Book Reviews

Summary: Bruno looks into a shady community market and stumbles on a series of international crimes.

More than anything else, this series of books leads me to want to visit rural France and eat lots of French food and drink wine. I have friends that live in France and about 8 years ago we went to go visit them. They live in a community that is probably not too different from the setting of this book (although north of Paris and not in the regional setting of the book.)

Black Diamond’s food discussion revolves around Truffles. When I hear truffles I always think of the chocolate variety and not the expensive fungus that is a delicacy in French food. Bruno when he moved to St Denis and built his home started hunting truffles and planted the Oak trees and doing the other work to start his own truffles. Though his friend, who everyone calls ‘The Baron’, Bruno meets a local truffle expert who helps train Bruno’s dog to search for truffles and helps Bruno to learn about the market and the beauty of truffles. But when a local truffle exchange market seems to be corrupted, Bruno is brought in to investigate.

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Summary: An arson on a remote (and illegal) genetically modified research farm leads to a crisis. And it might be related to a potential new investment by a large winemaker. Bruno as chief of police and lover of his small town seeks to preserve the community.

Martin Walker has created a small French village and a cast of characters that feel to me like a French version of Wendell Berry’s fiction, but with a modern thriller twist.

The Dark Vineyard is the second in the series and included all that I loved about the first. It is as much about the setting and the long descriptions of life in the French countryside as it is about the mystery. And that is what most of the complaints are about in the Amazon reviews.

This is not a fast book. But it is a delicious one, both in literary description and its description of all of the food and wine consumed. It is a book that seems to have been written with the slow food movement in mind.

Christians followers of the “˜slow church’ movement or those that are rediscovering the parish concept might also enjoy this series as an illustration of the value of slowing down and valuing the local.

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Summary: A guide for giving and receiving Spiritual Direction.

I have been interesting the concept of spiritual direction for several months now.  As with many things I need to read through a number of books and spend a lot of time thinking through things before I am really ready to move further.  So I still have not actually found a spiritual director yet. (I have been going to a spiritual director for about a year now.)

But I am getting closer to understanding what Spiritual Direction is all about.  For David Benner, spiritual direction is mostly about prayer.  The Spiritual Director is praying for and helping the person receiving the spiritual direction to pray and connect more fully to God.

Benner is a counselor.  So he spends some time differentiating Spiritual Direction from counseling.

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Halloween, the season of creepy monsters and cavities, is also the perfect time to curl up with a good book. Whether you like to be scared stiff by your reading material or prefer a romantic ghost story instead, the literary world contains ghouls and goblins galore if you know where to look. From classic tales of the macabre to modern supernatural thrillers, a good Halloween book offers both tricks and treats. Celebrate the holiday with some of the spooky and supernatural titles mentioned here.

Horns by Joe Hill

Recently adapted for a UK movie starring Daniel Radcliffe, this supernatural grindhouse thriller follows Ignatius Parrish in an unpredictable and suspenseful battle for his own soul. Ig’s small town reputation catches up to him in a unexpected way the morning he wakes up from a night of heavy drinking to find a pair of unmistakably demonic horns growing from his skull. Written by the son of Stephen King, this thriller has dynamic pacing and a climax that will leave you gripping the edge of your seat.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

This intensely poetic and nostalgic novel from the mind of fantasy genius Ray Bradbury focuses on one autumn in the lives of two twelve year old boys. Set in the year that “œCooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show” visits their small American town, it follows the two boys, one of their fathers, and the mysterious carnival leader – a haunting presence known as “œMr. Dark.” Bradbury’s title comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, uttered by a witch as she completes her spell. This novel holds secrets and terrors for the protagonists and for all readers who possess the kind of romantic Halloween spirit that still inspires dreams of running away with the circus.

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Reposting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale today only for $1.99

Brandon Sanderson develops a new magic system for each fictional world he crafts–and this steampunk young adult novel, set in alternate (yet strangely reminiscent) history of the US, is no exception. And yet… A magic system of lines written on the ground in chalk, where the monsters that threaten to eat you alive are actually two-dimensional, hand-drawn creatures? It’s weird, sounds kind of boring on the surface, and is actually pretty complex to grasp. It’s amazing (and impressive) that Sanderson explains it so well, and that he makes it as exciting as he does.

Joel desperately wants to be a Rithmatist–one with the gift for working with and manipulating those chalk lines–but cannot due to circumstances out of his control. So he does the next best thing: study the discipline as thoroughly yet surreptitiously as possible. Although magical in the sense that it’s not true to our world, the whole Rithmatic system is very logical and based in physics and geometry, so Joel is able to grasp and apply all the basic concepts in his head–even if he can’t execute them personally. This comes in handy as he becomes involved in an investigation of mysterious disappearances (possibly murders) of Rithmatist students at the local university.

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Releases today
Book jacket summaries can offer an intriguing glimpse of the riches within its contents or have the opposite effect. A poor summary will result in a reader thrusting a book back on a shelf in the blink of an eye. The teaser for The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber left me somewhere in the middle.

Strange New Things is about Peter, a man of God who is given an incredible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Through a mysterious corporation known only as USIC, Peter travels to a distant galaxy in order to be a pastor missionary to the USIC employees and the native population on another planet. As he makes great strides in his work, Peter becomes rattled when the missives from his wife back on Earth detail horrifying events happening across the Earth and her own faltering faith.

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Summary: We are saved by grace but by grow by discipline. 

I am very supportive of the Spiritual Formation work of James Bryan Smith and his mentors Dallas Willard and Richard Foster. Theologically I really do agree that a theology or spiritual practice that focuses on conversion but stops there without leading into the grace that is spiritual formation is a crippled faith.

The difficult work of spiritual work is not a straight line or the easily transferable from one person to another through ‘five simple steps to…’ types of writing.

The most important thing that I got out of the book is that Smith talked about becoming wise, not creating rules. Rules bind people, but wisdom frees people to act with the other in mind.

As I was thinking about this book I kept thinking about those that I think of as both wise and holy. I realized that all of them are old. One of the problems of a youth obsessed culture is discounting the wisdom of our elders. And one of the most important parts of that wisdom is that there are no short cuts.

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