Book Reviews

Takeaway: No matter how serious the topic, sometimes it is good to just laugh.

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One of the chapters that I really enjoyed with David Dark’s Sacredness of Questioning Everything was about Questioning our Offendedness.  It is easy to be offended when people do not believe as you do or seem to make fun of what you consider essential.  David Dark has a useful understanding of being able to laugh at yourself and your beliefs.  Whenever you are offended instead of seeking after the understanding, hurt or incredulity that is often root of humor I think  it can help to build a bridge toward relationship instead of pushing people away.

I heard of Satan Loves You when a friend on Goodreads.com (a social network for readers) wrote a quick review of it.  It sounded like a fun bit of satire.  And I like satire and humor.  Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff and Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series are two very different takes on how different authors have attempted to make fun of religion through fiction.  (Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son is a negative example.)

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Takeaway: Quite a recovery for the series. Probably best book so far. Very interesting cliff hanger.

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As I get older, I have less and less interest in long series.  Maybe it is impatience.  Maybe it is justs that there are so many good books.  But I do still read series fiction.  In part it is because a long series can develop characters in ways that traditional single novels cannot.  But series are often very uneven.  After book four, I was almost read to drop this series.  I felt like book four was just treading water.

Book 5 was much better.  It really developed the story, gave lots of depth to the characters (I really like that the good and bad characters are not just two dimensional characters.)  The twins at the center of the story also were characterized better this book.  The last book I complained about the lack of motivation for the actions, but this book was much better about that.

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Takeaway: There is a reason that ‘lost novels’ were lost in the first place.  Only attempt if you are a very big fan of Heinlein.

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I found this on the Overdrive library system.  So I checked it out for free and I would advise that if you are going to attempt it, you find it for free as well.

It is not a good novel.  It was Heinlein’s first novel and it was never published while he was alive.  It has an amazing amount of material that he was able to later use in other books.

As one of the best 20th century Science Fiction writers, he made a huge impact on generations of writers and readers.  But in the 350 or so pages of text, there is only about 50 pages of story.  The rest is fairly pedantic explication of the world that we end up seeing in later works.

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Takeaway: Marriage can be scary, and that is not necessarily bad if it makes you think before getting married.

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I have not read or watched Eat, Pray, Love.* Honestly, I just have not had much interest in it.  But I was interested in this book.  While I DO NOT think that everyone should get married, I do like to read about marriage and how to strengthen those marriages that do happen.

Gilbert starts with a very unsentimental take on marriage.  She is broken and devastated over her divorce.  She meets a guy equally negative on marriage after his divorce.  And they live together with the stated commitment to never marry.

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Takeaway: I like the interesting take on the Eucharist and consumerism.  But the book as a whole was disappointing.

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This is my second book on a Christian view of economics in a week.  I am not sure why I read in themes.  The two books have very different methods.  In God’s Economy, Jonathan Hargrove-Wilson writes about his own experiences of conversion to ‘God’s Economy’ and how he has tried to live out that conversion.  In Being Consumed, William Cavanaugh writes as an academic theologian (although one that is most known as the author of Torture and Eucharist).

Both authors reject, simple free market/socialist dichotomies.  The first chapter of Being Consumed discusses what makes and does not make a free market. This is my favorite chapter because he directly takes on the understanding of the free market economy right off the bat.   His second chapter is about our relationship to goods.  The biggest weakness of this chapter is that Cavanaugh wants to talk about goods as only tangible things.  So when he discusses the movement away from making things, he means physical things.  Like many others, he mistakenly believes that ideas, intellectual property, creative acts are somehow different than cars, plows or clothes.  While it is a common understanding, it completely misses the economic reality of the digital world.  In general, I strongly agree with the theological reflections on work that are in this chapter.  But the dependence on the material-ness of work, makes it difficult to discuss in the real world.  It is not only new economic jobs that are not material, but jobs of teacher, pastor, musician, counselor that work outside the traditional creation of objects.

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Quick Review: Good biological near-term science fiction book.  The next phase of evolution is coming, quickly.

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Trying to save money, sometimes actually costs us more than we intended.  I found the audiobook of Darwin’s Radio on Overdrive library system and checked it out for free.  I obviously was not paying enough attention because it was an abridged version.  I hate abridged versions.  I want to read the whole story, not the highlights.  That being said, several of the comments on the unabridged books said it was too long, and many of the unabridged comments complained about the narrator.  The abridged version was narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, one of my absolute favorite narrators, so I am not completely disappointed.

The set up for the book is that there is a ‘virus’ that is identified that seems to only affect pregnant women, but only be carried by males.  What is odder is that only monogamous couples seem to ‘catch’ the virus.  The sickness causes miscarriage, followed by an immediate second pregnancy (without male involvement).  Over the first half of the book you discover that this is likely a evolutionary mutation to a new species of humans.  The ‘virus’ is identified in ancient neanderthals and may be responsible for evolution to modern humans.

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