Book Reviews

I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter

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Summary: A student at a exclusive girls school for spies falls in love with a normal boy.

If I had to guess, the recent article about why adults should be embraassed to be reading Young Adult books is setting its sights exactly on books like I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You.

I am not at all going to pretend this is great literature.  But it was fun, I did pick it up free, I liked the concept and because a young adult friend already has all of them, I will probably read at least one or two more of the series to see how things go.

Cammie Morgan is a student at the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women.   Her mother is the school’s headmaster and like most of the rest of the staff, a former spy.  In fact, most of the girl in the school are daughters of spies and/or are preparing to become spies.  They practice foreign languages and martial arts and have classes on covert ops and world cultures.  This is intented to be Hogwarts if it were a girls school and focused on training spies instead of wizards.

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Becoming Who You Are: Insights on the True Self from Thomas Merton and Other Saints by James Martin

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Becoming Who You Are cover imageSummary: God has created you to be who you are, not to be like someone else.

I picked Becoming Who You Are up on a whim.  I had some promotional credits from Audible and needed to use them on something cheap.  It caught my eye because it was about Thomas Merton.  I read Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain in college or soon after and enjoyed it but I have not picked up anything else by him, although I keep meaning to.

James Martin, the author has been on my radar as well, but again, just not enough time to read everything that pricks my interest.

Becoming Who You Are is short (98 pages, just over 2 hours in audio). It is a meditation on Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Jesus, and a few others. But really, it is Martin’s recounting of how these people helped Martin discover what it means to be himself.

Merton is known for his discussion of the True Self and the False Self.  The basic idea of the book is that to become the person that you want to be, you need to become the person that God made you to be.  Striving to become like Merton, Nouwen, or Mother Teresa will not make us a better Christian or more like what God wants for us, because God made us with a unique personality and purpose.

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Summer Knight by Jim Butcher (Dresden Files #4)

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1402884325_0.pngSummary: Everyone is out to get Dresden and all he is trying to do is save the world.

What makes the Dresden Files work is that Butcher knows when to bend the rules and when the rules need to be held.  Dresden is a Wizard.  A magical private eye, the only one, that works in Chicago.  The series is a mix of hard boiled PI and paranormal thriller.

In this fourth book of the series, Dresden, after defeating a plan to destroy him by the Vampire Court, is being brought up on trumped up charges by the Wizard Court (these are not legal courts, but essentially guild bodies).  A number in the Wizard court are not fans of his and are willing to let Dresden be turned over to the Vampires  (for interference) because Dresden saved a number of humans after the Wizard Court refused to act. (And if the Wizard Court does not turn him over, the Vampire Court will declare war.)

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The Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis

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Re-posting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition of The Horse and His Boy is on sale for $0.99.  (Also The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is only $1.99)

The Horse and his Boy by CS LewisSummary: The only the Narnia stories not to include someone from this world magically going to Narnia.

After reading Alister McGrath’s very good biography of CS Lewis I decided I was going to read one CS Lewis book a week for a while.  I have a number of them, some I have read, some I have not.  Last week I read the Silver Chair, this week The Horse and His boy.

Like the Silver Chair, I really did not remember anything about this book except the broadest outline.  A boy who has been raised as a poor fisherman’s son, escapes from his home when he overhears his ‘father’ negotiating to sell him as a slave.  As he escapes, the horse of the man reveals himself to be a Narnian talking horse and they escape together. I had completely forgotten there even was a girl and another Narnian horse that they meet up with.

The Narnia books keep surprising me with their shortness.  It feels like they were so much longer when I was a kid.

Lewis again is using fiction to hide teaching.  In Silver Chair it was about knowing the word of God and following it.  Here it seems to be more about the love of God for those that are not his normal followers.  And a lot about pride and the nature of who is really the hero.

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The Dragon Business by Keven J Anderson

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Summary: A middle ages fantasy version of How I Met Your Mother.

Kevin J Anderson is one of those authors that seems to produce a superhuman amount of books.  He has published 120 book according to his bio.  Many of them are part of established worlds, Dune, Star Wars, X-Files, etc.  I have not read any of those books.

