Book Reviews

Most of the time I finish books that I start.  Sometimes it is months for me to finally work through a book.  But I usually do eventually finish.

But this week I stopped reading two books. I was bored and just didn’t want to struggle through these books that were no longer interesting.  I had already given them a good trial.  I was about half way into both books (11 hours of audio between the two of them).

I picked up When I Was a Child I Read Books at the same time I picked up Gilead.  I started When I Was a Child first.  And pretty quickly switched to Gilead.  I loved Gilead.  It is a wonderful novel written a lot like a memoir.  It is honest and real and a bit sad but still hopeful for the idea that a pastor can still make a difference in the world.

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Takeaway: An essential novel for Pastors.

Gilead is one of those books that pretty much everyone should read.  Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. And all kinds people have it as on lists of their all time favorite books.  Which means that I have been reluctant to read it ever since I was aware of it.

Why is it that as soon as a book is one that you ‘should read’ it instantly becomes less interesting?

I finally decided to pick it up when I needed to buy another book from Audible to get a $10 credit.  And when Englewood Review of Books put it on their list of 10 novels every pastor should read.

Gilead is the story of John Ames.  Ames is a congregational pastor in the small town of Gilead, Iowa.  Ames is now an old man (76).  After being single for most of his adult life, he married late in life and now has a young son (6).  Ames’ heart is bad and throughout the book we know he is going to die soon.  So he is writing to his son.  He wants his son to know who he, and the rest of his family history since it is unlikely that he will be around much longer to tell him.

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My brother in law was in town for Thanksgiving, and he had a copy of Unbroken with him. As soon as I saw the book cover, I wondered to myself why I had not yet read it. I had heard great things about the book. I knew that it was a story about WWII and was based in the Pacific. I knew that the author was praised for the book. That was where my knowledge of the book ended. At one point in time, it was on my must read list, but for whatever reason, I had never picked it up.

I asked my wife pick up the book for me at the library You see, we’re a homeschool family… she’s there ALL the time 🙂 I started reading it, and found it very difficult to put down.

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Summary: A series of 18 essays about the implications of the Trinity of a variety of areas of a theology and practice.  Compiled in honor of Jürgen Moltmann’s 80th birthday. 

There were two reasons I picked up this book.  One, I am trying to read about the Trinity as part of my annual reading goals.  Two, I am reading it because Miroslov Volf’s name is on it.  I have been hearing about Volf for a while and just have not had a chance to read him.

Volf is a professor at Yale and is best known for his work in the areas of social Trinity and forgiveness (Exclusion and Embrace, The End of Memory and the less academic Free of Charge).  He also has controversial book on Christian response to Islam (Allah) and a well reviewed book on Christianity and the Common Good (Public Faith).

What is interesting to me about Volf is that he is academically responding to real issues around him.  Volf was born and raised in what is now Croatia.  He studied in Germany under Jürgen Moltmann and eventually came to the US to teach at Fuller until moving to Yale in 1998.

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Summary: Very helpful, quick overview of John Paul II’s theology of the body.

I purchased this about a year ago after I read Matthew Lee Anderson’s very good Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith (first review, second review).  I was looking a basic introduction to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and Christopher West has written several books on it.

The book sat on my bookshelf for a year but I read it very quickly once I picked it up. Overall I this was a good book.  I highlighted and marked up the book quite a bit (and then left it with my Dad while visiting for Thanksgiving, who was also interested in reading it.)

So I don’t have the book notes.  From memory, the strong points are Marriage as a divine gift, the strong idea about how celibacy fits into that sacramental view of marriage, the way that God designed the body and the ways that sin and redemption of have affected our subsequent view of body.  All of that really is good, fits well within the Christian (and Evangelical) theology and I think strengthens our theology.

Many place the book was quite beautiful in its descriptions of the body, marriage, sex, and God’s love for us.  I think that beauty is something that is often missing in our Evangelical descriptions of the body.  We get erotic, physical, dangerous; we miss the beauty.

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I started The Casual Vacancy with eyes wide open to the fact that this was no Harry Potter novel–and yet, even though I wasn’t offended by the much more adult tone (and content!) that Rowling establishes right out of the gate, I was a little surprised by it. No matter how prepared you are, it’s just weird to hear the f-bomb dropped by one of Hermione Granger’s literary cousins. What didn’t surprise me at all, though, having read and loved multiple analyses of them, was Rowling’s masterful plotting and the literary alchemy she weaves to engage the reader and drive the story. Indeed, that is what merited my 4 stars for the book.

Pagford is a small town that seems idyllic on the surface, but underneath the veneer of folksy charm the place is roiling with class warfare, sexual tension, violence, back-stabbing and duplicity. Rowling’s characters are broken, wounded, cynical, crass, self-centered, petty, and strangely sympathetic. The reader gets a first-person perspective from everyone as each maneuvers around the other, reading (and often misreading) the circumstances from a unique and limited vantage point–to hilarious but often tragic effects.

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