Book Reviews

The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

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This is an unusual book.  First of all, the in the US there is a pretty clear anti-drinking message by the church, so anything that merges drinking and God is usually suspect.  The first chapter of this book does a good job giving a history of beer, civilization and the church.  I think it makes a … Read more

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and Blue Like Jazz: The story of a story

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  When I started reading “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” I had never read a book by Donald Miller (or at least I didn’t think I had. When I was looking at Donald Miller’s Wikipedia page I realized I had read his first book “Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance“.) Many, many … Read more

Watch on the Rhine by John Ringo

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Here is the good part, Baen is a great publisher and believes in DRM-free books.  They sell their books at reasonable prices and give a lot of them away free. What is the bad part?  This book is very predictable and not worth reading. I wish Ringo had skipped a few of these books and made … Read more

Sacred Marriage

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This is one of the books that my wife and I have used for an read together before we go to bed book. This is not a standard Christian marriage book. In fact, this is as unique a Christian marriage book as I have read. There are some parts I have issues with, but the … Read more

Fledgling by Octavia Butler

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Fledgling: A NovelSummary: A very different vampire story than the recent Twilight/True Blood variety.

Do you get tired of me saying, “This is an author that I have been wanting to read for a while”?  Because I am a bit tired of writing it.  But it is true.  Butler was a unique writer. She was an African American female science fiction/fantasy author. She wrote African American characters into Science Fiction and Fantasy.  She was also the first (only?) science fiction author to receive a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.

Fledgling was Octavia Butler’s last book.  Butler died at the age of 58 in 2006 (of a stroke), a year after this book was published.

Fledgling is a vampire book.  Not like Twilight or True Blood, but still very much vampire.

In this world of vampires, you do not become a vampire.  You are born a vampire.  Vampires, (they call themselves Ina), are a different species from humans.

The Ina need humans for blood and form a symbiotic relationship.  The humans willingly form a community around a particular Ina and in exchange the Ina venom helps humans heal and live longer.  A human ‘symbiant’, can live to 200 or so years old.  While the Ina often live to 500-600 years old.

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Good books mixed up in a bad book

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Again it has been a while since I have posted.  I have participated in two group blog discussions, one about the book Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps and one about Mad Church Disease by Anne Jackson.  I recently bought four books on prayer.  I have been reading a bunch of books on prayer and intercession, … Read more

Mad Church Disease Chapter 6

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This post is based on the sixth chapter of Mad Church Disease. There are both previous and later blog posts for this blog group book discussion. This is a hard chapter to blog about. The previous chapters are primarily describing the issues with us as people and the church as an institution that lead to … Read more