Book Reviews

Takeaway: Content may be king, but organization is important to communicate the message.

I read because I love to read.  But one of the biggest reasons that I love to read is because I am curious.  I want to know more about the world.  I want to hear great stories that help me to experience what has been or might have been or could be.  The more you know the more you know you don’t know.

I picked up Philosophy: A Student’s Guide when it was on sale from Crossway a couple weeks ago.  While I have a pretty good background in theology and bible, my philosophy background is weak.  So this seemed a good place to bone up on a weakness.

Philosophy: A Student’s Guide is a short (130 pages) introduction to Christian Philosophy.  The basic question is ‘in light of canonical Trinitarian Theism, how do we approach…’.  There is a chapter on Metaphysics, Anthropology, Ethics, Epistemology and Aesthetics.  These chapters were fairly helpful at looking at a particular way to approach Philosophy as a Christian.

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Takeaway: Sometimes desperate situations lead to desperate measures.  But there should always be a limit if we are to claim the title human.

The final book in the trilogy was both fulfilling and a little frustrating.  As I got closer to the end I was pretty sure that either I was going to be unsatisfied with the ending, or there was a fourth book that I did not know about.  (There is not a fourth both, although there is a prequel that I have not read yet.)

In the final book, Thomas and the remaining subjects have completed the maze.  They have completed the Scorch Trials.  Soon after the beginning of the book, Thomas completes a month in solitary confinement.  But W.I.C.K.E.D is not done.  There are more test, more trials, more testing.

What should happen? If there really is the potential for a cure then shouldn’t Thomas and the others participate?  Shouldn’t they make sure that they do everything they can to save the world?

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Summary: A coming of age high school romance between two unlikely teens set in 1986.

In the last year I read almost everything that John Green has written.  And I loved all of it.

So when John Green tweeted how much he loved Eleanor and Park, I added it to my wishlist.  Now my wish list is LONG, but I do track the prices of those books and when it went on sale I picked it up.

Saturday afternoon I was looking for something to read.  I just finished the last few pages of two different non-fiction books and wanted something light and fun.

I started reading and was hooked almost instantly.  In fact I read the entire book before I want to sleep (it was after midnight and was reading in bed, but I didn’t go to sleep before I finished.)

I am a romantic at heart and I love young adult books, so this might not be for everyone.  When I was describing it to my wife, I said it was just like Pretty in Pink, just if the Molly Ringwald character was overweight, and instead of just having an nice alcoholic Dad she had an abused mom and a sadistic drug addicted step-dad, and Andrew McCarthy‘s character were half Korean.  And instead of Duckie… (then my wife said, “so it isn’t really like Pretty in Pink at all.”)

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Takeaway: My brain is not designed for complex physics. But I keep reading anyway.

The premise of the book is fascinating.  Physicist Michio Kaku takes science fiction ideas and objects and evaluates how they might work and how far away we are from being able to actually do what is now impossible.

Light Sabers, Warp Drives, faster than light travel, time travel, replicators are all in here.  The closer Kaku is to the actual science fiction the more interesting the book is.  The longer the description, the more side discussions the more I lost interest.

Kaku is a fairly good author.  Much of the book was very well written and understandable.  (I say this as someone that wants to understand science and frequently reads science but really does not understand it.)  But it gets too detailed too often, especially about half way through the book.

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Takeaway: Would you consent if you knew that your death (or the deaths of your friends) might save millions? What if you had already consented, but you don’t remember?

Genre books are a wonderful thing.  They give markers for the type of book you are reading.  They follow standards and allow you to dig deeper into an idea than if the author started from scratch.  Some genre books allow you to relax into them or mindlessly wander away for a few hours knowing you will not have to think too hard.

The struggle of genre books is that they can become too repetitive and too predictable.  Dystopian young adult fiction is getting to the too predictable point.  The Selection was an example of a book that had lost some of its purpose and social commentary.

So I am glad to report that the Maze Runner series (at least so far) has stayed within the genre, but broken outside the standard mold.  This is not a repeat of the Hunger Games or Divergent.  But you can see some of the family markers.  If anything, this book feels more like Orson Scott Card’s classic, Ender’s Game, than most other modern dystopian novels.

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