Book Reviews

Night by Elie Wiesel

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Takeaway: A book everyone should read to remind us that suffering is not a reality show or an abstract discussion.

I have never read any of Elie Wiesel‘s books. I have known of him and that he was a Nobel Prize winner and writer, but not a lot more. I ran across his first book, Night, when looking for audiobooks on Overdrive. (Overdrive is a library system that allows you to check out ebooks or audiobooks over the internet just like your regular library books.)

I ran across it months ago and kept putting it off. I knew it was about the holocaust and I just did not want to read a depressing story.  Finally, I decided to go ahead and start it. I was transfixed. I listened in less than 24 hours.

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The One by Kiera Cass (The Selection #3)

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Takeaway: Beautiful dresses on the cover are not enough to carry a trilogy.

The best summary of the third book is this paraphrase of a conversation that felt like it happened about five times in the book. “œHow can I say “˜I love you’ if you have all of these other girls.” “œWell how can I dismiss all of these other girls if you won’t tell me that you love me.”

The Selection trilogy is a cross between the Hunger Games and the Bachelor. In a dystopian future, the Prince must choose a wife from among a selection of citizens. The first book in the trilogy was pretty dismissible. The story was fairly flat while entirely too much “˜I am not good enough’ internal dialogue.

But because the second book was at my library on audiobook, I went ahead and read the second, the Elite. The characters were much better fleshed out and the world suddenly was more than a dystopian movie set.

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Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God by John Piper

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Reposting my earlier review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $0.99.
Think by John PiperSummary: An encouragement to the church from the heart of a pastor to properly value the role of thinking in our Christian faith.

“This book is a plea to embrace serious thinking as a means of loving God and people. It is a plea to reject either-or thinking when it comes to head and heart, thinking and feeling, reason and faith, theology and doxology, mental labor and the ministry of love”

As I continue on my attempt to buy no more than one book a month for at least the first six months of this year, I am going back to a lot of old Christianaudio.com free books of the month that I picked up when they were free, but did not listen to at the time.

In the case of Think by John Piper, I am pretty sure that I picked up the audiobook because I respect John Piper.  And I chose not to listen to it, because I get frustrated every time I read John Piper.  I respect Piper because his heart for ministry, and because of his desire to encourage and edify the church. I get frustrated with Piper because it seems he has little imagination to see how anyone can believe something other than what he believes.

This books proved my previous experience yet again.  Piper is writing this book to encourage the church to think more deeply, so that we can love the Lord better and more thoroughly and also love others.  In many ways a book about why the reader should think more is like Tony Reinke’s book about why you should read more.  Anyone that is going to pick it up, probably already agrees with the premise.

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Prototype: What Happens When You Discover You’re More Like Jesus Than You Think? by Jonathan Martin

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Takeaway: Jesus’ life on earth was for more than just taking us to heaven.

Every once in a while I am truly surprised by a book. I have read several blog posts by Jonathan Martin (he is not currently blogging). And I generally have agreed with with what I read, especially when he was taking an uncomfortable position. So I was interested in reading his book, but did not really know much about him and assumed it would be another, not too much different from all the rest of Christian living books.

Prototype is different, primarily because of the theologically rich content, with virtually zero theological language, and no dumbing down. A lot of the great books that I read I am uncomfortable recommending to many because the language is too theological or the content is too dense to understand without some major background in theology or philosophy. Or if the book is intentionally trying to reach the masses, it is dumbed down and condescending. Prototype has all of the positives of theologically rich text, with none of the negatives of condescension, dumbing down or complicated theological language.

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Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill

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Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and HomosexualityTakeaway: Sometimes not having something really allows you to look and understand.

One of the things I remember from a grad class about understanding diversity is that often people do not focus on their identity as “_____” until they are a minority in that area.  So people often do not think about their maleness, until they are in a class of all women.  They do not think about their Appalachia roots until they live in New York City.

Wesley Hill has a better understanding of the purpose and use of sex from a Christian perspective than most Christian books on sex or marriage that I have read.  I think it is in part because of his struggle to understand sexuality as a consciously gay (and celibate) Evangelical.

