Book Reviews

Takeaway: If you are thinking about joining the Catholic church this has many good questions, clarification and guidance.

I am on a project to understand more about the Catholic church.  I have two motivations around this, 1) a friend of mine recently converted and I am reading understand more about his decision and 2) I am convinced that much of the Evangelical opposition to Catholicism is rooted in ignorance of the Catholic church and not really on theology.  So I apologize to those that have no interest in Catholic theology, but I will probably read at least another half dozen books in the next couple months.

I have been paying attention to Christian Smith for a while.  He is a Sociologist specializing in Christian youth culture and maturation.  But I had not read more than a couple of articles (more about his research than by him) before I read his book Bible Made Impossible last year.  It was a massively frustrating book for me.  He points out many of the problems that Evangelicals have with the bible and its use.  In the end I think he is right that we need to read the bible with a Christological hermeneutic, but that is difficult to describe in practice.  I think he strongly hinted at his conversion in the book because coupled with the Christological hermeneutic is the need for a church voice (or authority) to regulate the reading (ie the Catholic Magisterium).

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Summary: A richly told story of early Puritans and the struggle against the New England wilderness and the missionary outreach to Native Americans.

This is my second Geraldine Brooks novel in as many months. The first book, People of the Book, supplements the known story of a real Jewish prayer books as it moves through European history. In Caleb’s Crossing, Brooks takes the small fragment of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard and creates a rich story around the known characters.

What was most interesting to me is that the entire books is written as a ‘Day Book’ or journal by a fictional woman (girl at the start of the book.) When I was in grad school I took an Early American Lay Piety class. In that class I read segments from a number of women’s journals. Many of them were recounting their sins and lives in order to prepare themselves for the possibility of death. Many of these were written just before childbirth because 1 in 5 women died in childbirth at this time.

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Summary: The conclusion of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series.

This is a good example of a books that was given away free on kindle, I liked the books and I have read all of the rest of the series (and paid for them).  I have also encouraged others to buy and read them.  Free, done right, can be a good business model for authors.

This is a young adult series that was very uneven, but I really wanted to love.  It has two twin teens that find themselves in the midst of a magical battle, realize they have latent magical powers themselves and realize that the world they thought of as boring and dull was actually full of history and magic.

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

Summary: The conclusion of the trilogy, with a little suspense thrown in for good measure.

I finished this almost a week ago now.  But I did not have a chance to write the review until now.  Now that I have some distance I am going to try to write up a response to the whole trilogy as well as the final book.

It is not possible to separate the book from the sex that is contained inside the book.  Even last night, the book came up, and the only topic was the sex contained inside the book, and whether it was just porn for women.

I briefly talked about why I thought it was not porn in the review for Fifty Shades of Grey, but I will mention one other point.  As a Christian, I believe that the only appropriate place for sex is within marriage.  Anything that detracts from sex within marriage is detrimental, and in many cases, should be considered a sin.

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Takeaway: History is important.

I do not need to be convinced that history is important.  It is a lesson that I have understood well and in spite of the fact that personally I don’t always learn from my history, I do want to pay attention to our national history.

It is amazing to me how often that not only average people get history wrong, and therefore base ideas or actions on incorrect data, but how often influential and powerful people get many of the same issues wrong.  People that if they don’t know better themselves, should have someone around them that can correct their ignorance.

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

Summary: Christian Grey and Ana Steele separated at the end of the last book.  They are in love, but can they be together?

I know am stepping out on a limb talking about the Fifty Shades series as a Christian.  I know there are many that will (and should) stay away from the books.  Here is a good blog post about why this blogger will not read them (I don’t entirely agree, but she raises some good points.)

(Note some plot spoilers if you have not read the first book.)  At the end of the first book, Ana decided that she could not deal with Christian’s anger and emotional hostility that he exhibited through BDSM and she left him.  I am sure it is not surprising that fairly quickly into the second book they reunite.

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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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