Adam Shields

Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler (Patternist #2)

October 4, 2026October 7, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: The subject of Doro’s breeding program, after several thousand years, comes of age.

The first book in this series, Wild Seed, was more of a prequel than the first book in the series.

Doro is some type of mutant person that was born about 4000 years ago. He accidentally discovered that he could leave one body and take over another, giving him a type of immortality. Eventually he started a breeding program to create a people for himself. And he took on a type of God role for them. This breeding program both gives him some type of purpose (this book really discloses the purpose of the program) and a ready source of bodies to take over.

This book opens in the 1970s (roughly current time period because it was written in 1977), jumping more than 100 years from the end of Wild Seed (which moved about 300 years during the book.) Doro finds Mary, a young abused girl, and gives her to Anyanwu (now called Emma) to care for and raise.

As Mary gets older and ‘transitions’ to her full powers, she is more like Doro than any other of his previous “˜children’. Mary creates “˜patterns’ (the source of the series name) and draws people under her power.

Embracing Obscurity: Becoming Nothing in Light of God’s Everything

October 5, 2026October 4, 2014 by Adam Shields

Takeaway: Obscurity, humility, smallness. All undervalued and difficult disciplines in a world of individualism, social media and mixed messages.

I ran across the very interesting book Embracing Obscurity on Tim Challies’ blog. His review gave a bit of the back story and resulted in the book being put on sale for a couple weeks at Amazon.

An anonymous author decided to write a book about humility. The author realized that writing a book about humility was in itself an un-humble activity so he (and I think it is pretty clearly a he) decided to write and publish a book secretly. Even his family is unaware.

Out of Town Again

October 1, 2014 by Adam Shields

Roughly once a year, a group of my guy friends from college go on a trip together. We have been doing this since 1995 and this is our 21st trip. (We are going backpacking in Colorado this year.) It is hard to schedule six guys that now live in four different countries (including the US), … Read more

A House Like a Lotus by Madeleine L’Engle

July 15, 2026October 1, 2014 by Adam Shields

Takeaway: On today’s after school special, Polly has to deal with serious things.

I love Madeleine L’Engle’s writing. She takes young adults seriously, she writes about serious issues but she makes her characters real. So I pick up every one of L’Engle’s books when they come up for sale and I intentionally don’t read anything about them prior to reading the book.

This is the third book in the Polly O’Keefe series. Polly is the daughter of Meg and Calvin from the Wrinkle in Time series. And Zachary Gray from the Austin series is also a significant character in this book.

In the time line this book is set just after A Ring of Endless Light which I read earlier this year and about a year or so before An Acceptable Time which I read a couple years ago.

(There are spoilers in this review, but this is a book that cannot be discussed without spoilers.)

Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood by Michael Lewis

October 4, 2026September 29, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: Author Michael Lewis (The Big Short, Money Ball, The Blind Side) gives his account of the new world of fatherhood.

Michael Lewis is one of those authors I have been meaning to read, but I am tired of reading about economics and I have never liked sports. So as I was looking around for something to read, I stumbled across this in the KindleUnlimited collection.

Lewis is giving his account of the changing of the meaning of fatherhood. It is no longer “˜Father Knows Best’ but hopefully is it moving past “˜father as convenient idiot’ as well. There is a huge social shift over the past couple generations. The social science research has shown a huge shift in the number of hours that fathers have increased in house work and child care over the past 50 years.

But still there is a stereotype of the distant and/or idiot Dad. Lewis both feeds into and helps break this stereotype. He is an active Dad that cares for his kids. He also highlights some of the stupid (but real) things that Dads do.

On the positive side, he communicates well the inability of fathers to replace mothers. It just isn’t possible. Men can’t birth children or breast feed. So Dads do what they can, they care for the older children, change diapers, comfort Moms.

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

October 4, 2026September 25, 2014 by Adam Shields

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.

Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott

July 15, 2026September 21, 2014 by Adam Shields

Reposting my 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.75
Summary: 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.

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

July 16, 2026September 19, 2014 by Adam Shields

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.

Dad is Fat by Jim Gaffigan

July 15, 2026September 18, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: 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.

A Christian Survival Guide by Ed Cyzewski

July 15, 2026September 16, 2014 by Adam Shields

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.