Currently Reading

Yes, I have some serious books underway, most notably, A.C. Gaebelein's Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (originally published in 1910) and George Eliot''s mid-19th Century novel, Adam Bede. The last is this month's selection for our book club, The Notting Hill Napoleons, but it's beginning to look pretty dicey for either Claire or I finishing it before tomorrow night's meeting. I'm only at 13% and Claire isn't much further.

By the way, I know it's 13% because I've been struggling to read it on Claire's Kindle and, instead of page numbers, that's what it tells you. Silly machine.

Anyhow, getting the Eliot novel done may be out of reach. Sorry, Napoleons.

I have not proceeded very far into the Bible commentary either. But I've read enough to think it's absolutely first-rate. I'm beginning a series at Faith Bible Church this Sunday morning which will take us through the Sermon on the Mount, a well-known but not as well-understood a passage which takes up three long chapters of Matthew's gospel. I've been doing my regular research in preparation for Sunday's sermon (reading and re-reading the text, thinking about it, considering questions, doing word studies, and looking into the various study tools I've acquired over the last 42 years as well as those available nowadays on the internet at sites like StudyLight.com), but I remembered early in the week that someone had given me a box with several old Bible commentaries that I hadn't looked into yet. It seemed like I remembered there was a couple of Gaebelein books in there (whether Frank's or, more preferable to me, his father A.C.'s ), I didn't know. Might one of them cover Matthew?

One of them did. And, hooray; it was the A.C. Gaebelein one. True, the box contained only the first of what should be two volumes. But, for my present purposes, to read A.C.'s introductory chapters on the gospel and then the coverage of the three chapters I'm working with right now, was terrific.

But I must admit that reading for my sermon, reading that 13% of Adam Bede, and the regular hours of reading required to maintain Vital Signs Blog, wasn't my only reading for the week. I was under the weather, as they say, for the whole of Wednesday and, along with a nice sleep-in that day, I also read two Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries. One was a 1947 Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Fan-Dancer's Horse (there's an enigmatic title for you) and Spill the Jackpot. The latter novel was published in 1941. It was written by Gardner but under one of his his pen names, A.A. Fair. Spill the Jackpot was one of Gardner's successful series starring an unlikely team of Donald Lam (5'5'' of guts, street smarts and detective genius) and his overweight, overbearing boss, Bertha Cool.

I loved 'em both. And, who knows, maybe it wasn't so much the zinc and orange juice as it was the extra sleep and the detective novels that got me back to work in a day.