Adam Shields

Bruno, Chief of Police: A Novel of the French Countryside by Martin Walker

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Summary: A small town police chief in rural France must protect his community, in more ways than one.  

Seven years ago, my wife and I went to France to visit friends that live live there.  We loved France.  More than the wonder of Paris, which was incredible, we enjoyed time in the relatively small town that our friends lived in. Walking to get bread in the morning with gardens and old homes and churches on nearly every corner we felt why Europe and US are very different culturally.

Bruno feels very French.  He is interested in food and wine (and we hear quite a bit about that.)  But he is more interested in the people of his community.  This community has adopted him and he loves them.

Bruno is the police chief of a very small community in France.  There has been a vicious murder, not only the first murder in recent memory, but one that exposes some of the nasty undercurrents of the community.  Bruno has the job of not only solving the murder, but protecting the town from outsiders that have no interest in it.

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Theme Testing

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I am not much of a design guy.  I like to write my blog not tweak it.  So it has been over two years since I have had a major re-design of the blog.  A friend of mine is working on a new Theme design and needed beta testers.  So I offered to test it … Read more

The Maze Runner by James Dashner (Maze Runner #1)

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The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Summary: First in a dystopian series about a group of boys trapped in a maze.

When Thomas wakes up all he can remember is his name.  A group of teenage boys welcomes him to ‘the Glade’.

The Glade is a large open grassy area with high stone walls.  As Thomas asks questions he comes to understand that none of the boys can remember anything before the Glade.  Some have been there as long as 2 years.  The glade is in the center of a massive stone maze.  One that changes every night.

In the Maze the boys have created a functioning society.  And while there are always difficulties, this is not The Lord of the Flies.

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Our Common Prayer: A Field Guide to the Book of Common Prayer

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Our Common Prayer: A Field Guide to the Book of Common PrayerSummary: A guide to the parts and functions of the book of common prayer service (not really to using the book itself).

Over the past several years I have been paying much more attention to the resources of higher church, especially in the areas of the liturgy.  However, temperamentally and experientially I am still a clearly low church Christian.

Part of what I have been talking about with Spiritual Director has been exactly that.  I have been trying to get back into the practice of fixed hour prayer.  Several years ago, I was able to do that fairly regularly when my oldest niece was an infant (and I was the nanny.)  But then a second niece was born and the naps were no longer overlapping and fixed hour prayer went out the window.

Even before reading Alan Jacob’s Book of Common Prayer: a Biography or reading Susan Howatch’s Church of England series, I was interested in the Book of Common Prayer as a spiritual practice.

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Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century

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Reposting this review because Farewell is the Jan 8 Kindle Daily Deal and on sale for $1.99 (the audiobook is only $0.99 with purchase of the kindle book.)

Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth CenturyTakeaway: The actual workings of spy tradecraft is as odd as the fictional ones.

Farewell is the code name of one of the most important spy stories of the 20th century.  A Russian KGB agent, frustrated with his treatment by the KGB, turned over thousands of pages of documents to the French secret service (the FBI equivalent, not the CIA equivalent) and was perhaps more responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union than any other single person.

The story really is both incredible and fairly simple. Vladimir Ippolitovitch Vetrov, a talented athlete, a good student and a handsome young man is recruited to the KGB.  He is trained as a foreign operative and serves two terms outside of Russia.  But because of some of the problems of the KGB and some of Vetrov’s own problems he gets called back to Moscow and ends up as a technical analyst.

Frustrated by his lack of importance and the lack of respect he feels he is getting, he decides to become an informant and contact the French DST.  Working with a French secret service he is first given a handler (a businessman that is close, but not a spy) and then a single agent.  But it may have been the very lack of tradecraft that allows Vetrov to sneak out hugely important technical details of the Soviet infrastructure, military and spy systems.

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The Good and Beautiful Community by James Bryan Smith

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The Good and Beautiful Community: Following the Spirit, Extending Grace, Demonstrating Love by James Bryan Smith

Summary: Spiritual growth is not accidental, it is intentional and it needs to be intentional as part of a community.

The Good and Beautiful Community is the last book in a trilogy of books that started with The Good and Beautiful God and The Good and Beautiful Life.  These books together are intended to be a full year group study on discipleship.  Starting with God, then moving to individual character and concluding with community.  I read Good and Beautiful God nearly 2 years ago and have always intended to read the rest of the series.  Christianaudio.com offered me a copy of Good and Beautiful Community for review and I snatched it up.

The basic structure of each of these book is to talk about the false narratives that we as Christians tend to have around various issues.  This third book seemed a bit more disjointed than the first, but I think it is partially the nature of community.  Community is a broad topic and Smith covers the ways that community needs to come together to serve, reconcile, worship, disciple.  These topics are not always joined together in people’s minds, but for the purposes of this book, they are all primarily about the church, not the individual.

This is the fourth book of Smith’s I have read and each of them really draw me back to focusing on discipleship and spiritual growth.  I tend to enjoy discussion (and arguing in my head) issues of theology and church practice, but Smith rightly brings the focus back to growth.  If by our discussions and reading and coming together we are not moving toward greater love for God and his people, then our discussions or reading or gatherings may not be beneficial.

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Most Read Book Reviews in 2013

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   The God of the Mundane by Matt Redmond  Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism by Molly Worthen  The Fault in Our Stars by John Green      Holy is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present by Carolyn Weber  Divergent by Veronica Roth  137 Books in One Year: … Read more

The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan (Book 1 of the Kane Chronicles)

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Reposting this review because Red Pyramid is free on Kindle. I was not a huge fan, but I have heard from several who thought that I was too hard on the book and have finished the trilogy. Free is worth picking up, and kindle format is probably better than the audiobook.

The Red Pyramid (The Kane Chronicles, Book 1)Summary: A brother and sister must figure out a way to save their parents and the world from a vengeful Egyptian god.

I found this free on audiobook from my local library. I am listening with two purposes. One, I need some lighter fiction. I have been over-doing the theology and heavy stuff and if I am going to keep blogging I need to maintain an intellectual balance of books. Too much intellectual challenge is draining. There has to be time to process and relax. But I also have several friends who have children that are reading faster than they can keep up. They are good parents that want to read what their kids read and try to have conversations and discussions with their kids about books, but there is a point when kids and parents reading speeds start converging and kids often have more time to read than their parents. So I am trying to keep an eye out for good middle grade, early young adult books that I can recommend.

I really enjoyed the Percy Jackson series and was interested in a new take on mythology from Riordan. This is definitely a different take.  Instead of the gods of Greek mythology, these are the gods of Egyptian mythology.  Instead of being focused on children that are half human/half Greek god, these are more like possession by the Gods.  The subject matter is just more problematic and the books feel a bit darker, although not much.

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