Book Reviews

Bookwi.se Favorite Books of 2014 – Fiction

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Favorite books of the year lists are the ultimate in subjectivity. Yes, there is a thing that is called a good book. But I tend to think that the book that lots of people like is worth picking over one that is technically excellent, but many did not actually like (The Magician trilogy is a good example.) And more variable than anything, books often speak (or not) to the place we are in life. One person’s amazing books isn’t amazing to the next person because they have experienced the world (or at least that particular time) differently.

So my list of books here are just the ones that at the end of the year, on the day I wrote out this list, the ones that I picked. (My list of non-fiction books will be tomorrow.) Also if you missed it, Bookwi.se Contributor Emily Flury posted her list of her favorite books and their companion movies yesterday.

The links below are to the full reviews

Lila: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson

I was really reluctant to read the companion book Gilead. It took me forever to actually pick it up. But when I did, I liked it. Gilead as an old preacher telling his life story to a young son that will never know him because was touching. But I thought it was a little slow and plodding.

Lila, telling the story from a different person’s perspective, was anything but plodding. It was a the best fictional story of grace that I have read. It was a bit old fashioned and definitely a literary book. But it was excellently written and well worth reading. I am planning on starting a second reading of it this week.

The Martian by Andy Weir

I have not been kept on the edge of my seat listening to an audiobook for a while. Although I am not completely sure why I was so entranced. It was well written, with characters I liked. I wanted to figure out how the astronaut was going to survive life on Mars, but I never really seriously thought he wasn’t going to survive. It wasn’t the ending that was in question, it was the process. As there was all kinds of great science and MacGuyver ingenuity going on.

A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle

There have been a few years when most of my favorite fiction books have been young adult. This year I read a lot less young adult books than in recent years and much of what I did read, I wasn’t really impressed with. But A Ring of Endless Light was proof to me that serious literary young adult fiction is not only possible, but important. One of the reasons I have been such a fan of John Green is that I just did not read really good young adult fiction that took the reader seriously when I was a teen. But A Ring of Endless Light is proof that high quality young adult fiction existed (whether I would have been prepared to read it as a teen or not.)

Bruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker (and the rest of the series 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Over the past couple years, I have been enjoying more mystery books. It was not a genre that I really liked much prior to the last few years. Being introduced to Dorothy Sayers, J Mark Bertrand, and Martin Walker have changed my view of the potential of mysteries. The Bruno series especially is enjoyable, but it is more about the characters and the setting than the mystery. Bruno is the chief of police (and only police officer) of a small french village. He sees his job as more about preventing crime and mediating between people than arresting people. Because of this he cares about the people and the people care about him, Walker creates a story that I want to read. Also I love all of the descriptions of French culture, food and wine. Every book in the series made me want to go visit France.

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Emily Flury’s 2014 Best of Books and their Movies

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The following is my list of the books and their movies that I enjoyed reading and watching the most this year. In looking back over my reviews for these books, I recall that I also had a lot of fun doing the background research for these books. Many of them had a rich history surrounding the book or the making of the movie, or there is simply a lot of chatter about the book and its movie to look over. The list is chronologically ordered according to when I reviewed them. Click through to the reviews to see them again. (Adam’s fiction list is tomorrow and non-fiction Wednesday).
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden 
Although the validity of the story has been brought into question by the geisha whose life the story is based on, both the book and its movie beautifully, tragically, and intriguingly describe what life might have been like for a woman in Japan during the early to mid 1900s. This title stands as a favorite because I was impressed to find that the book painted just as wonderful picture in my mind as the movie does.
Dr. Sleep by Stephen King 
As a fan of Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Nicholson, it is no surprise that I loved the book and movie, The Shining, which preceded this book. This book, which is unique on my list because it doesn’t have a movie associated with it yet, was amazingly just as solid as the book that came before it. In a world where the majority of sequels fall flat or are an excuse for the writer/director to get another money grab, this book was awesome in the fact that it could easily stand-alone and still be great. I guarantee that this book will be made into a movie.
Howl’s Moving Castle by Dianna Wynne Jones 
My husband introduced me to Japanese animated films, specifically Studio Ghibli movies, and I have to say that, for the most part, they do not disappoint. I was curious to see if the book that Howl’s Moving Castle was based on is as fun to listen to as the movie is to watch. While the book was different from the movie, they are both great in their own ways. And, those differences don’t detract from each other but they add to each other’s greatness. I was also excited to discover that this book and its movie would be a great way to get a younger listener interested in literature.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote 
This title comes with a great deal of nostalgia for me as it is one of my mother’s favorites and I even listened to the movie’s soundtrack on record a bunch growing up. I really enjoyed listening to this book because it was narrated by the great Michael C. Hall, who starred in Dexter, a favorite show of ours. What most surprised me was how rich of a back-story I discovered when I dug into the life of the author of this short and sweet story. The research led me to want to watch the movie, Capote, which is based on Truman’s life and was pretty amazing in and of itself.

