Book Reviews

A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle (Austin Family #4)

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Summary: Death, Life, Meaning and other light topics.

Nothing reminds me more of the importance of not wasting time on bad books like reading a really good book. I cannot tell you why I have not read everything that Madeleine L’Engle has written by now. I have had the time, but I haven’t done it. I need to rectify the situation.

A couple years ago I blogged through the Time Quintet and then a couple of stand alone early novels. I picked up the first of the Austin Family books and was not excited about it. So it took me a while to read another.

I skipped to A Ring of Endless Light because I picked it up on kindle a while ago while it was on sale. But I actually ended up listening to it on audiobook from the library.

The Austin family series is focused on a family of 4 kids and their parents. There is nothing apparently special about the family except that they seem to be a pretty healthy, well-loved family.

All of A Ring of Endless Light is set on Seven Bay Island. This is the home of their Grandfather. Every summer they usually spend time with their wise retired pastor/missionary/scholar grandfather. This summer they are spending the whole summer because their grandfather is dying.

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Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church by George Weigel

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1403749750_0.pngSummary: A helpful look at a reforming movement within Catholicism, but a lot of inside baseball.

I have read a number of positive reviews of Evangelical Catholicism from people I trust.  But more than anything, this book reminded me how little I actually know about Catholicism.

This is a book that is very inside baseball.  For those of us outside the Catholic Church, a book that was about 1/3 the length would have been appropriate.

As a non-Catholic, and one that was made very aware of my lack of knowledge it is hard to review this book.  But there are things that really stood out to me.

One, I think the main reoccuring theme of the book, that the church has done a very poor job catechizing (teaching) its members is true.  John Paul II started a program of “˜new evangelicalization’, which is a dual, active focus on evangelizing those outside the church, and catechizing those inside the church. I think almost no one really disputes this.  How it is done I am sure has lots of controversy.  But the fact that it is needed, I think is probably less controversial.

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The Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories by PG Wodehouse

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Summary: Collection of humourous short stories, but the dog one is not to be missed.

I was complaining that I needed something different to read a few weeks ago and Seth Simmons, one of Bookwi.se’s regular contributors suggested PG Wodehouse.  Like so many authors, I was aware of him as a great humorist, but I had not actually read anything.

The Man With Two Left Feet is one of about 30 of his books that are in the public domain and available for free as kindle books.  And several of those have Audible discounts if you buy the kindle version first.

I wasn’t paying attention when I picked this up, because it is a collection of 13 short stories.  I am not a particular fan of short stories.  I prefer a full length book that really develops characters.

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I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter

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Summary: A student at a exclusive girls school for spies falls in love with a normal boy.

If I had to guess, the recent article about why adults should be embraassed to be reading Young Adult books is setting its sights exactly on books like I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You.

I am not at all going to pretend this is great literature.  But it was fun, I did pick it up free, I liked the concept and because a young adult friend already has all of them, I will probably read at least one or two more of the series to see how things go.

Cammie Morgan is a student at the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women.   Her mother is the school’s headmaster and like most of the rest of the staff, a former spy.  In fact, most of the girl in the school are daughters of spies and/or are preparing to become spies.  They practice foreign languages and martial arts and have classes on covert ops and world cultures.  This is intented to be Hogwarts if it were a girls school and focused on training spies instead of wizards.

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Becoming Who You Are: Insights on the True Self from Thomas Merton and Other Saints by James Martin

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Becoming Who You Are cover imageSummary: God has created you to be who you are, not to be like someone else.

I picked Becoming Who You Are up on a whim.  I had some promotional credits from Audible and needed to use them on something cheap.  It caught my eye because it was about Thomas Merton.  I read Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain in college or soon after and enjoyed it but I have not picked up anything else by him, although I keep meaning to.

James Martin, the author has been on my radar as well, but again, just not enough time to read everything that pricks my interest.

Becoming Who You Are is short (98 pages, just over 2 hours in audio). It is a meditation on Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Jesus, and a few others. But really, it is Martin’s recounting of how these people helped Martin discover what it means to be himself.

Merton is known for his discussion of the True Self and the False Self.  The basic idea of the book is that to become the person that you want to be, you need to become the person that God made you to be.  Striving to become like Merton, Nouwen, or Mother Teresa will not make us a better Christian or more like what God wants for us, because God made us with a unique personality and purpose.

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Summer Knight by Jim Butcher (Dresden Files #4)

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1402884325_0.pngSummary: Everyone is out to get Dresden and all he is trying to do is save the world.

What makes the Dresden Files work is that Butcher knows when to bend the rules and when the rules need to be held.  Dresden is a Wizard.  A magical private eye, the only one, that works in Chicago.  The series is a mix of hard boiled PI and paranormal thriller.

In this fourth book of the series, Dresden, after defeating a plan to destroy him by the Vampire Court, is being brought up on trumped up charges by the Wizard Court (these are not legal courts, but essentially guild bodies).  A number in the Wizard court are not fans of his and are willing to let Dresden be turned over to the Vampires  (for interference) because Dresden saved a number of humans after the Wizard Court refused to act. (And if the Wizard Court does not turn him over, the Vampire Court will declare war.)

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The Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis

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Re-posting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition of The Horse and His Boy is on sale for $0.99.  (Also The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is only $1.99)

The Horse and his Boy by CS LewisSummary: The only the Narnia stories not to include someone from this world magically going to Narnia.

After reading Alister McGrath’s very good biography of CS Lewis I decided I was going to read one CS Lewis book a week for a while.  I have a number of them, some I have read, some I have not.  Last week I read the Silver Chair, this week The Horse and His boy.

Like the Silver Chair, I really did not remember anything about this book except the broadest outline.  A boy who has been raised as a poor fisherman’s son, escapes from his home when he overhears his ‘father’ negotiating to sell him as a slave.  As he escapes, the horse of the man reveals himself to be a Narnian talking horse and they escape together. I had completely forgotten there even was a girl and another Narnian horse that they meet up with.

The Narnia books keep surprising me with their shortness.  It feels like they were so much longer when I was a kid.

Lewis again is using fiction to hide teaching.  In Silver Chair it was about knowing the word of God and following it.  Here it seems to be more about the love of God for those that are not his normal followers.  And a lot about pride and the nature of who is really the hero.

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The Dragon Business by Keven J Anderson

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Summary: A middle ages fantasy version of How I Met Your Mother.

Kevin J Anderson is one of those authors that seems to produce a superhuman amount of books.  He has published 120 book according to his bio.  Many of them are part of established worlds, Dune, Star Wars, X-Files, etc.  I have not read any of those books.

But I did really like his Saga of the Seven Suns series (or most of it.)  It was a good space opera series that got a little bogged down with too many story lines in the middle of the series, but it was still quite enjoyable.

I ran across Dragon Business when I saw that Anderson is starting a new trilogy set in the same world as Saga of the Seven Suns.  The Dragon Business was an Amazon Prime book so I could borrow it for free.

The first line of the description is, “King Cullin may be known as “the Dragon Slayer”, but he fears his son’s legacy will be as “King Maurice Who Speaks with Proper Grammar”.”  This is a book with very modern sensibilities, in the vein of the movie A Knight’s Tale.  Early in the book, the father is trying to tell the son a story and the son complains about the father switching between first and third person and omniscient narration.  It was pretty funny.  And there is a good theme of wanting a child to be everything you couldn’t be, but still wanting them to be well grounded and appreciate the things you appreciated.

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