Adam Shields

Takeaway: History is important.

I do not need to be convinced that history is important.  It is a lesson that I have understood well and in spite of the fact that personally I don’t always learn from my history, I do want to pay attention to our national history.

It is amazing to me how often that not only average people get history wrong, and therefore base ideas or actions on incorrect data, but how often influential and powerful people get many of the same issues wrong.  People that if they don’t know better themselves, should have someone around them that can correct their ignorance.

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Note: Fifty Shades Darker is a sexually explicit book. Please be aware of that before purchase

Summary: Christian Grey and Ana Steele separated at the end of the last book.  They are in love, but can they be together?

I know am stepping out on a limb talking about the Fifty Shades series as a Christian.  I know there are many that will (and should) stay away from the books.  Here is a good blog post about why this blogger will not read them (I don’t entirely agree, but she raises some good points.)

(Note some plot spoilers if you have not read the first book.)  At the end of the first book, Ana decided that she could not deal with Christian’s anger and emotional hostility that he exhibited through BDSM and she left him.  I am sure it is not surprising that fairly quickly into the second book they reunite.

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Note: Fifty Shades of Grey is a sexually explicit book.  Please be aware of that before purchase

Takeaway: In spite of the explicit sex, this relatively traditional romance novel is surprisingly insightful into human behavior.

Fifty Shades of Grey (and the following two books) are a publishing wonder. Originally published by a small press last year, it was a word of mouth and mostly illegal digital copies that lead to the books being re-released by a larger publisher in April.  In the last six weeks, the books have sold over 10 million copies in the US.  That puts with other books like Catch-22, Lovely Bones, and Wrinkle in Time.

The difference is that Fifty Shades of Grey is very sexually explicit and includes graphic descriptions of bondage and S&M.  There is a line of thought that suggests that romance novels are the female version of porn.  I do not agree with that line of thought but the popularity of Fifty Shades will likely rekindle that discussion, especially among Christians.

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Over the last couple months, I have been reading much more fiction than I have in recent years.  I am not sure if I am just burned out with non-fiction or I have may internal changes in my approach to reading or something else.  But the result is that I have expanded my reach into previously unexplored areas of fiction.

While I traditionally like young adult literature, I have read virtually no Christian young adult fiction outside of a few classics.  A friend of mine recommended this to me a while ago and I finally got around to reading over the weekend.

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Takeaway: The Bible was written to people very distant from us.  

Last year I undertook a project of reading about how to understand, interpret and think about scripture.  I read a number of books.  (Here is a summary post.)  However, this little book, just under 70 pages, suggests many of the same ideas that the hundreds of pages that I read last year did.

If you want to think about how to understand scripture, how to read it on your own and how think about translation and culture issues, this is a good introduction.  It is not perfect, I don’t agree with every word, but it has a lot of good advice and clearly presents many of the issues.

David Ker is a bible teacher in a seminary in Mozambique and a bible translator with Wycliffe Bible Translators.  He has the background.  This book is an edited form of a group of blog posts. So there is a number of topics, but they are dealt with in relatively short sections.  This is a book you can easily read in 60 to 90 minutes.

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Summary: Tris and Four continue to have a rocky relationship and continue to try and figure out why being Divergent, like they are, is such a threat to society.

Dystopian literature has a pretty specific set of themes and settings.  The rise of new young adult dystopian is a fad that will fade eventually.  But there will be several sets of books that I think will continue to be popular after the fad has passed.   Most visible is the Hunger Games series.  They have sold a gazillion copies and there is a movie.  I like Hunger Games have read them (reviews below).

A second series that I think will probably stick around for a while is the Divergent Series.  It is a trilogy and the third book is not scheduled to come out until Fall 2013.  So I cannot give it a final opinion, but I have enjoyed the first two.

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Takeaway: Everything we do changes our brains.  The repetitive action of computer and internet work is very effective at changing our brains.  This has implications for everything.

The Shallows is not a new book.  It has been out for about two years and many people, much smarter than I have had their take at it.  My short review, Carr has lots of good points, which tend to be lost amidst his hyperbole and cherry picked stats.

At the center of this argument is that people are reading books less. And he has some statistics from the Bureau of Labor to show this.  But as I talked about on this blog the National Endowment for the Arts study shows the largest increase in reading in decades (in all types of reading except poetry).  Right off the bat, this severely undercuts his argument.  The Library of Congress study came out after the book, so I don’t blame him for not using it.  But even if it had come out I think he would have disputed it.  Because in that study a novel is counted as reading a novel no matter what format you read it in.  But Carr does not believe that.

“An ebook is no more related to a book than an online newspaper is related to a print newspaper.” (By which, he means that they are not hardly related at all in the context of the quote.)

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