Book Reviews

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue/ The Untold Story of English by John McWhorter

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Summary: Every area of study has its rebels and story tellers. McWhorter’s is rebelling by claiming that English gained more from the Celts than others.

One of the joys of reading is picking up a book in a subject area that you know nothing about and just diving in.

I am going through a bit of reading malaise.  I have found in the past that I need to read something completely different. And I have not been excited about my on-deck audiobooks.  So I picked this up last week when it was on sale for $1.99 on audiobook with some promotional credits (making it free for me and still technically keeping to my buying no more than 1 book a month pledge.)

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is about linguistics and the history of English.  The subtitle is over reach and probably written with marketing in mind.  But the basic book is five arguments about why we need to pay more attention to grammar in the history of English and less attention to borrowed words and etymology.

Everyone knows that English borrowed a bunch of Viking and French words as part of its development. McWhorter says that more important is the fact that English has borrowed a lot of grammar as well.

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Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen C Meyer

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Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen C MeyerA devastating critique of Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of life’s origins, and a rigorous defense of Intelligent Design as a legitimate and compelling scientific theory. Stephen Meyer is a philosopher of science, and he ably traced the discovery of DNA and its contemporary challenges in his previous book, Signature in the Cell.

Now, in Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer takes on the fossil record in the “œCambrian Explosion” and details the attempts by evolutionists to account for it. As it turns out, Charles Darwin himself recognized that the fossil record exposed a potentially fatal weakness in his new theory of natural selection, but one he assumed (not unreasonably at the time) that science, given enough time (pun intended), would fill in the gaps. Unfortunately, as our understanding of biology and genetics has increased exponentially over the last 150 years (and especially since the 1960s), the difficulties for Darwin’s theory have only gotten worse.

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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Part of my goal this year is to catch up on all of the classic audiobooks that I have picked up over the years. I picked up nearly 20 free classics last year when Audible and Amazon were promoting their kindle book/audiobook integration (whispersync).  And you can still pick up over 100 classic audiobooks for $0.99 each.

While I have seen a couple of movies based on Jane Austen books, prior to this reading of Pride and Prejudice, I have not read Austen before.

As I have been reading through a number of classics over the past year or so there has definitely been a mixed bag.  Some are clearly classics because they brought something new (but do not feel all that great because that new feature is now common, think Citizen Kane.)  Others really are great and their greatness is still visible.  I would put Pride and Prejudice  in the later category.

The story is fairly familiar.  It is a proto-romantic comedy.  There is misunderstanding and unrequited love.  There is the guy that looks good but is not.  There is the guy that seems annoying, but is really the right one.  There are all kinds of situations (and personal pride) that keep the lovers apart.  And there is a real sense of comedy, although not the slapstick or baudy that is common among a lot of modern romantic comedy.  What is clear is that family honor is one of the biggest reasons that keeps the two apart and that is certainly not what would keep a couple apart today.

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The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy

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The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness OrczySummary: An early 20th century romantic thriller set during the French Revolution.

When I was an elementary student I had two ‘go to’ reading choices, a set of children’s biographies (more historical fiction than biography) and the Illustrated Classic series.

The children’s biographies gave me a pretty good sense of history and historical figures (although probably 80 percent of each book was fiction.)  And the Illustrated Classics gave me the rough outline of a number of classic books.

But as I read many of those classics again as an adult I have a hard time remembering if I actually have read the full version or the children’s abridged versions prior to re-reading.  (And there is often a pretty large difference.)  Stories that I loved, I sometimes love even more reading the full original version.  And sometimes my memory of the story is nothing like what the actual book is like.

The Scarlet Pimpernel was written originally as a play in 1905 and then novelized.  It is a swashbuckling novel of heroes and light romance.  But in many ways reading it again it feels more like a 1940s pulp fiction than a classic.

The hero (Sir Percy) is perceived as bumbling and slow (but very rich) by everyone, including his wife.  In reality he is cunning and a great fighter.  It feels like Zorro (but I looked it up and Zorro was written 14 years later.)  That same secret identity idea really took off with the comic book superheroes.

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A Spiritual Formation Primer by Richella Parham

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A Spiritual Formation PrimerSummary: A brief overview of the role of spiritual formation in the Christian life.

One of the areas that I think that many Evangelicals have missed is the concept of spiritual formation.  It is not that Evangelicals don’t do many of the things that make up spiritual formation.  They pray, they read their bibles, they share the gospel, they study theology, etc.  But there is a concern among at least some, that working on spiritual formation is a form of works righteousness.  (In other words, it is a way of earning our salvation.)

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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael ChabonSummary: Two cousins in New York City get in on the ground floor of comic books.  The book follows them for 15 years through their highs and lows.

Michael Chabon is one of those writers that has been recommended to me and I have been meaning to read for a while.  I didn’t really know anything about it, but The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 so it seemed like a good choice when I saw it on sale a while back.

Joe Kavalier escapes out of Prague just before World War II breaks out and moves in with his Aunt and cousin Sam Clayman in New York City.  Sam finds out that Joe is an artist and together with Sam primarily writing and Joe primarily drawing, they become the great comic book writing duo of Kavalier and Clay.

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On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming

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On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian FlemingSummary: Ernst Bloefeld (of SPECTRE) is back and has come up with a new scheme.

When I was a kid I loved James Bond movies.  And I still mostly like new James Bond movies.  But as I re-watch old ones the cartoonish villains bug me. Lasers to shoot down rockets, stealing all the gold in Fort Knox, etc. are just a bit silly.

I stumbled on the movie of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service sometime last year and made it through 20 or 30 minutes.  The set up is a bit ridiculous.  The bad guy has a lair in the Alps where beautiful girls go to get rid of their allergies.  James Bond sneaks in find out what is going on.

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Paper Towns by John Green

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Paper Towns is the third novel by the increasingly popular young adult novelist, John Green.  The book is about a graduating senior in high school, Quentin Jacobson, and his strange and compelling relationship with his neighbor, Margot Roth Spiegelman.  As young children, the two came across a divorced man who had committed suicide.  While they never spent much time together after that, the event created an unspoken bond.

One night their senior year, Margot gets “œQ” to drive her around while she seeks revenge against those who had wronged her.  They have a wild and crazy night together and then the next day she disappears.  Margot leaves small clues for Q to find her.  For the remainder of the book, he searches for her by following her cryptic clues and doing some soul searching in the meantime.

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