Okay... so this book club thing is a learning experience. We are reading books we have never read, and because we have never read them we do not know what they contain. Unlike Movies, books don't come with a rating.
When starting the book club I said that I wanted to keep schmutztica to a minimum (see previous post). We want to read books with substance, that have a lot to discuss. But, we'd like to keep the sex content and the language content on the mild side. Since we all have differing opinions of what "mild" is... we may read a book that seems really mild to someone and very offensive to others.
So, if you find yourself getting offended or feeling at all uncomfortable... stop reading! Or feel free to skip through those parts.
As a Christian, and a Pastor's wife I feel that it's important that I don't encourage my friends to do something unwholesome or unedifying. I hope that the book club can be FUN, intellectually stimulating, and a place to build friendships and get to know each other. I want people to feel safe and free to be themselves and to be honest.
I still want to discuss this book in our next meeting. There will be a lot to talk about. With that said, I don't want to revolve the discussion around our whether or not it offended us. However, I will be thinking about how we can investigate the books a bit more before we read them.
"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable- if anything is excellent or praise worthy- think about such things." Philippians 4:8
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If we're worried about avoiding sex and language we could read classics- Jane Austen and the like. There's a lot of good stuff in that category with no potentially offending content.
ReplyDeleteThere are many selections in the Christian Book store that should be safe and smut free. Good ones are 90 minutes in Heaven (I've heard, but I haven't read it yet, I do have it though) and Silence by Shusaku Endo. I read that one a while ago and I remember it was a pretty powerful story about making priests in Japan renounce thir faith. (There is some violence and torture.)
With that said, I see some of the "smut" as literature and look at it from an academic point of view. Sometimes it is meant to make us feel uncomfortable to get the author's literary feelings across- it's their form of art and expression. (But then, sometimes it's just smut.) So it doesn't normally bother me. And if it does, I just go read something else. I'm up for whatever you pick.