Book Reviews

Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card (Ender #4)

January 22, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: Who knows how to summarize this book?

It is no secret that I am a big fan of Orson Scott Card. I love many of his books (and hate a few as well.) After listening to the Audioplay version of Ender’s Game and then re-reading Ender’s Game as well, I decided to go back and re-read Xenocide and Children of the Mind.

It has been a couple months but I finally finished Children of the Mind. And I didn’t dislike it nearly as much as I remembered. Part of it is the lowered expectations of previous memory. But I also can catch a glimpse of what Card was trying to do.

Originally Xenocide and Children of the Mind were supposed to be one book. But Card got carried away and had to split it into two books. There are just too many ideas and too much going on in these books.

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by GJ Meyer

July 16, 2026January 21, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: A history of an incredibly tragic and costly war.

One of the things I love about reading is learning about things that I know almost nothing about. European history is one of those areas. So I picked up A World Undone as an audiobook during a sale late last year. This is not a small book (816 pages or 28 hours in audio) and I split it in half, listening to the first half, then finishing a couple other books before returning to finish it.

A detailed history book like this is hard to review. I am not adequate to evaluate the history (although it seems to be well regarded.) There were long battle scenes that were difficult to understand (and I frequently consulted maps to see what was being talked about.) But overall, A World Undone is a very readable overview of a huge and important war. It did not take long for me to realize that much of my little knowledge of the war was wrong. So what follows is really just some thoughts that I had about the book and the war.

It is incredible to me how large the standing militaries were prior to the war and how quickly (and how large) the drafts were. Russia alone started with well over 1 million troops. Tiny little Belgium had more than 100,000 troops before anything started. At the height of the war individual battles had nearly 1 million troops on each side.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

July 15, 2026January 20, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: One of the last, maybe the last, human recounts the end of the world.

Last year I listened the audiobook of Margaret Atwood’s famous, and excellent, Handmaid’s Tale. Oryx and Crake is also a dystopian novel, but a very different one.

Both were narrated by a single character. Handmaid’s Tale is from a woman that is at the bottom of the power structure and trying to survive and more of a political story.

Oryx and Crake tells a story about the end of the world but it is more environmental and maybe evolutionary. But my biggest problem with the book is that I really had no idea what was going on with the book until about halfway through the book. The main character is describing a world and his experience of it, but we really don’t know who he is, what the world is or why everything so bad.

Bruno, Chief of Police: A Novel of the French Countryside by Martin Walker

July 15, 2026January 14, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: A small town police chief in rural France must protect his community, in more ways than one.

Seven years ago, my wife and I went to France to visit friends that live live there. We loved France. More than the wonder of Paris, which was incredible, we enjoyed time in the relatively small town that our friends lived in. Walking to get bread in the morning with gardens and old homes and churches on nearly every corner we felt why Europe and US are very different culturally.

Bruno feels very French. He is interested in food and wine (and we hear quite a bit about that.) But he is more interested in the people of his community. This community has adopted him and he loves them.

Bruno is the police chief of a very small community in France. There has been a vicious murder, not only the first murder in recent memory, but one that exposes some of the nasty undercurrents of the community. Bruno has the job of not only solving the murder, but protecting the town from outsiders that have no interest in it.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner (Maze Runner #1)

January 11, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: First in a dystopian series about a group of boys trapped in a maze.

When Thomas wakes up all he can remember is his name. A group of teenage boys welcomes him to ‘the Glade’.

The Glade is a large open grassy area with high stone walls. As Thomas asks questions he comes to understand that none of the boys can remember anything before the Glade. Some have been there as long as 2 years. The glade is in the center of a massive stone maze. One that changes every night.

In the Maze the boys have created a functioning society. And while there are always difficulties, this is not The Lord of the Flies.

Our Common Prayer: A Field Guide to the Book of Common Prayer

January 9, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: A guide to the parts and functions of the book of common prayer service (not really to using the book itself).

Over the past several years I have been paying much more attention to the resources of higher church, especially in the areas of the liturgy. However, temperamentally and experientially I am still a clearly low church Christian.

