Book Reviews

I Am a Church Member: Discovering the Attitude that Makes the Difference

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Reposting this review because the Kindle edition is on sale for $0.99.
I Am a Church Member: Discovering the Attitude that Makes the Difference by Thom S. RainerSummary: Short discussion oriented book about what being a church member really is all about.

Someone at Rainer’s publisher has been paying attention to the blogosphere. I Am a Church Member (on sale last week) is a good response to Rachel Held Evans CNN post of two weeks ago.

This is not the only good response, but it is a one method of responding. Evans, I believe, was trying to describe her desires for the church based on her frustrations with the dysfunction of the church. (I don’t think she was trying to ‘demand’ that the church change to fit her desires as some have charged.)

Thom Rainer instead is trying to start with a healthy church and discuss what it means to be a good church member to that healthy church.

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Evangellyfish by Douglas Wilson

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Summary: A skewering of some convenient targets.

I don’t read a lot of Christian fiction.  Most of it I think tries too hard to get a message across and not hard enough to tell a good honest story.  And I think that is the central problem with Evangellyfish.

Douglas Wilson is a good writer.  He strings words together nicely and is pleasant to read.  But from the beginning this seemed like a book that was just too safe and predictable.  It is held up as good satire.  And that does seem to be what he is attempting.  But I happen to really love some good satire.  Christopher Buckley is one of my favorite authors.  Coffee with Jesus, the Colbert Report, Jonathan Swift, etc have left us with a world of satire and so in an age that is cynical about pretty much everything, satire needs to be even more carefully crafted than ever.

What I think that Wilson missed is that the best satire is not only from the inside, but against your own side. Evangellyfish is safe in particular for Wilson. A review on Amazon that I read after I finished captured my thoughts exactly,

“The book bills itself as dangerous and edgy, but it came across to me as par for the Wilson course. Pop quiz: which pastor lives like a hypocrite, full of deceit and sexual sin: the mega-church pastor or the Reformed pastor? Of course the mega-church pastor! What sin does the youth pastor struggle with? Of course sexual sin! Which female character villainously manufactures a campaign of vicious slander: the reporter, the secretary, or the midwife? Of course the midwife! After all, she’s already guilty of near-manslaughter just for having babies outside the hospital (at least according to the book!). To anyone familiar with Douglas Wilson, none of these caricatures are surprising.”

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The Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

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Summary: An IT worker, tasked with reading company emails, falls in love with one of the people he is snooping on. Last year, Rainbow Rowell started getting a lot of attention for her 2012 book, Eleanor & Park.  In part, the attention was for winning several awards including the 2014 Michael Printz Honor Book for … Read more

Dawn by Octavia Butler (Exenogenesis Trilogy #1)

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Summary: A Woman wakes up to discover the Earth as she knows it is no longer, and the only hope of survival is an alien species that has questionable motives.

Dawn is the first book that I have finished reading from KindleUnlimited’s library.  I actually already owned the kindle edition, but the audiobook is included in KindleUnlimited so I moved it to the top of my list.

Octavia Butler is known for her strong African American female leads, unusual in the science fiction world. Butler’s first real hit, Kindred, was semi-fantasy. A time travel book that takes a 1970s African American woman back to her 1820s era slave owning ancestor.  Kindred is an excellent book, one that I highly recommend and the best of Butler’s books that I have read so far.

The other of Butler’s books that I have read is Butler’s last book that she wrote before she died, Fledgling, a vampire book that was written about the time of the Twilight vampire craze.

So Dawn, as an Alien abduction novel, is yet again completely different.  Butler does a great job building suspense, letting you know what the main character is feeling and making the aliens, alien. It is one of the common thoughts of science fiction writers that if we do find aliens, that they will be so alien that we will have a hard time relating to them or even understanding why we don’t understand them.

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Death Masks by Jim Butcher

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Summary: Dresden, not quite as much of a mess this time, is searching for the Shroud of Turin, everyone else is trying to kill him.

Dresden is Chicago’s only professional Wizard.  Essentially he is a Private Investigator for supernatural issues.  That is when he is actually working and not trying to save the world from certain destruction.

Death Masks comes fairly closely on the heals of Summer Knight.  The Red Court (the vampires) have declared war on the White Court (the Wizards) and in particular on Dresden. So the vampires are still trying to kill him.  The local crime lord,who Dresden has previously had an uneasy truce with, seems to have some of his goons after him as well.  And Susan, his (maybe ex) fiancée who is part way through her transformation to a vampire herself after trying to save Dresden in book 3, is back in town.

All of that is in addition to an actual job, finding the Shroud of Turin, which was recently stolen.

