Book Reviews

Once a Spy is today Kindle Daily Deal and on sale for $1.99.  Well worth reading at that price.

Takeaway: An original take on the traditional spy novel.

I originally heard about Once A Spy from Books and Culture Magazine podcast and then an article.  The premise is too good to pass up.

Drummond Clark, age 64, is a spy and he has advanced stages of early onset Alzheimer’s.  This leads to a problem for the spy masters.  How much does he know, who will he tell.  Enter Charlie, his estranged son that is in debt to a Russian loan shark over some gambling debts.

Charlie has no idea that his father is a spy.  He thinks is father is a mediocre sales manager for a mediocre appliance manufacturer.  Turns out Drummond Clark is a super spy that would shame James Bond or Jason Borne.  It is just that he believes the best spy is one that no one pays attention to and no one remembers.  Drummond Clark fits that mold perfectly.

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The most read book reviews in June 2013:

1. Holy is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present by Carolyn Weber
2. Out of the Silent Planet by CS Lewis (Space Trilogy #1)
3. Bread and Wine: A Love letter to Live Around the Table (with Recipes) by Shauna Niequist
4. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
5. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene
6. Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
7. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

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Summary: Series of lectures on spiritual development.

Over the last couple months I have come to the conclusion that Evangelicals (of whom I am one) are good at sharing the gospel and keeping the importance of conversion squarely in their sights.

But I have also come to see that groups that assume the large scale Christianity of their communities (those that have been state churches) have done much more thinking about how to live as a Christian.

It is cliche (and I think at least partially true) that Evangelicals are interested in you up until your conversion.  After that I think we fall into the Paul problem of continuing to feed one another spiritual milk.  We are still trying to save one another.  But I think those that theologically are more oriented toward infant baptism and Christendom have thought more about living as a Christian. (The negative for them is that they also now need to evangelize their own as Christendom has broken down.)

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Summary: Good writing, mixed storyline.

I picked up the audiobook of Where’d You Go, Bernadette from the library because I thought it has been nominated for an Audie Award.(It was not, I was thinking of Beautiful Ruins).

I am very mixed on the book.  Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a satire about the problems up the top 1% in Seattle. The problem is that it fails as satire.

As a story it isn’t bad.  But the attempt at satire pushed the characters into a place where they were unlikable for much of the book.  Bernadette is an architect, former winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant, wife and mother of Bee. Elgin, her husband, is a genius in his own right. Microsoft bought out his company 20 years ago and he is now the head of a big robotics research project and fully invested in the Seattle lifestyle.

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The Count of Monte Cristo is a really really really long novel. I checked and at 46 hours it is the longest novel that I have listened to. 1Q84 is at a very close second. Perhaps it can be said that 1Q84 was also very long, too long, but I enjoyed it much more and did not feel like it was a chore to listen to. Since The Great Gatsby was a short and concise novel, the movie was able to stick fairly closely to the novel. The 2002 movie version of The Count of Monte Cristo was very different from the actual novel, and who can blame the filmmakers from trying their best to take such a long story and make it into a movie lasting slightly over two hours.

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Dale Ahlquist would rather be reading Chesterton than reading anyone else, and he wants to bring us, his readers, to the same place. I will readily affirm that this book greatly magnified my appetite for reading Chesterton–and it was already high–if for no other reason than the sheer volume of topics that Chesterton wrote about. He was one of the most prolific writers of the last 100 years, and literally every view he expressed–on any topic–was cohesive, internally consistent, and related to all his other views. He was able to discern the true heart of an issue and to describe it with a clarity of insight that was often surprising in its simplicity.

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