Part of what I have been talking about with Spiritual Director has been exactly that. I have been trying to get back into the practice of fixed hour prayer. Several years ago, I was able to do that fairly regularly when my oldest niece was an infant (and I was the nanny.) But then a second niece was born and the naps were no longer overlapping and fixed hour prayer went out the window.

Even before reading Alan Jacob’s Book of Common Prayer: a Biography or reading Susan Howatch’s Church of England series, I was interested in the Book of Common Prayer as a spiritual practice.

Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century

January 8, 2014 by Adam Shields

Reposting this review because Farewell is the Jan 8 Kindle Daily Deal and on sale for $1.99 (the audiobook is only $0.99 with purchase of the kindle book.)

Takeaway: The actual workings of spy tradecraft is as odd as the fictional ones.

Farewell is the code name of one of the most important spy stories of the 20th century. A Russian KGB agent, frustrated with his treatment by the KGB, turned over thousands of pages of documents to the French secret service (the FBI equivalent, not the CIA equivalent) and was perhaps more responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union than any other single person.

The story really is both incredible and fairly simple. Vladimir Ippolitovitch Vetrov, a talented athlete, a good student and a handsome young man is recruited to the KGB. He is trained as a foreign operative and serves two terms outside of Russia. But because of some of the problems of the KGB and some of Vetrov’s own problems he gets called back to Moscow and ends up as a technical analyst.

Frustrated by his lack of importance and the lack of respect he feels he is getting, he decides to become an informant and contact the French DST. Working with a French secret service he is first given a handler (a businessman that is close, but not a spy) and then a single agent. But it may have been the very lack of tradecraft that allows Vetrov to sneak out hugely important technical details of the Soviet infrastructure, military and spy systems.

Most Read Book Reviews in 2013

January 5, 2014 by Adam Shields

The God of the Mundane by Matt Redmond Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism by Molly Worthen The Fault in Our Stars by John Green Holy is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present by Carolyn Weber Divergent by Veronica Roth 137 Books in One Year: … Read more

The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan (Book 1 of the Kane Chronicles)

January 5, 2014 by Adam Shields

Reposting this review because Red Pyramid is free on Kindle. I was not a huge fan, but I have heard from several who thought that I was too hard on the book and have finished the trilogy. Free is worth picking up, and kindle format is probably better than the audiobook.

Summary: A brother and sister must figure out a way to save their parents and the world from a vengeful Egyptian god.

I found this free on audiobook from my local library. I am listening with two purposes. One, I need some lighter fiction. I have been over-doing the theology and heavy stuff and if I am going to keep blogging I need to maintain an intellectual balance of books. Too much intellectual challenge is draining. There has to be time to process and relax. But I also have several friends who have children that are reading faster than they can keep up. They are good parents that want to read what their kids read and try to have conversations and discussions with their kids about books, but there is a point when kids and parents reading speeds start converging and kids often have more time to read than their parents. So I am trying to keep an eye out for good middle grade, early young adult books that I can recommend.

I really enjoyed the Percy Jackson series and was interested in a new take on mythology from Riordan. This is definitely a different take. Instead of the gods of Greek mythology, these are the gods of Egyptian mythology. Instead of being focused on children that are half human/half Greek god, these are more like possession by the Gods. The subject matter is just more problematic and the books feel a bit darker, although not much.

Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue

July 15, 2026January 5, 2014 by All Old Users

Reposting this review because Room is the Kindle Daily Deal on Jan 5 and on sale for $2.99 for kindle. (Only on sale on Jan 5).

Rating: 4 Stars

Imagine your mother was kidnapped before you were born and was forced to live as a prisoner in an 11 x 11 ft shed (the “Room”). Imagine that you were born in the Room and had never seen the world beyond its four walls. Finally, imagine at the age of 5 you are asked to explain what life is like living in the Room. That is what this book is about.

It is written from the perspective of a 5 year old, which makes the storytelling so compelling. Kids already have a difficult time understanding certain nuances and details in life that we adults take for granted. But even more so for Jack, who only knows the outside world from what he sees on TV and what Old Nick, his mother’s captor, brings to them for “Sundaytreat.” Here’s the first line from the book: