Book Reviews

Summary: We have a way that we attached to romantic partners.  Finding a partner that is compatible with our attachment type makes those attachments more secure, longer lasting, and more fulfilling.  Oriented toward single adults more than couples.

I am fascinated by science books about human relationships and behavior.  One of the best I have read is Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me.  You can get the point by the title, and nearly two years after I read it, I still frequently bring it up in conversation.  Another interesting and more general book like this is Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

Book of this genre are best when they really are based in science, but they attempt to make the science real in lay person terms and ideas.  Mary Roach, who wrote Bonk, takes the tack of writing about the science through her own discovery.  She is a very present character in her books.  The authors of Mistakes Were Made were more traditional science writers.  They referenced studies and gave lots of examples but they were mostly writing from as academic narrators.

Some books get to science based or take a fairly simple idea and run it into the ground far past the attention spans of most readers (The Narcissism Epidemic I think fell into this trap.)  But ever since the original Freakenomics and some of Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell’s books became popular, this style of science/self-help/popular non-fiction came out, there have been many authors that are trying to find the secret to writing good books, that are actually useful and based in real science and understandable.

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Summary: A geologist is paid to survey Jamaica by a secret cabal of financiers that wants to take over the island and create their own country.  MI-5 enlists him to get to the bottom of the plot.

People familiar with the very popular Jason Bourne movies may be aware of the name Robert Ludlum.  He was the author of the original books.  He wrote 23 novels in his lifetime under a couple different pseudonyms and sold 300-500 million books in 33 languages.

I read the first three Bourne books a few years before the movies came out.  (The movies are very good, the books are very good, but they are only slightly related to one another in content.)

I knew the next Bourne movie was coming out soon so I decided to pick up another Ludlum book.  After the first three Bourne books all other Bourne books have been written by Eric Van Lustbader who licensed the characters. (Ludlum died in 2001 from injuries that he sustained in a fire.)

Ludlum likes to write about grand conspiracies, large corporations with secret agendas, shadowy spy agencies and other extremists.

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Summary: A former Irish military man is trying to escape his past by working as a bouncer at a seedy New York City club.  When a girl he likes ends up dead, his quiet life become much more messy.

I like to experiment with my reading.  My experiments lately have not been all that successful.

I am a fan of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books. And since I have finished the last of the Artemis Fowl books I thought I would explore Colfer’s first adult novel.

The first thing is that it feels like Colfer is trying to make up for having written young adult books all of his career by having the characters swear every two lines.  It is not completely outside the realm of possibility with these characters, but it feels forced and unnecessary.

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Takeaway: Prayer requires intention.

It has always seemed to me that the late 19th and early 20th century produced some of the best works on prayer.  EM Bounds, Harry Fosdick, RA Torrey, AW Tozer, Andrew Murry, Hudson Taylor and many others wrote some of the most read classics on prayer.

I have read a number of books on prayer from this era.  Many of them are quite good.  But many of them verge on moralism.  I do think there is something to sin separating us from God.  But it can go too far when the work of prayer depends upon our own work.  There has to be some partnership between us and the Holy Spirit in prayer.  But most of the time when I read descriptions of that partnership I am dissatisfied with the result.

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Summary: The follow up to Ender’s Game set right before the last chapter of Ender’s Game with ideas from the Shadow Series and before the Xenocide and later books.

Last week I was browsing through Audible.com for a new book and saw that Orson Scott Card had released a new book last week that tells the story of the first Formic War (Earth Unaware).  It is getting fairly mixed reviews right now.  But I will probably still get around to reading it soon.

That led me to looking around to see if there were others Orson Scott Card books that I have not read.  I found Ender in Exile in my library.  By description I did not remember reading it.  I remembered it within minutes of starting it.  But it was good so I re-read (re-listened?) to it.

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I listened to about two hours of both of these books on audio.  I just could not get into either one.  

I really want to watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy.  Sooner or later I will get to it. What I like about all of the reviews of the book is that people keep saying it is a slow spy novel about ideas more than action.  I tend to like books that are more about the ideas than the action.

But the price of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has been a bit high (now $12.99) and it is the fifth book in a series and the first four are not in kindle format.  (Yes it is the first of a trilogy within the larger series, but I still like to read books in order.)

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Takeaway: In this novelization of ancient Church history, the persecution of the church and the fight for orthodox christianity are made very real.

This year my theological reading topic has been the trinity.  I haven’t read nearly as much as I intended so far this year.  So when I ran across this book I picked it up to try and get back on track.

Eagle in Flight is about Athanasius, the 4th century bishop of Alexandria.  Athanasius is important to all the major streams of Christianity.  The Roman Catholic church considers him one of the four main ‘doctors of the church’.  Protestants point to his list of the books of the New Testament as one of the early confirmations of the New Testament canon.  Eastern Orthodox point to him as the ‘Father of Orthodoxy’.

He was a participant in the council where the Nicene Creed was written.  He was bishop during the several severe persecutions after Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of Rome.  And ended up spending 17 years over five different periods being exiled from Alexandria.  I was unaware how much in the years after Constantine that the Christian church was persecuted.

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