{"id":616,"date":"2006-10-29T00:33:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-29T00:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/wordpress\/?p=616"},"modified":"2006-10-29T00:33:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-29T00:33:00","slug":"hey-nostradamus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/2006\/10\/29\/hey-nostradamus\/","title":{"rendered":"Hey Nostradamus!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My trouble is that I&#8217;m ambitious. And I&#8217;m undisciplined.<\/p>\n<p>I both love the idea of reading great books and I enjoy reading great books. Oh, the other problem is that I read very slowly. <i> The Lord of the Rings<\/i> = 18 months. <i>Crime and Punishement<\/i> = 9 months. <i>The Count of Monte Cristo<\/i> = 4 months. Get the picture?  And that&#8217;s fiction.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/photos\/blog\/booksnf.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Non-Fiction! Mercy!  Here are the books I&#8217;m currently reading and some of them I&#8217;ve been reading for more than 3 years now. I really enjoy them, but there isn&#8217;t a driving plot or characters to seize or mystery to solve or multiple layers to dissect.  In order of when I first started them (note that one of them is fiction):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i>Compa\u00f1ero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara<\/i> by Jorge G Casta\u00f1eda\n<li><i>The Silmarillion<\/i> by J R R Tolkien\n<li><i>An Autobiography<\/i> by Mohandas K Gandhi\n<li><i>Hegemony or Survival: America&#8217;s Quest for Global Dominance<\/i> by Noam Chomsky\n<li><i>The Cross of Christ<\/i> by John Stott\n<li><i>Story<\/i> by Robert McKee<\/ul>\n<p>So this morning, instead of editing some home movies all day (I did it for 30 minutes and quit) and instead of curling up with one of these six treasures, I decided to read a whole book in one day. I picked <i>Hey Nostradamus!<\/i> by <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Douglas_Coupland\">Douglas Coupland<\/a>*. I had read his <i>Life after God<\/i> and loved it.  I lay down at around 8 AM and finished it around 5:30 with small breaks in between to play with Blaise. I was blown away. What a charging book about spirituality! I had to get off the couch and go to the bedroom when I finished so I could weep a little in private at the ending (until a little man began tugging at my pants). What beauty! Blaise and I stared at the rain outside for 10 minutes. I let the book just soak in. I can&#8217;t wait to get into another one of Coupland&#8217;s books.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/photos\/blog\/heynostradamus.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>*Douglas Coupland is a Canadian author who lives in Vancouver. He coined the phrase &#8220;Generation X.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My trouble is that I&#8217;m ambitious. And I&#8217;m undisciplined. I both love the idea of reading great books and I enjoy reading great books. Oh, the other problem is that I read very slowly. The Lord of the Rings = 18 months. Crime and Punishement = 9 months. The Count of Monte Cristo = 4 &#8230; <span class=\"more\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/2006\/10\/29\/hey-nostradamus\/\">[Read more&#8230;]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1878,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,7,30],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-admin","4":"post-616","6":"format-standard","7":"has-post-thumbnail","8":"category-books","9":"category-canadiana","10":"category-christianity","11":"category-zr"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}