or even the desire to earn a living. Rather, it was the desire to become outrageously wealthy by risking all they had. It is like the man who found buried treasure in a field so he sold all that he had to buy it. Except that in this case he wanted to profit off misfortune and off the near downfall of a whole economic system. There is no Michael Oher here to draw you in–instead there are just greedy and grouchy Wall Street goons who, though they had foresight, had little in the way of ethics.

But then again, maybe I am being unfair. These men did nothing illegal; they just made themselves rich by betting against a market that was already teetering on the edge of collapse. Isn’t greed at the very heart of so much of what transpires on Wall Street? And weren’t these men just the few who played the game most skillfully? Maybe we shouldn’t hold their success against them. They had the foresight to, essentially, take out hundreds and hundreds of life insurance policies on companies that were already on life support and very nearly ready to flatline. That the economic system allowed them to do this just shows how bizarre and convoluted it had all become.

The Big Short is no The Blind Side. It may be an unfair comparison, I suppose, but somehow I was hoping for more interesting characters and, at the very least, more likable ones. That would have set this book apart from the many others that deal with roughly the same topic, albeit from a different perspective. As it is, there are better options out there if you want to figure out just what went wrong with America before and during the crisis. It’s not so much that there’s anything objectively wrong with The Big Short–it’s more that Lewis has written a book that has stiff and ultimately superior competition.

Verdict: Read it if you’d like a lighter take on the coming of the financial crisis

Debuting at #5 is Mount Pleasant by Steve Poizner. Poizner is a wealthy and successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur who decided to try his hand at teaching in a public high school (in a poor area of town, naturally). This book tells his story.

At #11 is 13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and James Kwak. It is a call to reform the banking industry. I’m hoping it’s a bit more interesting than it sounds!

Down at the #14 spot is the Obama Zombies, undoubtedly the most interestingly-titled book I’ve come across this year. Jason Mattera tells how Obama and his allies staged a high-tech assault to capture the minds of young Americans. I’m looking forward to reading this one. Unrelated to this project, it may also prove useful for my studies on technology.

And squeaking onto the list at #15 is The Best Kind of Different by Shonda Schilling, wife of pitcher Curt Shilling. She writes about her family’s experience with a child who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. Interestingly, this is the third or fourth book to hit the list in recent years that deals with Asperger’s.

I considered giving up, but I will persevere. I’m stubborn and probably a bit proud. Nine days out of 10 I am enjoying this project and enjoying all the reading. I think it very unlikely that if I persevere to the end I will regret it at all. But if I do give up early, there may well be regrets. So I will press on. But do rest assured that if ever it truly gets to be too much (as judged by myself, my wife, the men who keep watch over my soul) I’ll let it go in a heartbeat.

The emphasis in this book is on the  health of the brain. The author, Daniel Amen says, rightly I suppose, that having a healthy body is only so much use if you’re not also going to have a healthy brain. He wants you to “Use Your Brain to Get and Keep the Body You Have Always Wanted,” according to the book’s subtitle. I’ll say off the top that the book isn’t as bad as it may sound based on that title. The key to a healthy body, he says, one that is in shape, energized, and youthful, is a healthy brain. If you’ve got a healthy brain, you’re well on your way to having a healthy body.

Most of the advice he dispenses is of the common sense variety. Eat your vegetables, take vitamin supplements, maintain a balanced diet, don’t eat too much junk food. You know how it goes. In return you’ll be healthier, feel healthier, sleep better, enjoy sex more, and so on. It’s the very things your mother told you all those years ago (though she probably left out the bit about sex).

One thing I found interesting is that the author cannot avoid discussing the body-soul connection. He seems to have no consistent spiritual framework to work from and certainly no love for the Bible. Yet he cannot deny the importance of caring for the soul as well as the body. He suggests doing this through Eastern-style meditation or through whatever rites or rituals are important to you. The suggestions he gives are far less compelling to me than the fact that he has to make them in the first place. Even the unbeliever or the person who denies God cannot deny that somehow, somewhere we are more than bodies, more than just flesh and blood. But as usual, the prescription will do nothing to to cure the ill. The solution, he suggests through his worldview, is intrinsic–look inside of yourself and you fill find peace. But the Bible tells a very different story. When we look inside we see what ails us. It is only when we look outside of ourselves that we can find what the cure for the ultimate disease.

It is well and good to have a healthy brain and a healthy body. But how much better is it to have a healthy soul? A man may gain the whole world, he may gain the brightest brain and the most beautiful body, and still lose his soul.

Verdict: Read it if it’s been too long since you read a book on healthy living

In the end, though, it was not filth that offended me as much as just sheer stupidity. The first chapter of this book is ugly–not as much graphic as just plain inappropriate, like when you try to tell a joke and it just goes bad. You realize that what you thought was funny, was actually not funny at all. After that opening chapter the book is far more childish and just plain stupid than lascivious as she looks at life and love and daughterhood and dog ownership. Chelsea Handler, whom I had known only from seeing her name on book covers, is clearly desperately immature and willing to do just about anything to gain attention. Her sense of humor, such that it is, is puerile, akin to the kind of nonsense that was so popular on that show Jackass. She likes to mock people through pranks, she likes to laugh about farting, she likes to torment and mock and belittle. It’s terribly unsophisticated and, frankly, immediately tiresome. She makes herself so obnoxious that there is very little she could do, I think, to make herself or what she says in any way desirable or lascivious.

Of all the books I’ve read this year, and I’ve read plenty, this one is easily the worst. Frankly, I can’t think of a single reason I would ever, under any circumstances, recommend it. I can’t even understand why anyone, anywhere would buy it. It’s not sexual enough to titillate, it’s not clever enough to amuse, it’s not sophisticated enough to cause reflection. It’s an utter waste of time, money, effort and atoms. It is very clearly a cash grab, Handler’s attempt to make a few more bucks before her 15 minutes of fame comes screeching to a halt. And I say that this can’t happen soon enough.

If you look at the pictures of Handler on the book cover and compare to, say, images of her being interviewed, you’ll see that the cover photos are so heavily airbrushed that Handler is very nearly unrecognizable. You can see just the barest hint of her through all the Photoshopping. And it strikes me that this offers a parallel to the book itself. Here Handler gives a very one-dimensional and obviously fake version of herself. It’s as fake as her skin in that cover shot. She has constructed a fabricated version of herself that, for one reason or another, seems to appeal to readers. Perhaps her last two books, both of which sold very well, were clever or original or offered something (anything!) to commend them. Not so with Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang. Books don’t get a whole lot worse than this one. They just plain can’t.

Verdict: Read it never, ever, ever.

Squeaking onto the list at the #14 spot is The Devil’s Casino by Vicky Ward. It tells the story of Lehman Brothers, presumably focusing on its collapse during the economic downturn. I’ve already read several books that have focused on Lehman in general and the downturn in particular, but this will be the first to reverse the order–to focus on Lehman instead of the whole downturn. And I suppose it ought to be interesting. With luck I’ll get to it within the next couple of weeks!