Book Reviews

Note: Fifty Shades of Grey is a sexually explicit book.  Please be aware of that before purchase

Takeaway: In spite of the explicit sex, this relatively traditional romance novel is surprisingly insightful into human behavior.

Fifty Shades of Grey (and the following two books) are a publishing wonder. Originally published by a small press last year, it was a word of mouth and mostly illegal digital copies that lead to the books being re-released by a larger publisher in April.  In the last six weeks, the books have sold over 10 million copies in the US.  That puts with other books like Catch-22, Lovely Bones, and Wrinkle in Time.

The difference is that Fifty Shades of Grey is very sexually explicit and includes graphic descriptions of bondage and S&M.  There is a line of thought that suggests that romance novels are the female version of porn.  I do not agree with that line of thought but the popularity of Fifty Shades will likely rekindle that discussion, especially among Christians.

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Over the last couple months, I have been reading much more fiction than I have in recent years.  I am not sure if I am just burned out with non-fiction or I have may internal changes in my approach to reading or something else.  But the result is that I have expanded my reach into previously unexplored areas of fiction.

While I traditionally like young adult literature, I have read virtually no Christian young adult fiction outside of a few classics.  A friend of mine recommended this to me a while ago and I finally got around to reading over the weekend.

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Takeaway: The Bible was written to people very distant from us.  

Last year I undertook a project of reading about how to understand, interpret and think about scripture.  I read a number of books.  (Here is a summary post.)  However, this little book, just under 70 pages, suggests many of the same ideas that the hundreds of pages that I read last year did.

If you want to think about how to understand scripture, how to read it on your own and how think about translation and culture issues, this is a good introduction.  It is not perfect, I don’t agree with every word, but it has a lot of good advice and clearly presents many of the issues.

David Ker is a bible teacher in a seminary in Mozambique and a bible translator with Wycliffe Bible Translators.  He has the background.  This book is an edited form of a group of blog posts. So there is a number of topics, but they are dealt with in relatively short sections.  This is a book you can easily read in 60 to 90 minutes.

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Summary: Tris and Four continue to have a rocky relationship and continue to try and figure out why being Divergent, like they are, is such a threat to society.

Dystopian literature has a pretty specific set of themes and settings.  The rise of new young adult dystopian is a fad that will fade eventually.  But there will be several sets of books that I think will continue to be popular after the fad has passed.   Most visible is the Hunger Games series.  They have sold a gazillion copies and there is a movie.  I like Hunger Games have read them (reviews below).

A second series that I think will probably stick around for a while is the Divergent Series.  It is a trilogy and the third book is not scheduled to come out until Fall 2013.  So I cannot give it a final opinion, but I have enjoyed the first two.

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Takeaway: Everything we do changes our brains.  The repetitive action of computer and internet work is very effective at changing our brains.  This has implications for everything.

The Shallows is not a new book.  It has been out for about two years and many people, much smarter than I have had their take at it.  My short review, Carr has lots of good points, which tend to be lost amidst his hyperbole and cherry picked stats.

At the center of this argument is that people are reading books less. And he has some statistics from the Bureau of Labor to show this.  But as I talked about on this blog the National Endowment for the Arts study shows the largest increase in reading in decades (in all types of reading except poetry).  Right off the bat, this severely undercuts his argument.  The Library of Congress study came out after the book, so I don’t blame him for not using it.  But even if it had come out I think he would have disputed it.  Because in that study a novel is counted as reading a novel no matter what format you read it in.  But Carr does not believe that.

“An ebook is no more related to a book than an online newspaper is related to a print newspaper.” (By which, he means that they are not hardly related at all in the context of the quote.)

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Takeaway: The Reformation is very important to the history of Christianity and Europe, but the mythology of the Reformation is often overplayed and detrimental to understanding modern history.

This is the third book I have read in the Oxford Very Short Introduction series.  And I continue to be impressed.  I have done some reading on the reformation and taken two different History of Christian classes that included the reformation.  But even at only 135 pages of content, this book was able to add to knowledge of the Reformation.  The plan of this book is to debunk some of the myths while showing how much the different sides of the reformation really agreed.  Here is the thesis statement from the book:

Myths are not lies, but symbolically powerful articulations of sensed realities. It is probably safer to believe that all the myths about the Reformation are true, rather than that none of them are. The goal of producing a totally unmythologized account of the Reformation may be an unachievable, or even an undesirable, one. Nonetheless, this little book ““ drawing on the best, not always impartial, modern scholarship ““ will attempt to explain what sort of phenomenon the Reformation was, to assess its impact across religious, political, social, and cultural areas of life, and the character of its legacy to the modern world.

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Summary: A post-World War II boarding school is the setting of a classic coming of age story.

I have read a number of Madeleine L’Engle books over the last year or so.  Originally I wanted to re-read the Wrinkle in Time series.  Which led me to the last two books in the quintet that I had not read previously.

I also ran across Camilla, which along with And Both Were Young, are her two best known books writing in the late 1940s.  They are both classic coming of age books.  More about what it means to grow up and become and adult than about sexual discovery (which is what coming of age books have come to mean recently.)

Both books dealt with very serious issues and I was surprised that young adult literature of the time allowed.  Camilla included issues of divorce, suicide, affairs and more.

And Both Were Young is set in the last 1940s in Switzerland.  Philippa (Flip) is sent to boarding school there.  Her mother recently died in a car accident and her father is an artist that is going around the world to document children that have been affected by war.

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