Bookwi.se

Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

September 16, 2026September 16, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: A look at women in Evangelical Christianity and how they have influenced and been influenced by the culture.

I read Jesus and John Wayne not long after it first came out. And then I read it again with a book club in 2023. The history in Jesus and John Wayne and now in Live Laugh Love is largely familiar to me. I have read the books and known about the people and followed the news and even met a couple of the people who are mentioned.

I think one of the problems that Mark Noll identified in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, and that which I have heard Pete Enns and many other Christian academics expand on, is the problem of the role of intellectualism within Evangelicalism. To tell the story of evangelicalism from a slightly different tack from Du Mez, Neo-evangelicalism’s founders were trying to break away from the fundamentalism’s antagonism toward not only culture, but the tools of the culture. And fundamentalism fought back against evangelicalism with the charge that it was trying to make culture like it and build clout. But over time, those who were fundamentalist in orientation against the broader culture, adopted the evangelical label and many of those who would have been apart of the original neo-evangelical orientation either were pushed out, or left in disgust.

I have seen a number of people dismiss Du Mez broadly over the past week or so with some version of “she is just a marxist.” Early in the book she says, “Ultimately, this book is about power–about women’s power to define their own lives, men’s power over women, and the power women wield over one another. It is about discipleship and devotion, authority and submission, manipulation, cruelty, and control.” (I read a prerelease version provided by Netgalley for purposes of review so I will not give a page number to the quote because my version is likely not paginated as the released version.)

That quote rightly says that she is studying how power impact Christianity. That is not to say that the only thing in the book is power, but to pretend that post-marxian scholars cannot look at power without being “marxist” is like saying that post-Adam Smith economists cannot look at the role of wealth without being capitalists or that biologists can’t look at biological change without being darwinists. Once the a tool has been released into the world, that tool exists and to not use it because of a fear of a label is exactly the type of anti-intellectualism that Noll was rightly concerned about in evangelicalism.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

September 8, 2026September 5, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: Aliens destroy the Earth and put millions of people who managed to survive into a live action role playing game where they have to survive lots of monsters (and some people) trying to kill them.

I have known about Dungeon Crawler Carl for about a year. It started showing up in recommendations for great audiobooks and what to read if you like Project Hail Mary or the Murderbot series. I have been reading a lot of fiction lately, in part because my paying job has been so busy that I have not had the brain power for other types of books. I finally decided to pick them up when a good friend and his wife said they were listening to them as an audiobook on a long drive.

Dungeon Crawler Carl knows it is not great and important literature. It is funny, crass, way too violent, but engaging. At this point I am in the middle of the third book in a bit over a week. The kindle books are in the Kindle unlimited library so I have borrowed them and then had the kindle discount to get the audiobook for under $5 each.

This is a book describing a live action role playing game. It is inspired by first person shooters and Dungeons and Dragons and the wide variety of other games. In some ways I think this is like a more adult oriented version of Ready Player One, except Ready Player One was an immersive video game who was on a quest to solve problems using cultural history. Dungeon Crawler Carl is supposed to be more D&D inspired fantasy where the “real” person dies and there is (from my perspective) entirely too much description of blood and guts from the fights.

Invincible: The Ultimate Collection Vol 1

September 1, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: A spoof of the DC superhero world. I can’t remember if it was when I was reading about Chosen Ones or in Chosen Ones or something else entirely, but I saw a recommendation for Invincible and found a copy at my library. The version I read was probably 300 pages and had a real … Read more

The Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

August 31, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: Ten years after five chosen teens work together to defeat a magical enemy, they come back together to face a new enemy.

A last year, I stumbled on When Among Crows by Veronica Roth and then I read the second of that series To Clutch a Razor. I had not read any of Roth’s books in a decade, but she has been writing, so I decided I would pick up some of her books when I ran across them on sale.

The Chosen Ones has a premise that I was interested in. A group of “chosen ones” was found as early teens after magic started happening and an enemy arose. That story is the backstory to this book but flashbacks do tell us part of that story.

This book is about those heroes as the most famous people on earth and how they have adapted to that, or not. The story primarily focuses on Sloane. She is dating Matt, the team’s leader, but she has not recovered from the trauma of that original fight. It is this part of the book that I liked the most. I wanted to understand what it was like to grapple with regret for what you had done, while the world treats you as a hero. I didn’t really want the book to only stay there, but that was where I liked the book most.

