Book Reviews

Takeaway: In a novel it seems to be appropriate to spread out a simple story over a five day car trip.

I am a fan of young adult fiction.  But I often do not enjoy middle grade fiction.  There is something about the middle grade years that seems to rub me the wrong way.  I am not sure what it is.

Whatever it is, Walk Two Moons seemed to hit all my buttons.  The story is narrated by the main character (Sal) as she and her grandparents drive from her home to see her mother.

Coincidentally, Sal tells her grandparents about her best friend (Phoebe) and how Phoebe’s mom disappeared without a trace.  And how that affected Phoebe and those around her.  Of course, this is partially her own story. Sal’s mother left the family, which led to Sal and her Dad leaving their family farm and moving into town.  So Sal is relating Phoebe’s story as a way of coming to terms with her own story.

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Takeaway: The background to a book can be as interesting as the book itself (so read those epilogues and acknowledgements and introductions, they are often important.)

I really intended to re-read The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction this summer.  I have lots of good intentions with my reading.  But I often get distracted (squirrel!) with other books.

I also forgot that I bought Reverting to Type nearly 18 months ago, right after Jacobs released it.  I stumbled on it again last week and read it on a quick Friday afternoon (it is only 32 pages).

The Pleasures of Reading is a very freeing book, focusing on rediscovering reading as a pleasure, not a chore.  And Reverting to Type is more of a personal description of the same thing.

Jacobs is an English prof (25 years at Wheaton and moving to Baylor this fall).  So after giving the reader a description of his family background in reading (involving lots of westerns, science fiction and detective novels).  He talked about how he became a professor and began teaching. What was important for this essay (and related to the Pleasures of Reading) was that once when he was frustrated in grad school and again later as a professor he realized that the pleasure of the ‘genre fiction’ was valuable.

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Summary: The irony from the title is that Hunter believes that we cannot really change the world.

When I first started using Lendle, I did not realize that when you ask to borrow a kindle book, you are asking for that book right now. That ended up giving me a few books to borrow when I didn’t have time to read them. But in this case it gave me a copy of To Change the World nearly two years after I requested it. (If you are a patron on Lendle you can hold a place in line but then wait until you are read to read the book.)

So I ended up with To Change the World in the middle of my beach vacation. To Change The World is not what I was looking for. Most of the summer I have been reading only fiction, and fairly light fiction at that.

To Change the World is a serious book by sociologist James Davidson Hunter. He is the author probably most well known for his book 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. To Change The World is three long essays about the nature of ‘World Changing’.

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Summary: The Queen takes a larger role in the final book of this trilogy.

It is unfortunate that this series is out of print and not yet on kindle It does not make sense to me why publishers are either not working faster on moving out of print books into ebooks, releasing books to authors to turn into ebooks, or authors claiming back their out of print books and turning them into ebooks on their own.

There are some books that are not good enough to re-release. But many books released in the 60s to 90s are good enough. I know the real reasons are often complicated (capital, not wanting to cannibalize current sales, technical know-how). But as someone that has formated three books for kindle for friends, it is not that hard. I think most books could be converted and formatted for less than $2000. Because of copyright, many will need new covers, which can cost just as much. But this is way less than actually writing a new book.

Open Road is an ebook publisher that has focused on taking older released by well known authors that are out of print and moving them to ebooks (and maybe new print editions.)

None of that has anything to do with The Beggar Queen other than the fact that this is a very good young adult series that is out of print. The paperbacks are easily available used and some new copies of the 2002 edition are still available.

In this book, Queen Augusta has spent two years trying to work out a new government. Her ‘counselors’ (Theo, Justin and Florian) have been working on a constitution but there is a number of road blocks. Augusta (or Mickle as we know her) is working to find a way to break the impacts.

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Summary: A classic biography of St Francis from one of the great Christian authors of the 20th century.

GK Chesterton’s biography of St Francis is one of the classic biographies of St Francis and Chesterton attributed his work on this book to his eventual conversion to Catholicism.  Both of which were good reasons to read (listen) to this book.

I have started paying attention to the audiobook discounts when you first purchase kindle books.  So I picked this book up at the beginning of July when I had some promotional credits at Audible.  I might have been better served by reading the kindle version instead of listening to the audio version. Chesterton is not the easiest author to read.  He has a lot of asides and his fairly conversational writing style takes some getting used to.  That and he is brilliant.

Chesterton’s biography of St Francis is not a traditional biography.  Instead it is partially a biography and partially an exploration of the state of the Catholic church at the time of Francis and how Francis changed the Catholic church during his time and after. So if you are looking for a traditional biography, you will probably be disappointed by this book.  It has biographical details, but not many of them.

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Summary: Mickle (Queen Augusta) is on the throne, but now Westmark is being invaded by the Kingdom of Regina.

My memory of this series is that it was the most important anti-war books that I had read. I frequently thought about it when I was reading the second and third books of the Hunger Games.

And re-reading it 25 or so years later, I understand why the books have stuck with me. But like many young adult books that I have read again as an adult, the story is much less detailed and explicit than I remember.

In Westmark, Mickle, the princess, is found again and restored to her parents. Theo, the teen that fell in love with her, saved her life and helped her find her way back to her parents, has been given the task of traveling throughout the country to find out what the mood of the land is and how the King can improve the country. This is also a way to keep Mickle and Theo apart while they mature and to see if they really are in love.

While they are apart, Carrabas (who Theo saved and the King exiled at the end of the last book) has encouraged Regina, a kingdom to the north, to invade. This is only accomplished because a number of nobles and members of the military work with Regina to see it accomplished.

With the Westmark military in shambles it is only the people, and Florian’s rebels that can push Regina back.

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Takeaway: If we are going to take scripture seriously, we need to understand how it came to be.

Part of the movement within Christianity and the modern world is that the traditional means of understanding authority has changed.  No longer is it good enough to say, the bible says so.  Or at least, there are several important steps between.  And at least one of them is coming to an understanding that the bible is trustworthy.

For the Evangelical, understanding scripture as trustworthy means that we need to understand how we got the bible in the form it is in.

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Summary: Mix the Bachelor and Hunger Games, drop the blood, increase the romance and throw in a few dystopian elements and you get the Selection.

I think like most people I picked up this book because of the cover.  Almost every review I have read has commented on the cover.

There is more to this book than they cover, but like the cover this is mostly eye candy.

America Singer has been chosen for a competition to become the wife of the Prince and eventually the Queen.  The set up is very much like an episode of the Bachelor.  There are group meetings with the guy, everyone is swooning for him (except America), individual dates, people get eliminated.  There is a host that interviews the girls and the Prince and the whole country is wrapped up in the results.

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Takeaway: An attitude of doubt and the ability to ask a good question are two different things.

One of the problems of reading a large number of books on top of one another is that inevitably the books end up in conversation with one another.  I started The End of Our Exploring right as I was finishing up The Art of Letting Go: The Wisdom of St Francis.  Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Priest, is known for his books on spiritual development, especially male rituals of adulthood.  So even though the two books are about totally different issues, both Rohr and Anderson spend time talking about how pain relates to questioning and spiritual growth.

Rohr expressly says that pain is a necessary component to both spiritual and emotional growth.  But Anderson suggests it is a weakness of contemporary Christianity that “we often do not begin to question until the megaphone of suffering has awakened us from our sleep.”  Maybe Anderson needs to allow us as Christians to have more pain.  But I think they are both right, pain and discomfort often present during growth.

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