There are three things that this book really gets right.  One it is very consciously personal.  About half of the book recounts Hill’s struggle to understand his sexuality and his decision about why he feels that the only way he can be authentically Christian and still true to himself is to be celibate.  The second thing that he gets right is that he does not keep it personal.  He tracks two others Christians that also were both gay and celibate (Henri Nouwen and Gerald Manley Hopkins).  Hill is still young, as a 20 something he does not have the life experience to discuss celibacy as a long term lifestyle and I think he wisely brings in the experience of two now deceased men.  The picture of these men is not all that pretty, they lived tortured and lonely lives, but that is also part of what Hill will live as well if he continues to choose a celibate life.  The third thing that I really appreciate is a view of sexuality as something that is not a ‘right’.  And he views all of life as a possible means of teaching us to be like Christ.  This connectedness of life to Christ is important to how he understands God.  God is not a cosmic killjoy that says he can’t have sex out of meanness, but instead God has created a world that is fallen and that God uses the fallenness to mold us into the people he (God) wants us to be.

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The Devil’s Cave by Martin Walker (Bruno, Chief of Police #5)

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Summary: A scandalous death and the threat of devil worship shake up the quiet village of St Denis.

Maybe it is hard to call St Denis quiet at this point. It is a small French village of about 3000 people.  But in roughly a year it has had several murders, an international summit, two arsons, and a human trafficking smuggling organization busted. Not bad for a country police officer.

This book is a bit different. The book opens with a naked woman’s dead body floating down the river in a small boat. There are signs that she has participated in a Black Mass meant to call to Satan to get him to do their bidding. This is based on the real black mass that was performed for Madame de Montespan in order to create a love potion to force King Louis XIV to love her.

As can be expected, nothing is as simple as it seems. There is international arms deals, porn movies, murder, prostitution and other crimes. The real mystery of the story is about the identification of the characters more than anything else. Once everyone gets identified, then the rest of the mystery is fairly easy to solve.

As with some other series books, there is beginning to be a “˜red shirt’ problem in the series. As is joked about in Star Trek, there always had to be a “˜red shirt’ character that was a part of the away teams so that someone could be hurt or killed without harming the main set of characters. And in this series, new characters seem to be introduced primarily to be either victims, criminals or red herrings.

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The Resistance Man by Martin Walker (Bruno, Chief of Police #6)

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Takeaway: History and heritage matter.

One of the nice features of the Bruno, Chief of Police series is the mixing in of real history, culture and geography along with the fiction.

In this case, Walker is mixing two pieces of real history into the mystery.

The first is the largest train robbery in history. In 1944, the French resistance stole what would be the rough equivalent of about $400 million dollars (or to the comparisons in the book, 5 times the total education budget of France that year or 5% of the total French national budget.)

One of the last resistance fighters still alive in St Denis (and one of the members of that train robbery) died. Because he died with two of the bills from the train robbery in his hand, Bruno starts investigating his connection.

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A Grief Observed by CS Lewis

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a grief observed cover imageTakeaway: An image of what grief may be like.

A Grief Observed is one of those books that I have felt like I needed to read but have not wanted to read. I have not suffered a great loss, whether as a parent, spouse, or child. And so reading about another’s loss seems somehow voyeuristic or at least intruding.

But I bought the Kindle edition a few weeks ago when it was on sale, and I ended up listening to the audiobook (read by Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham) because it was part of the Scribd subscription library.

After reading the disappointing Lunch With Lewis, I wanted to read Lewis himself.

A Grief Observed is short, only 68 pages on Kindle and less than 2 hours of audio, including introductions from both Madeleine L’Engle and Douglas Gresham.

In the text, Lewis says he limited himself to four notebooks that he found around the house because if he did not arbitrarily have a limit, there would be no limit to the end of grief (and he wasn’t going to go out and buy more to prolong his writing).

I can see why so many have found this book so comforting while others do not. Lewis is particular. He honestly cries out to God and laments but also looks inside himself for the root and reality of his grief (and hope.) He is also intellectual and deals with the intellectual issues around faith and grief that will not apply to many potential readers.

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An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor

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Summary: Finding spiritual practices for those that have become dead to spiritual practices.

One of the problems for me in loving Amazon and enjoying book reviews, is that there is always five recommendations for every book that I actually read. The more I read, the more I see that I want to read. One of those authors that has been on my radar for a while is Barbara Brown Taylor. A number of my “˜reading friends’ rate her very highly.

Barbara Brown Taylor is a former Episcopal priest, turned professor. It is hard not compare her writing style and voice to Anne Lamott. They both are around the same age, female, and disgruntled with a church that they still feel drawn to and love in spite of themselves. Their memoir-y writing styles are not completely different.

An Altar in the World is semi-autobiographical, but it is less memoir than recounting what it is like to find spiritual practices outside the church that connect us with God. Parts of this were very good. But parts of it just seemed a stretch for me. I have been interested in finding God through the spiritual practices within the church, the historic ones that have not been a part of my Christian journey. Mostly this book is about finding God in the every day and ordinary.

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