I am not going to spoil the story, but I can understand why a number of people didn’t like the book, or at least thought it was mediocre. The story was a little slow and it meandered around a bit. I liked the book and I have appreciated the grappling with the emotional and other costs of being a hero. It felt to me like While the World Watched, which was the memoir of the last girl to leave the bathroom before the bomb went off that killed the four girls in the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. She grappled with the cost that she and those around her paid for participating in the civil rights movement. Her brother clearly had PTSD and died young. She grappled with alcoholism and nearly divorced before moving back to Birmingham and working with the museum before she retired.

Galahad and the Grail by Malcolm Guite

August 23, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: A retelling of part of the Arthurian legends in verse.

I have known of Malcolm Guite for quite a while, but I do not tend to read a lot of poetry and have not previously read any of his books. I have listened to a number of interviews on various podcasts. Guite is a priest, poet, and public intellectual. Galahad and the Grail pulls together all three.

I thought I had read TH White’s Once and Future King when I was a teen, but after reading Galahad and the Grail, I think I have only seen the Sorcerer and the Stone and other movie and TV adaptations. So while I had a rough idea of the characters, most of the story that Guite is adapting and putting to verse was new to me. I did not know anything about who Galahad was or how he was conceived.

It is obvious that Guite is using his skill as a poet to put this story to verse. But he is also thinking theologically about how imagination shapes our formation as humans. I am a bit resistant to the role of Christendom in this story. Arthur and others are clearly Christians working to culturally shape England into a Christ-following country. But the point here isn’t that this is history, or an example of England being particularly chosen by God for a particular purpose of colonialism or power, but that this is a story about how myth and imagination shape shared identity.

I picked up Galahad and the Grail not long after I finished Wilson’s version of the Odyssey. Both were written in verse and I read each of them a bit in verse to understand the structure, but then I mostly listened to them as audiobooks. My perception is that narrative verse was meant to be heard. And while I want to read enough to become familiar with the structure, I want to hear it because narrative verse is an aural medium.

Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy by Robert P. Jones

August 23, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: Grappling with the ways that Christians in the US are embracing authoritarianism and complicit in rejecting democracy.

I have read Robert Jones’ previous books. There is a clear progressions. He was the head of a polling company when he wrote The End of White Christian America. That book is mostly about the demographic trends in the US. His next book was White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. That one was still primarily using polling and demographics but drew on more history to contextualize how a belief in white racial superiority was a long term trend in the US that was explicitly tied to some forms of Christian theology. His third book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future, leaned even more into history and more than the previous two books paid attention to how Native American mistreatment and not just anti-black racism was an important reality that needs to be paid attention to.

This fourth book again slightly shifts the focus while still remaining part of the larger trend, this time focusing on how there is a movement against democracy and toward authoritarian control. I think the initial opening of the book that discusses Martin Niemöller the German pastor most well known for his poem, First They Came For. Jones specifcally talks about the different between Niemöller and Bonhoeffer because often Bonhoeffer is pointed to as a hero while Niemöller is not. Jones thinks most of us are more like Niemöller than we are comfortable with. Niemöller initially supported the Nazi party, but then changed his mind and worked against the Nazis. Niemöller lived through WWII, spending six years in a concentration camp. And then in the years after he dedicated his life toward ecumenical work that was focused on peace and Holocaust remembrance. I think that point, which comes back to the fore several times is largely right.

One of the problems of talking about these trends with people who are reluctant to pay attention is that the sources matter. For instance in a section where Jones is talking about President Trump talking about his admiration of Hitler, he cites Generals Kelly and Milley, the president’s Chief of Staff and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff during the first administration. And he cites General Mattis, Secretary of Defense under Trump, as saying that Trump is a direct threat to democracy. These are not liberals or democrats, but people who served directly under Trump as political appointees of Trump.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

August 12, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: The moon inexplicably turns to cheese one afternoon. There is fallout.

I really like John Scalzi’s writing. He has serious scifi which I enjoy. But I mostly enjoy his humorous stuff that tends to be great on audiobook when I have a long day of mindless database work. I listened to this over the course of two days almost non-stop.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a ridiculous concept. One day, the moon turns to cheese. The reason is never discovered. Scalzi takes a silly idea and runs with it. Each chapter is one day. Mostly focused on different characters who mostly do not come back up in the rest of the book. (But some do.)

