Adam Shields

Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey #3)

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Summary: Lord Peter Wimsey overhears a doctor talking about a case and is convinced it is the perfect crime.

When I think of Lord Peter Wimsey, I most often think of the modern TV show Castle. I am a big fan of Castle. And there are many similarities. Lord Peter Wimsey is rich, interested in crime, has a good intrinsic sense of how crimes can be committed, is interested in crime as intellectual activity and works with a police officer who he allows to do all the mundane work and there is a good bit of humor in both.

Of course there are differences, Wimsey is not a writer, just a rich Lord (brother to a Duke). He has the free time to think about and solve crimes (Wimsey collects and sells rare first edition book, but has no need for money). And this is the 1930s Britian, so the sexy female cop is out of the question.

But I can totally see Castle with this plot. Wimsey is eating dinner at a fancy resturant and overhears a doctor talking about the death of a patient.  He interupts and asks the doctor to tell him the whole story which leads Wimsey to believe that the patient was killed.

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Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott

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Reposting my 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.75
Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential PrayersSummary: SHORT, but helpful look at the essence of prayer.

I am not an Anne Lamott devotee.  So I do not read everything she writes.  But I have read enough to know that she is a very good author and one that looks at spiritual realities from a different perspective.

So one day last month I was tired of all of my audiobooks I had been listening to and looked around to find another.  I noticed that with my member discount at Audible, Help, Thanks, Wow was under $5.  So I picked it up.

I had resisted previously because it is so short.  In audiobook it is barely 90 minutes.  In paper it is listed as 112  pages.  But it must be a gift book sized pages.

However, for $5 I thought it was worth picking up.

I listened to it two days after listening to Palmer Parker’s Let Your Life Speak.  The two books, although not at all similar in subject had a similarity in spiritual direction.  Both emphasized that the Christian life is not striving after looking good or being respectable.

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How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor by James KA Smith

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Summary: The traditional story of how to the world came to be secular (a subtraction of belief) is not the real story.

Starting last year I have been paying a lot of attention to James KA Smith (Jamie). The first book of his that came across my radar screen was Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation. (I still haven’t actually read that one, it is on my list for this summer.)

But I did read Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. And it really did fundamentally change my perspective on liturgy and worship. Since then I regularly read Smith’s editorials (he is the editor of Comment magazine) and I have slowly been reading some of his other books.

How (Not) to Be Secular is the type of book I wish were more popular. For important ideas to really take hold, we need good authors to popularize those important ideas into formats that a general public can understand. Charles Taylor’s A Secular age is a massive and important book, but at 900 pages it is too long (and too dense) for most readers. (And more than a few people have suggested Taylor is not the most readable author.) So Jamie Smith has put together a 148 page companion that covers the basics of the argument and includes relevant contemporary examples.

The basic idea of A Secular Age is to explain what it means to live in a secular age and how we have come to this place in culture.

“We are all skeptics now, believer and unbeliever alike. There is no one true faith, evident at all times and places. Every religion is one among many. The clear lines of any orthodoxy are made crooked by our experience, are complicated by our lives. Believer and unbeliever are in the same predicament, thrown back onto themselves in complex circumstances, looking for a sign. As ever, religious belief makes its claim somewhere between revelation and projection, between holiness and human frailty; but the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs.”

Taylor’s innovation is how he reframes discussion about secularization from what it has lost (belief in God) to how the very nature of belief claims have changed.

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Dad is Fat by Jim Gaffigan

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Dad is Fat by Jim GaffiganSummary: Funny stories mixed in with some advice.

I like comedy.  I don’t laugh nearly enough.  I have a tendency to be a little too serious.  But I have a few standard humor authors.  Christopher Buckley is one of my favorites (but I have read pretty much everything he has written.)  Christopher Moore is pretty funny except when he isn’t.  I really liked Bossypants by Tina Fey.

Last year, some friends introduced me to Jim Gaffigan.  Since then I think I have seen three of his TV comedy shows and I really like his humor.  He seems like a fairly real person.  And like me he is an introvert, likes kids, hates sports, is a little over weight and loves his wife.

This seemed like the perfect book for him.  He has great material on being a Dad.  He has five kids (six and under).  He lives in New York City in a 2 bedroom apartment (on the 5th floor without an elevator) and lives without a car.  When he is not touring, he is often at home with his kids.

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A Christian Survival Guide by Ed Cyzewski

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Summary: The basics of Christian practice and belief from someone that survived their faith.

One of the problems of my life is that I spend very little time with people that actually are non-Christians. I am a stay at home Dad, I work part time out of the house in my spare moments, my prefered enjoyment activities are reading and being alone.