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The Zimzum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage by Rob and Kristen Bell

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Summary: A decent (quick) book on the Christian understanding of marriage without a lot of Christian language.

I generally don’t like reviewing books that have a lot of controversy. So I have not reviewed many of Rob Bell’s books (but I liked Velvet Elvis and Sex God). I went to college with Rob and Kristen (they were a year in front of me) so I have paid attention to Rob’s ministry. (I didn’t really know Kristen, but Rob is one of those people that it is hard not to know who he was at college.)

I originally did not have any interest in picking up The Zimzum of Love. There are a ton of marriage books being jointly written by well known pastor couples recently. I tend to avoid book trends because they are often following the trend, not writing good books.

Books and Culture’s parody review of Zimzum of Love did not help my desire to read the book, although I don’t think that the parody was all that helpful and after reading the book I didn’t think it was all that accurate either. (Although it does have a few good points.)

Then I read Richard Beck’s review on his blog Experimental Theology (I am a regular reader). As you might expect, it is like Beck and Jason Hood (the Books and Culture reviewer) had read two very different books. But mostly it felt like Hood was taking issue with Rob as a persona than really dealing with the book as a book.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters and Papers from Prison”: A Biography by Martin Marty

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Summary: The history of how and why this Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison spread so widely and became so influential.

At this point I have read far more about Bonhoeffer than by Bonhoeffer. That is not to say I haven’t read Bonhoeffer, but to say I have read a lot about Bonhoeffer, especially over the past several years since writing on him seems to have exploded.

I read Letters and Papers from Prison in college soon after I first read Cost of Discipleship and somewhat before I read Love Letters from Cell 92.

It is actually the now out of print Love Letters from Cell 92 that really humanized Bonhoeffer for me and moved him from abstract theologian to real live human person. About the same time as I was reading Love Letters from Cell 92, I started University of Chicago Divinity School and had Martin Marty as a professor.

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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Movie and Audiobook Review)

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To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic and well-beloved fiction novel by Harper Lee.  The novel is from the perspective of a young girl, Scout, growing up in a small town in Alabama during the 1930s.  Aside from experiencing some of the usual adventures of a small child during that time, Scout and her brother Jem must navigate life as their father, Atticus, defends a black man who has been falsely accused of raping a white woman. Seen in some way as a story within a story, the trial shows the true character of Atticus and how some bravery and standing up for one’s beliefs and dignity really does matter.

To Kill a Mockingbird is not a perfect novel but it is about as good as it can get.  It is my impression that critics of the novel had to really search for problems with the novel.  Apart from the social lessons to be learned from the novel, the true beauty of the novel is how wonderfully descriptive and visual Harper Lee makes it.  I would credit this aspect in part to the fact that many of the characters and the events in the novel are autobiographical. It is a lot easier to be descriptive about people you know and events that you experienced. I am not sure whether I read the novel or saw the movie first, but, when reading the book this time, I would have sworn that some of the scenes from the book had made it into the movie that didn’t because they left such a strong visual impression when reading them. This might be like the chicken and the egg conundrum where the question is was the book so well-written that it was easy to visualize the scenes as if they were a part of the movie, or were the actors in the movie so adept at portraying the characters of the book that it made it easy for me to visualize them in the scenes from the book.

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Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense by Francis Spufford

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Summary: Maybe, at least for some, the right apologetic is not about logic, but emotion and experience.

It would be hard to over emphasize how many people I respect have been fans of this book. It has been reviewed (and I think generally reviewed accurately) in Books and Culture (long), Christianity Today (short), the New York Times, the Telegraph and the Gospel Coalition (critical but appreciative). (Although not everyone likes it.)

The central idea of the book is that given our culture (and Spufford is writing to a secular UK here, not primarily to an Evangelical US) the idea that we should try to prove our Christianity through logic or proof is the wrong move.

As Alan Jacobs says in the opening of his review, apologetics should be more concerned with rhetoric than dialectical tasks, in other words, follow the interest of the listener, not your own desire to be right.

So Spufford is concentrating here on why, for him, Christianity can be an emotionally right choice, even if he can’t prove it scientifically or logically as many of the New Atheists are challenging Christians to do (or vice versa).