I don’t think method this would work for a lot of books. There isn’t enough character development or the plot becomes too convoluted to pull so many characters together. But it works here. The potential apocalypse that can come about because of the turning to cheese has lots of threads to work on.

The Oxford Detective Society by Faith Martin

August 10, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: A biographer works to solve a mystery.

Every month Amazon gives away a handful of new releases to drum up reviews and interest. I don’t always look, but it can be worth checking out. The Oxford Detective Society was a free book in July 2026 with a formal release date of August 1, 2026.

The Oxford Detective Society is primarily about Lyssa Moore. An Oxford trained writer who occasionally accepts writing commissions or ghostwriting jobs. She is also a relatively recent widow still grieving the death of her young husband from an undiagnosed congenital heart defect.

The current job is to write a biography about a young aristocrat who helped fund and guide a 60s pop group toward stardom. She and the lead singer were a couple, but things started falling apart when first he died of an apparent drug overdose and she died not too long after in what appeared to be an accidental drowning in her garden pond.

This is a very straightforward mystery that is clearly the set up of a series. The society is about the group of friends in her building that seem to all hang out quite a bit. But there was not a significant involvement from them in solving the mystery. The characters were mostly likable and the action reasonable. I would have like a bit more depth to the story. There were a few red herrings, but the actual solution was fairly predictable.

The Odyssey by Homer translated by Emily Wilson

August 3, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: The classic story translated by Emily Wilson, narrated by Claire Danes.

I have been preparing to go see Nolan’s version of the Odyssey for the past several weeks. First I read Stephen Fry’s retelling and then I mostly listened but also read a bit of Emily Wilson’s translation narrated by Claire Danes. I have listened to her narrate The Handmaid’s Tale and she has a fairly flat reading style that works for some kinds of fiction but not others. I think it works here.

Wilson translated The Odyssey into verse. Not all version do, some are prose. Generally I think that narrative verse should be listened to. I think that is the case in my favorite verse book, Brown Girl Dreaming. and it is the case with Malcom Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, which I am also reading right now. I tend to get both kindle and audiobook editions because I want to get a sense of the written version of the verse. So I do read about 10 percent of the book. But I mostly listen because these are intended to be heard.

I am not going to get into arguments about the quality of Wilson’s verse or whether Nolan’s version was a good adaptation. I am just not qualified for either of those arguments. Wilson fit the story into verse, there were artistic choices there and some content was shaved to make it fit into verse. Nolan was also adapting a story that has many versions to the screen and also made artistic and stylistic choices. Personally I think it is an artistic masterpiece that also had real misses in some of the choices. Visually I think it was very interesting. I liked the twin themes of grief about war and the concern about how his actions in war led to the larger rejection of “Zeus’ Law” and while I understand how that adapts the original story, I think it makes sense of a modern adaptation. At the same time, I thought Matt Damon’s performance was a bit too flat. And that I wanted the ethics to be a bit more foreign to our modern sensibilities. Not in a way that horrifies us, but rather in a way that shows the ancients as alien to our thinking.

Odyssey: The Greek Myths Reimagined by Stephen Fry

July 27, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: A retelling of Odyssey.

We are preparing to watch The Odyssey. We wanted to watch on IMAX and when we were buying tickets the best option was more than two weeks away. I am pretty sure I have never read a straight translation of The Odyssey, but I have read or seen a ton of adaptations. Some of those adaptations are pretty straightforward like O Brother Where Art Thou? and Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan .

I have also read books “based-on” the Odyssey like Circe by Madeline Miller. But there are those that I didn’t identify as being inspired by the Odyssey, but I have found since that they were, like Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmin Ward and Cold Mountain by Charles Martin. But I think probably more common is the number of books that uses references to the Odyssey, like Daughter of Rage and Ruin by K. B. Hoyle. That book is a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, but she still references Cyclops as another famous giant as part of the quest. Many of Hoyle’s books are based on quests and so almost all of them in some way reference The Odyssey.

While Fry’s Odyssey isn’t a translation, it is a pretty straightforward retelling, with a few asides, some explanations built into the main text, and some humor. If you have previously read The Odyssey and want a better refresher than wikipedia, this might be right for you. I know Stephen Fry from his audiobook narration of Harry Potter and other books. And it was on sale on Audible so I picked it up because I was not sure I could get through the original before I saw the movie.