Michael, a Knight of the Cross, who was last in Grave Peril (#3) and is one of my favorite characters, is back.  Michael is Catholic and devout and carries a sword around while defeating evil, raising his brood of kids, working as a contractor and keeping his wife happy.  This time he is joined by two other Knights that are trying to save Dresden.

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Strip Tease by Carl Hiaasen

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Summary: A farcical skewering of politicians, money and regular people trying to make a living.

A few months ago Audible was having a buy one get one free sale.  One of the options was Strip Tease. I couldn’t really find anything to match with the other book that I did want, so I threw it in my cart as a free extra.

I have read two other Hiaasen books, but it has been a while.  I remembered them as funny, sort of mysteries concerned primarily with local Florida issues.  After I was about half way through Strip Tease I went back and read my previous reviews.  I was not kind.  I thought the characters were basically unlikable and while the writing was ok, there was very little redeeming value in the books.  And basically I feel the same about Strip Tease.

Strip Tease is primarily about Erin, a young divorced mother who is working as a stripper because it is the only way she can earn enough money to pay her lawyer to try and get back her daughter from her dirtbag ex-husband.

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Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

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Ready Player One

Summary: A classic young adult quest novel based in 2044, but built on 1980s culture.  A fun book for both adults that lived the 1980s and teens that were years from being born.

My Sister-in-Law introduced me to this book.  Published last August it was several lists of the best of 2011, but I had not heard of it until her recommendation.

Wade is living in 2044.  The US has degenerated into lawlessness.  The world economy is in ruins because of huge shortages in oil, energy, water and food.

The world is falling apart, but there is one consolation, Oasis.  The Oasis is an immersive online world.  Most people now live more in the Oasis than in the real world.  Students go to school in the Oasis, adults work in the Oasis, everyone escapes reality in the Oasis.

The creator of the Oasis is James Halliday.  Five years before the start of the book, Halliday died and left his enormous fortune and the entire company to whomever solves his puzzle.  Wade (his avatar is named Parzival in the Oasis) and many others have made it their goal to solve the puzzle.  It is their lottery, their work, their only hope.

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The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic by James KA Smith

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1404896221_0.pngSummary: Maybe our need for interpretation and our finiteness as humans is a feature of our creation, not a consequence of the fall.

The more I read James KA Smith, the more I appreciate his perspective.

The Fall of Interpretation was Smith’s first book.  It was an adaptation of his Ph.D. dissertation that he lightly edited and re-released in 2012.  Last fall, it was briefly on sale, and I picked it up because it was written by Smith, without really knowing what it was about.

Like normal for Smith, this is a book that has way more philosophy than I understand.  But also, like normal, I can follow the argument without always understanding some of the minor details.

Smith’s argument is “To be human is to interpret, to encounter the world and entities within the world” and “something of an encounter conditioned by the situationally of human finitude”.  He is suggesting that our finitude is not something to be overcome, but something to be embraced as a feature of our creation.  (Yes, the language can be a bit overly academic, but it is understandable.)

The problem is that,

“At root (and roots, of course, are usually buried, unseen and hidden) the linking of interpretation to fallenness may be understood as the product of a dominant Western interpretive tradition, a broadly neoplatonic understanding of creation and Fall, an understanding that is itself an interpretation. I believe that this tradition, which has significantly influenced aspects of the Christian tradition, remains plagued by an incipient Neoplatonism (or gnosticism) that continues to construe creational finitude and human be-ing as “essentially” fallen and therefore ties hermeneutics to such a corrupted condition.”

What was important about this book for me was his discussion of the finiteness of humanity.

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MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker

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Summary: Basis of the movie and beloved TV show, and well mined by them both for ideas.

Every night my senior year of college MASH was on at 10 PM and was watched by whoever happened to be around.  Long before that I had seen most of the episodes, but it is a testament to its quality that college kids were devoted fans to a show that started the year before most of us were born.

Last week the novel was the Audible deal of the day so I picked it up.  And mostly I enjoyed it.

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The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

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Summary: A farce in the style of PG Wodehouse (or vice versa) poking fun at the triviality of Victorian society.

I know that Wilde has the reputation of being funny, but the only other work of his that I have read was the Portrait of Dorian Gray.  And while I appreciated the book, I did not think it was great and it certainly is not a comedy.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy.  It is also a play and it has been a while since I have read a play with stage directions and character dialogue.  And I am not sure I have ever listened to an audiobook of a play, which is what I did here.

Two friends both are leading double lives, in part because they can.  Algernon is meeting with his friend who is known as Earnest.  Earnest wants to propose to Algernon’s cousin, but Algernon discovers that Earnest’s cigarette case has the inscription “From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack.”  So Earnest admits that he is actually named Jack (or John) but uses the name Earnest when he comes to London to get away from his country house.

Algernon admits a similar deception when he wants to get away from London, he pretends to visit a sick friend named Bunbury.

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