But I did really like his Saga of the Seven Suns series (or most of it.)  It was a good space opera series that got a little bogged down with too many story lines in the middle of the series, but it was still quite enjoyable.

I ran across Dragon Business when I saw that Anderson is starting a new trilogy set in the same world as Saga of the Seven Suns.  The Dragon Business was an Amazon Prime book so I could borrow it for free.

The first line of the description is, “King Cullin may be known as “the Dragon Slayer”, but he fears his son’s legacy will be as “King Maurice Who Speaks with Proper Grammar”.”  This is a book with very modern sensibilities, in the vein of the movie A Knight’s Tale.  Early in the book, the father is trying to tell the son a story and the son complains about the father switching between first and third person and omniscient narration.  It was pretty funny.  And there is a good theme of wanting a child to be everything you couldn’t be, but still wanting them to be well grounded and appreciate the things you appreciated.

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Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues by NT Wright

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Summary: Wright at his best tells a new narrative about an old story. In this book too many issues cut short the narrative.

I am an unabashed fan of NT Wright.  I have read most of his popular level books (except the commentary series) and a few of his more academic oriented books.  I appreciate his focus on calling people to a fresh look at scripture and his ability to take scripture seriously while maintaining real academic quality.

But on the whole I was disappointed by this book.  It is a re-working of articles that have previously appeared elsewhere.  Most of them were commissioned by US journals or from chapters in books that were for US audiences, so as a Brit, he is most of the time consciously writing for the North American Evangelical audience.

His basic argument, like most of Wright, is that given historical realities of the original writers and audience, we modern readers tend to be missing the intended point of the original writers.

As with most Wright he needs to go through a fairly long narrative to be able to help the reader understand his point.  And I think that is why his full length book treatments are better than these shorter issue based chapters.

The problem is not so much the individual chapters, but that in almost every case, he has a better response in a full length books (and he frequently tells the reader that there is more to the story if you want to pick up another one of his books.) So his first three chapters on science and religion, the historical Adam and the resurrection were all better handled by his book Scripture and the Authority of God.

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Slavery of Death by Richard Beck

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slavery of death cover imageSummary: Differing perspectives on theological issues allow us to see other views and approach our views with more clarity.

I have recently started reading Richard Beck’s blog Experimental Theology. I was briefly introduced to Dr Beck 10 or 12 years ago via a mutual friend at a conference, but only recently have I started reading him.

The Slavery of Death is an attempt to explore the way that the Christus Victor model of the atonement* interacts with the way most western Christians view the relationship between Sin and Death.

The Eastern Orthodox tradition does not reject the Penal Substitution model of atonement, but they tend to emphasize the Christus Victor model as more in line with their theological positions. So much of what Beck is doing in this book is telling the story of Christianity again (for us Western Christians), but through the lens of Orthodox views.

The traditional Western story is that death was introduced to humanity (and maybe the whole world) after the sin of the garden.  But…

“According to the Orthodox, the real issue at the heart of Genesis 3 “the biblical story of “the fall” is not focused on establishing a causal model regarding the sin/death relationship and how we inherit a moral stain from our ancestors, but is mostly concerned about the etiology of death and who is to blame for introducing death into the world. In other words, the Eastern Orthodox tradition understands Genesis 3 to be more about theodicy (a story about where death came from) than soteriology (a story about where sin came from).”

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The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi

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Reposting this 2012 review because the Audiobook is today’s Audible Deal of the Day and on sale for $3.95 today only (June 7)

The Android's DreamSummary: Two trade representatives die during an interstellar trade negotiation creating an interstellar incident.  If Harry Creek does not find a particular type of sheep there might a war, one that Earth will not be able to win.

I enjoyed reading Agent to the Stars so much that I picked up another John Scalzi book.  And since it had Will Wheaton as narrator I picked up the audiobook.

Both of Scalzi’s books that I have read so far have not been primarily concerned with the science.  Instead the are science fiction settings, there are aliens, it is in the future, but it is really just the setting, not the main concern of the book.  So people that do not traditionally like science fiction might like these.

Android’s Dream is more of a spy book than a science fiction book.  Harry Creek is a former cop, a former war hero, a computer specialist and currently works for the State Department giving aliens bad news.

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