The time I do spend with people is usually my extended family or church small group. In spite of that I feel like I know a lot of “˜post-Christians’. Those that have grown up in the church or on the perefery of the church, but have an uneasy relationship with the church now.

The US makes being a “˜none’ easier all the time. And for many, it is far easier to walk away from the church when things get difficult than it is to struggle through to a new equalibrium. Or at least that is how I describe it. It seems to me that there are many points in time where all is good, you are comfortable, you have faith, you see God working, and things make sense. But then there is a crisis of faith, or a dry spell or a tragedy or something that breaks that equilibrium and you have a choice of searching for a new equilibrium or to just stop fighting.

Ed Cyzewski has written this guide for two groups of people, those that have no background in the church, or those that have lost their equilibrium and need to find a new one. For both readers, the old answers aren’t working any more. New Christians have different questions because they didn’t grow up in the church and they are culturally ill-disposed toward the standard answers that were based in a previous generation’s questions. And those that have grown up in the church and had their equalibrium break, the standard answers were probably what caused the break in the first place.

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Vacation

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Starting tomorrow I am going on a week’s vacation.  I have book reviews scheduled, but I am not sure if I will be posting any free book posts. All should be back to normal on Sept 15 (or maybe the 16th if I am really swamped the first day back at work.)

Perelandra by CS Lewis (Space Trilogy #2)

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Perelandra by CS Lewis (Space Trilogy #2)Summary: In the second book of the series Ransom visits Venus.

The books of Lewis’s space trilogy are hard to review.  How to you review a classic work of CS Lewis?

In the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom is kidnapped and taken to Mars where he finds a ‘garden of Eden’.  Mars is an old world, one that has not fallen.  There is no sin.  There are only the creatures, following in perfect unison with their creator.

In Perelandra, Ransom is called to Venus for some purpose he does not know.  Once there Ransom meets a green woman.  One of only two people on the planet.  She has been separated from ‘the king’.  The world of Venus is a great ocean with floating islands.  There is one solid place in the whole world.  But the green woman and ‘the king’ have been told by their God that they can visit, but they are not to live there.

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1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

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Reposting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $3.25
Takeaway: The world is not what it seems.

This is a wide ranging book, originally written as a trilogy in Japanese .  It is hard to classify it as a genre, but I would probably call it a contemporary fantasy.  Although I think that most of the people that will like it would not pick up a book labeled fantasy as a first choice.

Aomame (the female protagonist) opens the book late for an appointment.  She is stuck on a skyway in a cab.  The cabbie suggests that if she really needs to get to her appointment she could get out of the cab, climb down an emergency ladder and take the subway (which has a stop near the bottom of the stairway.)

Aomame decides to do this, but the cabbie warns her that nothing will quite be the same once you have stepped outside the realm of your normal life.  And nothing is. Aomame is not going to any old business appointment.  She is on her way to assassinate a man who beats his wife.  She has a relationship with a rich older woman that provides her with information (and money and support) to kill men to stop them from beating their wives.

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The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of St Francis by Richard Rohr

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Summary: A series of six lectures on spiritual development.

Just over a year ago I first listened to The Art of Letting Go. And at the time I absorbed much, but also thought I needed a second listening. So I have slowly listened to this a second time over the past two weeks.

The strength and weakness of the book is its format as lecture/conversations.  It is formated as six lectures for those that would like to go on a spiritual retreat with Rohr but cannot. Rohr is clearly working off of notes but does tend to go off those notes occasionally and is not always as precise about his language as he could be. But at the same time this is very conversational and relaxed in tone.

One of the things I appreciate about reading Catholic priests and monks is that the Catholic church is much more comfortable with psychology and philosophy than the Evangelical world. But the flip side of that is that the language used by Catholics often has slightly different meanings (usually more precise academic meanings) than many Evangelicals are used to.

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CS Lewis: A Life by Alister McGrath

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Summary: An important, highly readable biography of Lewis.

More than several people agree that this is the best Lewis biography to date (see links below).  So far I have not read any negative reviews of Alister McGrath’s new biography.

McGrath unlike previous biographers was not a friend, student or family of Lewis.  And unlike previous biographers McGrath had access to an enormous library of Lewis’ correspondence which has led to a new understanding of Lewis.

McGrath also is planning a second, more academic evaluation of Lewis, so this book is written as a popular biography.  If there is a weakness of the book it is that it does not go into as much depth as I would like it to about several areas.  His spiritual development as a young Christian, how Lewis related to his step sons both before and after their mother’s death, and his theology are all areas I would have liked more depth. (Bookwi.se Note: I read A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of CS Lewis by Devin Brown after writing this review and it is a good supplement in this areas.)

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