Spufford starts with trying to find the shared belief that we all have about this life. That central shared idea is HPtFtU, which stands for the Human Propensity to F*ck things Up (and he abbreviated most of the time.) Christians call this sin, but I think Spufford is right that calling it the HPtFtU feels more accurate. We can debate the reality or transmission method of original sin, but pretty much no one can debate that HPtFtU is real. We all have been a part of it and we all have seen others participate in it.

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Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II by George Weigel

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Takeaway: Regardless of whether you are Protestant or Catholic, John Paul II was important.

Last year, I picked up Witness to Hope for Kindle when it was on sale. But the size and time commitment kept me from actually reading it. As much as I would like this blog to not influence my reading, I often don’t pick up long books because of my attempt to keep up, with assistance from several regular contributors, a 5 review a week schedule.

So, I do not often make room for a biography that clocks in at more than 1000 pages. At the same time, I tend to hate abridged audiobooks. If it was important enough to put in the book initially, it was probably important enough to read later.

But when I noticed that the audiobook of Witness to Hope was in the Scribd audiobook library, even though it is abridged, I picked it up.

The actual content is just under half of the original book. And it feels like an abridgment. The biggest problem with the abridgment is that it focuses too much on the political life of John Paul II as Pope and not enough on the spiritual influence. Spiritual is undoubtedly there, but when you compare the time devoted, it seems less important.

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Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You by John Ortberg

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Summary: It is not a violation of faith in Christ’s work, to pay attention to our own soul.

Lately I have been increasingly frustrated with Christian Living books. Particularly their introductions. I think I first noticed this strongly with James Bryan Smith’s The Good and Beautiful Life, but I have noticed the problem with a number of other books as well.

Maybe it is my problem and not one else need pay attention. But if I have to diagnose a more general problem, it is that for some reason Evangelicals seem to need to over compensate in their introductions for the general feedback that they think they are going to hear. And worse that overcompensation seems to be particularly focused on clichés. The books that are am frustrated with often have some really good content, once I get past the general introductions. But several times I have been so frustrated with the cliche-ridden introductions that I have had to force myself past them.

Soul Keeping has this problem. I really love that John Ortberg is writing a book that is as much about a tribute to the work of Dallas Willard in his life as it is about soul keeping as a subject. But honestly, I don’t need to be convinced that it is important to think about and work on my own spiritual health. I have been seeing a spiritual direction for over a year now. I read Christian books incessantly. I go to church regularly and while far from perfect, I really do think I am paying attention to my spiritual life for a lot of good reason. And the primary reason I don’t need to hear about the importance of spiritual care is that I grew up as an Evangelical (as would most of the readers).

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A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor’s Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace by Brian Zahnd

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Takeaway: Very few take Jesus seriously when he about having a different type of kingdom.

As American Christians have started looking again at their eschatology (view of the end times) and moving away from dispensationalism, more Christians are starting to see that the implications of their eschatology affect many areas of their Christian life.

For instance, a number of Christians have adopted a more nuanced position on ecological issues after rejecting the traditional Dispensational idea that the physical earth was simply waiting to be destroyed as punishment for the sins of the world.  So if the earth was not condemned, then God’s command to be stewards of the earth in Genesis might still be a present command.

Brian Zahnd began re-evaluating his support of war (after originally supporting the first Gulf war and then the wars after 9/11) in response to a new look at Jesus’ words in the Gospels.  Repeatedly throughout the book, in one way or another, Zahnd asks, “What if Jesus really meant what he said.”

For Christians that really try to take scripture seriously, this is a deeply disturbing question.  It is hard not to think that Zahnd has a real point if you have heard just a few sermons from the Sermon on the Mount.  We tend to spiritualize the Sermon on the Mount, not put it into practice.

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The Butterfly and the Stone by Dan Mayhew

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I am reposting this 2011 review because the Kindle edition is $2.99.
The Butterfly and the StoneSummary: Whether you have a prodigal child, were a prodigal child or know a prodigal child, this books on the heart break of loving a prodigal and what it teaches us about God loving us is a must read.

Right up front I have to disclose that I know Dan Mayhew (the author) and his wife Jody.  I have been aware of the roots of what this book is talking about for the past decade or so since I first met them.  I have not ever met their son, but I have frequently prayed for him and the family.

So maybe I am tainted in my opinion, but the reality of a parent writing about their love of a child, and the corresponding pain of watching a child struggle through bad decisions, addiction, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (after serving in Iraq), homelessness, suicide attempts, etc., is powerful stuff.

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