Carrie

I suppose I should start by saying that this isn’t even a book I purchased for myself, as religious non-fiction doesn’t tend to be my genre of choice. I picked this up for Matt a few months ago, and after he finished it, twice over, he asked me to read it so that we could discuss it. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from a book named “Sex God,” but I figured it couldn’t be bad – the author is Rob Bell, pastor at Mars Hill, which is the church I attend (irregularly). I enjoy his sermons, and hoped his writing style would be similar.

To start off, the title is a bit misleading; attention grabbing, but just slightly misleading. The focus of the book, as the full title suggests, is the connections between sexuality and spirituality. The definition of “sexuality” isn’t the conventional one, though; Bell’s definition of sexuality is a bit broader, more like the connection with others that we are all in search of. Not what I was expecting, but it was interesting. Rather than sexuality, I would say this book is more about personal relationships, marriage and love, and how they relate to and are paralleled in our relationship with God. The book also manages to be religious, without being terribly preachy; most points and messages are delivered via anecdotes and short stories, including pop culture references.

While the book wasn’t what I was expecting, it was a good read. I found it insightful, and thought provoking. My only real beef with the book is that it doesn’t seem to focus on any one topic, which is likely due to the anecdotal, slightly meandering style of writing. You’ll start at one point, and sort of wander around a bit, and eventually come full circle; while there are some thought provoking points made, I just wish that he could have gone into more depth. My other minor quibble is how he does his footnotes. All of his footnotes are at the back of the book; you’ll read a passage, see the number for the footnote, flip to the back of the book, and find out exactly which passage of the Bible he’s referencing. That’s it. Not even the text of the passage, just the book, chapter and verse number. If I had to flip all the way to the back of the book, I want it to be for more than just 2 words. Shorter footnotes, like references to Bible verses, could have easily been placed at the bottom of the page, or even in-line with the text. All in all, though, I would definitely consider this to be a worthwhile read.

Earlier in the month I posted about looking for a reading list type plug-in for WordPress, and finding Now Reading. I’ve since installed it, and finished customizing my library. I’m happy with how it looks (for now), and have decided that in an attempt to both read and write more, I’ll post my thoughts on books as I finish them. Not quite as ambitious as the “52 in 52″ meme, where bloggers attempt to read & review a book a week, but a decent start, I think.

As some of you may have noticed, I finally got around to implementing tagging a while ago, via the Simple Tagging plug-in. The categories in the sidebar are more like a table of contents, and the tags work more like the index at the back of a book. Generally, I’m very happy with the tags; I love having the list of related posts show up on the single view, and the Tag Cloud on the archive page makes it easy to find posts by specific topic.

My only problems are minor formatting issues, really. I want the Tag View page (the page you go to when you click a tag) to display just like it displays all the other archived entries. It does, mostly; I’ve made it use the same template that I use to display archived entries. The only problem is in the number of posts it displays at a time. I installed the Custom Posts Per Page plug-in ages ago, to dictate how many posts show up on given page views. On the home page, it is supposed to show 4 posts. On the daily view, monthly view, and search result pages, it’s supposed to show no more than 10 posts per page, and for all other views it’s supposed to show 999 posts. For whatever reason, the tag view page thinks it’s the home page, and displays only 4 posts.

The other minor bug relates to the footer. The 5 most recent posts and 5 most recent comments show up at the bottom of the page; on the tag view pages, the 5 most recent posts for that tag are displayed instead. The 5 most recent comments show up correctly, though.

I suspect the quirks may be related, but I don’t know for certain. My reasoning is that since WordPress thinks the Tag View is the home page (as the query property comes up true when I check if it’s the Home view), it’s using that same query to get the 5 most recent posts. I can create a workaround for displaying the proper number of posts on a tag view page, but I’ve exhausted most of my ideas for fixing the Recent Posts in the footer. Any ideas out there?

So, I’ve been checking out “reading list” type plug-ins for WordPress, because I’m getting sick of just keeping a text file on my PDA of books I’ve read, and ones I want to read. Whenever I come across a book that looks interesting, it gets added to the text file, but then I forget about reading anything on the list until I come across a new book that looks interesting. Wash, rinse, repeat. I was searching online, and came across the Now Reading plug-in, which is great – it lets you add books to a “library,” and you can mark books as “Have Read”, “Reading” or “To Read,” along with other details like when you read the book, and your own review. There are some beautiful implementations of it (Example) as well. The author of the plug-in has a nice implementation as well (here). I really like that rather than hiding the reviews away in the library, where someone may never see them, he’s made each review into a post, and linked to them from the book summary in the library.

Of course, the “Now Reading” plug-in made me think about what else I might consider applying it to. It would be nice to be able to create a library of video games; what I have, what I’ve played, what I’m playing now, what I plan to play. And for movies, as well; what movies I’ve seen, what I thought of them, what movies I own, et cetera. Of course, I already have lists of what movies & video games I own; reviews could be easily accomplished by simply creating and using a “Movie Review” or “Game Review” tag. So would I really NEED to extend “Now Reading” to include Movies & Video Games? For how I would use it, probably not.