Book Reviews

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.

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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.”

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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.

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Summary: A new set of heroes are on a quest to free Hera and stop something worse than the Titans from destroying the Gods (and maybe all of humanity with them.)

The Percy Jackson and the Olympians were rightly a popular series of young adult books.  They include magic, heroes, Greek Gods, adventure and lots of historical and mythical references.

With The Lost Hero, Riordan takes the same setting and starts a new series with new main characters.  Jason has no memory of his past.  But he is son of Zeus and and already battle tested and a leader, but he has never been to Camp Half-Blood before.  Leo is a mechanical genius, but after the death of his mother he has been hiding his real power.  Piper is the daughter of a famous movie star and constantly in trouble for theft.

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Summary: We have a way that we attached to romantic partners.  Finding a partner that is compatible with our attachment type makes those attachments more secure, longer lasting, and more fulfilling.  Oriented toward single adults more than couples.

I am fascinated by science books about human relationships and behavior.  One of the best I have read is Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me.  You can get the point by the title, and nearly two years after I read it, I still frequently bring it up in conversation.  Another interesting and more general book like this is Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

Book of this genre are best when they really are based in science, but they attempt to make the science real in lay person terms and ideas.  Mary Roach, who wrote Bonk, takes the tack of writing about the science through her own discovery.  She is a very present character in her books.  The authors of Mistakes Were Made were more traditional science writers.  They referenced studies and gave lots of examples but they were mostly writing from as academic narrators.

Some books get to science based or take a fairly simple idea and run it into the ground far past the attention spans of most readers (The Narcissism Epidemic I think fell into this trap.)  But ever since the original Freakenomics and some of Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell’s books became popular, this style of science/self-help/popular non-fiction came out, there have been many authors that are trying to find the secret to writing good books, that are actually useful and based in real science and understandable.

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Summary: A geologist is paid to survey Jamaica by a secret cabal of financiers that wants to take over the island and create their own country.  MI-5 enlists him to get to the bottom of the plot.

People familiar with the very popular Jason Bourne movies may be aware of the name Robert Ludlum.  He was the author of the original books.  He wrote 23 novels in his lifetime under a couple different pseudonyms and sold 300-500 million books in 33 languages.

I read the first three Bourne books a few years before the movies came out.  (The movies are very good, the books are very good, but they are only slightly related to one another in content.)

I knew the next Bourne movie was coming out soon so I decided to pick up another Ludlum book.  After the first three Bourne books all other Bourne books have been written by Eric Van Lustbader who licensed the characters. (Ludlum died in 2001 from injuries that he sustained in a fire.)

Ludlum likes to write about grand conspiracies, large corporations with secret agendas, shadowy spy agencies and other extremists.

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Summary: A former Irish military man is trying to escape his past by working as a bouncer at a seedy New York City club.  When a girl he likes ends up dead, his quiet life become much more messy.

I like to experiment with my reading.  My experiments lately have not been all that successful.

I am a fan of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books. And since I have finished the last of the Artemis Fowl books I thought I would explore Colfer’s first adult novel.

The first thing is that it feels like Colfer is trying to make up for having written young adult books all of his career by having the characters swear every two lines.  It is not completely outside the realm of possibility with these characters, but it feels forced and unnecessary.

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What goes on inside us can be very complicated. This book by Metro-Atlanta pastor, Andy Stanley, works to untangle and uncomplicate what goes on by breaking down the dangerous emotions that we have going on into 4 basic emotions: guilt, anger, greed, and jealousy. In each of these areas, he talks about why they are so dangerous and gives easily spelled-out solutions to overcoming these emotions.

If you are familiar with Andy Stanley’s preaching and writing style, then you already know that he is extremely good at making complicated or lofty ideas more accessible. The simplicity that he gives to our inner emotions is definitely the major strength of the book. We can (or at least I can), at times, be overwhelmed by everything going on inside and feel like there is nothing that can be done. Stanley states that excepting things the way they are is very dangerous as it effects not only ourselves but our families and others around us. So, he gives clear instructions that start with meditation and end with an action that is usually carried internally but sometimes externally.

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Takeaway: Prayer requires intention.

It has always seemed to me that the late 19th and early 20th century produced some of the best works on prayer.  EM Bounds, Harry Fosdick, RA Torrey, AW Tozer, Andrew Murry, Hudson Taylor and many others wrote some of the most read classics on prayer.

I have read a number of books on prayer from this era.  Many of them are quite good.  But many of them verge on moralism.  I do think there is something to sin separating us from God.  But it can go too far when the work of prayer depends upon our own work.  There has to be some partnership between us and the Holy Spirit in prayer.  But most of the time when I read descriptions of that partnership I am dissatisfied with the result.

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