Book Reviews

It is not a surprise to anyone that reads this blog regularly that I enjoy reading.  It is one of my favorite ways to relax, think and process.  So this past long weekend my wife and I and the extended family went up to my mother-in-law’s cabin.  Over the weekend I read three novels, a Kindle short and parts of two more non-fiction books.

My tendency is to review every book I read.  But I decided there was nothing in particular that either recommended the two trashy novels that I read, nor a good reason to discourage the reading of the particular books.  So I am going to just give some thoughts on the reading of trashy novels.  If you are really interested I read these two. (Yes there is a content warning.)

Unrealistic Expectations

One of the biggest, and legitimate complaints about trashy novels is that they set up unrealistic expectations about life.  They are filled with incredibly rich, incredibly beautiful people who seem to have lots of time.  In the real world there are not a lot of 28 year old self made billionaires, but they seem to pop up pretty frequently in novels.

Even in romance books that are not filled with explicit sex, there is an insinuation that the people of these novels do little other than have sex.  Even the novels tend to make fun of the amount of sex these people have.  But the problem is that often it is the sex that seems to define the relationship instead of the relationship building a safe place for sex.

We are all adults, we get this intellectually, but in the real world, just become you love them, and even if you are married, it is not a guarantee of great sex.  I think Christians teaching plays into this just as much, and maybe more than the trashy novels.  If you grew up in the Evangelical world you were told, probably a lot, that if you waited your wedding night you would have mind blowing sex (probably in those exact words.)  If you have not figured it out yet, it is a lie.  Even if you have good sex now, you will at some point have issues.

The Hero

One of the thing I like about reading trashy novels (although it is probably equally unrealistic) is that there usually is a hero, maybe more than one.  For all of the sex, language and violence, most of the time the story is pretty traditional.  There is a person or a group of people in trouble and someone is going to save them.  One of the seemingly missed themes about the 50 Shades of Grey books last year (Bookwi.se reviewed 1, 2 and 3), was the redemption of Christian Grey by the end of the third book.  Anastasia was the hero and saved Christian by her love of him.  Christian was a more traditional hero and saved Ana from a murderer.  Both people acted as a hero.  Similarly in the books that I read this weekend, both members of the couple had horrible abusive pasts.   In the end the love from the other (eventually unconditional and real) brought about healing.

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Summary: Augustine is very important to the the history of Christian thought and often misappropriated by all sides.

Augustine is not my favorite Christian thinker. I know this is partially because he is not incredibly accessible. And partially because I have not read that much of him, and there is a lot to read.

I read his Confessions in grad school. And I have read bits and pieces since. Chadwick says that is part of the problem with Augustine. Because Augustine wrote a lot, more than virtually any other of the church fathers prior to middle ages (or at least we have more of his writing than anyone else), there is a lot of material to mine for Augustine’s support of your favorite theological point.

There are three main points that I got out of this introduction. One, I have heard frequently that Augustine was anti-women. There is a lot of evidence to marshal for that position, but Chadwick says that Augustine was not anti-women, he was anti-sex. And much of his anti-sex position was really about the fact that he was concerned about his own weaknesses rather than being against sex as a whole. Augustine for a while advocated that pastors live apart from their wives in celibate community. This was not all that popular among the pastors he supervised. (Although it was part of the movement toward celibate priest.)

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Summary: The second book of the George Smiley series, Smiley works to solve a murder.

I am going back and reading the first two of the George Smiley series after having reading the more popular third to sixth books in the series.

These are not as good as the Karla trilogy (starting with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy).  But they give some good background on Smiley.

In the middle of the first book Smiley resigns from the British intelligence service.  I believe this is the only book of the Smiley series that has nothing to do with espionage.

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According to Alex Avery, it is scientifically proven that organic foods are not safer than non-organic. Organic food is not more nutritious, overall. Non-organic milk has almost zero chance of containing hormones and is by far the safest food item on the market today. Even if hormones made it into the milk supply, the are the exact same hormones that humans have, and the levels in milk would be so low as to pose no risk whatsoever. The pesticides that organic farmers use (yes, they do use them–and often shield that fact with euphemisms) are less powerful and less efficient than modern non-organic pesticides, which means that they are applied much more frequently and crop yields are often lower.

These are just a few of the claims Avery makes. I am an equal opportunity skeptic, which is why this book appealed to me. I like things that challenge the conventional wisdom. I recognize that I have no easy way to confirm much of what Avery writes; he cites a LOT of studies from a variety of research bodies (collegiate science departments, the FDA, European research bodies, etc), but I don’t have the expertise to know if (or how much) he’s spinning. Sometimes the biased tone gets a bit obnoxious, but that doesn’t (necessarily) mean he’s not telling the truth.

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Despite being modern classics beloved by children, laymen adults, and critics alike, the Chronicles of Narnia are admittedly somewhat of a literary hodge-podge. Or so most believed. Many have attempted to build a comprehensive interpretive framework for them, but none have received wide acceptance. Michael Ward, Oxford scholar and C.S. Lewis aficionado, presents his own framework, arguing that the classic Ptolemaic solar system (not the modern Copernican) holds the key to understanding the series. Ward’s research of the Chronicles and its author is impressively extensive. He shows how Lewis was steeped in the cosmological mythology of medieval literature, and he illustrates the heavy influence wielded by a particular planet throughout each book.

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