Giving, Charity, and Working

I seem to be acutely affected by whatever I am reading. I'm not sure if I'm wording that correctly, but I'm too lazy to look it up. What I mean is that I can get totally into a book, while I'm reading it. Afterwards I'm able to distance myself from it a bit and think about it more objectively. The last two books I've read (I'm not done with one of them yet) are almost completely opposite.

The book I finished right before Christmas is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. First of all I'm proud to say that I finished it in five weeks, only renewing it once. This was not a good book to read at Christmas time. At least not for me. One of the themes in the book is people expecting hand-outs to meet their needs, rather than working for their bread. Drilling that idea into my head is not conducive to me putting money into the Salvation Army bucket. This book is 1176 pages and I'm not going to explain it to anyone who hasn't read it, but let me say there are a lot of ideas presented you can think about for a very long time.

For Christmas I recieved A Secret Gift by Ted Gup. This is a true story about an anonymous offer to provide 150 families with $5 right before Christmas 1933. The donor made his offer in the newspaper and asked people to write and tell him of their circumstances and why they needed the money. I have not finished this book yet, but I am really enjoying it. The people who recieved the money never learned the identity of the donor. Only recently when Ted Gup found the original letters in his grandmother's things, has the truth come out. The mysterious donor was his grandfather. I find the letters really enlightening. They shed a first-hand account to the problems people faced in the Great Depression. (I know that is such a Sarah Palin sentence, but it's been a long week and I'm not fixing it.)

I am in a more giving mood now. Only the Santas with their buckets are all gone.