Book Reviews

Takeaway: The world is changing and Christianity is changing with it.  

Mark Noll is one of the most important academics of Christianity in the world. He is a historian, but the implications of his work go far beyond history. Personally, the most important book of his that I have read it The Civil War and Theological Crisis. That book looked at how Christians of an earlier generation had worked through cultural change and there were many implications for how we can now work through cultural change.

In The New Shape of World Christianity, Noll makes a subtle argument. Simply, Noll argues that American Christianity is important to worldwide Christianity not so much because it is leading the world, but more because the world’s culture is changing in ways that are similar to the ways that the United States is changing. Noll is clear that it is not that the world is becoming like the US, as much as it is that the cultural pressures (globalization) that the US is facing are also facing the rest of the world. It is just that the US is a bit in front of the rest of the world in many of these cultural changes and pressures.

Read more

When I was a boy I read a lot of books (surprising I know).  Some I have been revisiting over the past couple years (CS Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, etc.)  I have found that I enjoy re-reading many of those books, but that reading them as an adult sometimes gives me a whole new insight into the book and sometimes leaves me missing my childhood view of the book.  (In other words, some books have an adult subtext and some are just written for kids.)

The Encyclopedia Brown books are all about Leroy Brown, the child sleuth that everyone called Encyclopedia.  When I was a kid I think I wanted to be him.  I have always liked trivia.  But I have never been all that observant.  I think that is one reason why I like reading books, because I am always surprised by plots twists that most people have already figured out.

Read more

Summary: A Thriller that most of the world has already read or watched.

I am way behind on this trend.  This has been made into two different movies and was the most sold book in the US in 2010.  It is among the top 20 most sold books ever and there have been at least 30 millions copies sold in 44 languages if Wikipedia is to be believed.  I am not going to say anything about this that has not been said better by a number of other (better) reviewers.

I have been reluctant to read this book.  Not because it is popular, I read popular books all the time.  But because it has a reputation for being sexually violent book.  Eventually after a number of people recommended it to me over the past couple years and enough people that I know (and that know my reading habits) told me that I would enjoy it and it was not over the line for my reading history, I picked it up at the library.

Read more

Summary: Christian soccer mom fights demons and bad guys.

I have been in a reading rut for the last couple weeks.  It is not that I don’t have lots to read (I always have lots to read.)  It is that nothing is really all that interesting.  So I have been bouncing all over the place trying to find something that I want to read.

John Ringo is one of the authors I discovered because of Baen’s free ebook library (see link below).   Ringo writes all over the place.  He has a series of military science fiction.  Some light fantasy, some fantasy/science fiction mix, and a series of modern techno-thrillers (that have a lot of sex and verge on porn).

Princes of Wands is a bit of a deviation from all of those.  It is a collection of four short stories about a Christian soccer mom that fights demons and evil powers through the power of Christ.

Read more

Summary: Roald Dahl’s autobiography of his childhood written for children.

As you can imagine, I spend a good bit of money on books.  I saw an estimate that the average household only buys 1 to 2 books a year.  And that nearly half of the book purchases are from about 5 percent of readers.  If that is actually true, I would not be surprised if I am in the top 1 percent.

I try to read books that I pick up free on kindle.  And I often listen to the monthly free audiobook from christianaudio.com.  And I do get some free books to review.  However, I pay full price for most books I review and that gets expensive.

My regular source of free books is my local library.  I almost never go and check out a book in person.  I mostly avoid paper books.  But I do check out audiobooks via the Overdrive system from my local library.  The main problem with Overdrive in my area is that everything is always checked out.  So I often will go for weeks and get nothing.  This week I had three of my holds come up all the same day.

Boy by Roald Dahl was a bit of a whim book.  I know it is a bit of anathema for many children’s book lovers, but I have not read much by him.  Boy is a autobiography oriented toward elementary students.  Growing up I read a lot of biographies.

Read more

Summary: A funny (occasionally crass), but real self-help book for married men.

Last week Orgasms are for Women and Marriage is for Men was offered free for kindle.  Because I try to post virtually all of the free Christian kindle book on Bookwi.se, I ran across it.  I do not always look into a book, but those that seem a bit sketchy or maybe categorized wrong I try to look at.

I read the intro before posting it and then read the rest of the book over the weekend.  It is a quick book (around 50 pages) and most people will read it in about an hour.

I think that it is a mostly helpful book.  It is written under a pseudonym, but the author claims to be a former pastor and marriage counselor.  He said that in his experience, 99% of the motivation for marriage and premarital counseling was to get the counselor to change their spouse’s behavior (this seems about right to me).  This book is oriented around the idea that you cannot control the other person, you can only control yourself.  So get your stuff together and forget about theirs.

Read more

Summary: A cynically nihilistic take on some of the most beloved fantasy books.

As much as I enjoy books stealing ideas and remaking stories (like Fuzzy Nation), Lev Grossman has soured me on the concept for a while.

I was not a big fan of the first book of this series, The Magicians.  I thought it was really well written and had some great ideas.  But I just did not like the characters.  But I still wanted to read the second book.  It was written so well, I figured the second would have to be better.

After having read it, I think this opening line from an Amazon review gets it exactly right.  “Joyless, dismal, and cynically nihilistic–that was the first novel in this series.”

Read more

Summary: The parallel book to Lost Hero

This is a book that is hard to discuss without at least some spoilers.  The Percy Jackson Series was a complete series based around the character Percy Jackson, son of the Greek God Poseidon, as he discovers that he is a demigod and works to save the gods from being other thrown by the Titans.

This series is after the first series, but has some of the same characters.  So I would read Percy Jackson first, then this.  In the first book (spoilers start here) we are introduced to Jason Grace, son of Jupiter and his two friends Leo and Piper.  What is revealed at the end of the first book is that the Greek Gods also have Roman sides to them and there is a whole world of Roman demigods that have been kept apart from the Greek demigods.

Jason was from the Roman side and was sent to Camp Half-Blood (the Greek side) by Hera in order to join the Greek and Roman demigods together to overthrow Gaia and the Giants.

Read more