Adam Shields

Livrada: e-book gift cards for your Kindle or Nook

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I love ebooks.  I primarily read digital formats.  But there are a couple of things I miss about physical books.  One of them is the ability to give books to friends and family.  Of course you can give a Amazon or Barnes and Noble gift card.  Or you can ‘gift’ books using an email address on Amazon.

Livrada e-book gift cardsBut Livrada has new idea.  They are physical gift cards that are for a specific book that can be redeemed for either Amazon Kindle or Nook books.

Right now they are exclusively sold at Target in the electronics section near ebook readers.

This is a good idea.  The cards have the cover of the book and the back has the description similar to the back cover of a paperback.

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Kindle 3G Monthly Data Cap

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Cover of "Kindle Wireless Reading Device,...
Cover via Amazon

One of the most unused, but nice features of the Kindle with Keyboard 3G is that it has web access.  Web access on a Kindle is not easy.  It is fairly slow, static, cannot handle modern web standards well.

But it is free, and it works almost anywhere in the world.  My sister-in-law brought her kindle to Kenya last year and was able to send us messages via twitter from out in the middle of no where.

But there are a few people that have really tried to break the system.  The Kindle is fairly hackable.  A few people have even tethered their computers to their kindle to try to obtain free internet access.

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Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

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Ender in ExileSummary: 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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Two Books I Did Not Like

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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.  

The Russia House (Dramatized) | [John le Carré]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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Eagle in Flight: The Life of Athanasius, The Apostle of the Trinity by Allienne Becker

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Eagle in Flight: The Life of Athanasius, the Apostle of the TrinityTakeaway: 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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Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way by Shauna Niequist

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Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard WayTakeaway: Life that is all good, is not life.  Real life is bittersweet.

About two years ago I received a promotional copy of Bittersweet and Cold Tangerines from Catalyst.  I kept them for a while, but eventually gave them away unread.

Last month I picked up the audiobook of Bittersweet on a whim.  My earlier estimate that it was primarily written with women in mind was not completely off.  There is a lot of discussion about having babies, miscarriage, friendship among women, cooking meals, being a mom and mentor.

But this is not a book just for women.  I have read many books intended just for women and this one speaks about being a woman because Shauna Niequist is a woman.

Bittersweet is one of those collections of essays/memoirs/thoughts on life books that is beautifully written.  She knows how to put words together to evoke the images and feelings she wants.  I am not a push over and I rarely tear up at movies and even less at books.  But there were a couple of times that I was very close.

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Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card

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PathfinderSummary: A very special boy can see the paths of everything that has ever lived.  And he is not just any boy.  But he does not know that yet.

Orson Scott Card is both blessed and cursed with being able to write books about very gifted children better than anyone I know.  It is a blessing because with few exceptions his books are very good.

The negative is that his stories are reminiscent of each other, even when they have different settings and genres.  Pathfinder is more fantasy (at least in the first book) than science fiction or dystopian.  There are two storylines that do not quite merge in this book.  I assume that we will learn more in future books.

What I think is happening is that a colony ship from Earth (the first one) had something unexpected happen when they tried to move through a fold in space.  Instead of jumping something odd happened. We really do not know for sure what happened through most of the book.

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Spycatcher by Matthew Dunn

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Spycatcher (Spycatcher Novel #1)Summary: A super spy saves the United States from a really bad terrorist.

Spy novels, with very few exceptions, have the same basic story line.  There are bad guys (modern spy novels it is usually either China or Islamic terrorists, old spy novels it is the Soviet Union or other Eastern Block countries).

The spy does a lot of bad things, but he (and it is usually he) feels bad about them, wants to quit but has to keep doing the spy things to keep the world safe because no one else can do the job as well as he can.

There are twists.  One of the good guys is actually a bad guy, one of the bad guys is actually a good guy, or something like that.

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Grave Peril (Dresden Files #3) by Jim Butcher

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Grave Peril: Book three of The Dresden FilesSummary: Dresden and a ‘Righteous man’ fight the latest set of nasties in order to protect Chicago from vampires, ghosts and more.

It is always interesting to me that once I start working on a reading project, suddenly books that I thought would have no connection to the project get connected.  In this case, Harry Dresden, the only wizard in Chicago, has started regularly working with Michael.  A righteous man that has been chosen as The Fist of God.

Dresden explains to another character that Michael’s power is because Michael is a righteous man.  His faith in God and simple, humble righteousness have a power that Dresden as a hard working wizard doesn’t have access to.

Throughout the book God’s power is present, not as magic, but a protective force for the innocent and righteous.  Of course, Michael and his family and friends are Catholic.  The books is set in Chicago, a very Catholic city, but more important, the ritual and rites of the Catholic church lend themselves to being written about like this.

The basic story of this book is that something or someone has been stirring up the divide between the real world and the NeverNever (the spirit world).  So Harry and Michael keep running around stopping Ghosts and demons and other nasty things from hurting or killing people.

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