The following is my list of the books and their movies that I enjoyed reading and watching the most this year. In looking back over my reviews for these books, I recall that I also had a lot of fun doing the background research for these books. Many of them had a rich history surrounding the book or the making of the movie, or there is simply a lot of chatter about the book and its movie to look over. The list is chronologically ordered according to when I reviewed them. Click through to the reviews to see them again. (Adam’s fiction list is tomorrow and non-fiction Wednesday).
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Although the validity of the story has been brought into question by the geisha whose life the story is based on, both the book and its movie beautifully, tragically, and intriguingly describe what life might have been like for a woman in Japan during the early to mid 1900s. This title stands as a favorite because I was impressed to find that the book painted just as wonderful picture in my mind as the movie does.
Dr. Sleep by Stephen King
As a fan of Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Nicholson, it is no surprise that I loved the book and movie, The Shining, which preceded this book. This book, which is unique on my list because it doesn’t have a movie associated with it yet, was amazingly just as solid as the book that came before it. In a world where the majority of sequels fall flat or are an excuse for the writer/director to get another money grab, this book was awesome in the fact that it could easily stand-alone and still be great. I guarantee that this book will be made into a movie.
Howl’s Moving Castle by Dianna Wynne Jones
My husband introduced me to Japanese animated films, specifically Studio Ghibli movies, and I have to say that, for the most part, they do not disappoint. I was curious to see if the book that Howl’s Moving Castle was based on is as fun to listen to as the movie is to watch. While the book was different from the movie, they are both great in their own ways. And, those differences don’t detract from each other but they add to each other’s greatness. I was also excited to discover that this book and its movie would be a great way to get a younger listener interested in literature.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
This title comes with a great deal of nostalgia for me as it is one of my mother’s favorites and I even listened to the movie’s soundtrack on record a bunch growing up. I really enjoyed listening to this book because it was narrated by the great Michael C. Hall, who starred in Dexter, a favorite show of ours. What most surprised me was how rich of a back-story I discovered when I dug into the life of the author of this short and sweet story. The research led me to want to watch the movie, Capote, which is based on Truman’s life and was pretty amazing in and of itself.
The Zimzum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage by Rob and Kristen Bell
Summary: A decent (quick) book on the Christian understanding of marriage without a lot of Christian language.
I generally don’t like reviewing books that have a lot of controversy. So I have not reviewed many of Rob Bell’s books (but I liked Velvet Elvis and Sex God). I went to college with Rob and Kristen (they were a year in front of me) so I have paid attention to Rob’s ministry. (I didn’t really know Kristen, but Rob is one of those people that it is hard not to know who he was at college.)
I originally did not have any interest in picking up The Zimzum of Love. There are a ton of marriage books being jointly written by well known pastor couples recently. I tend to avoid book trends because they are often following the trend, not writing good books.
Books and Culture’s parody review of Zimzum of Love did not help my desire to read the book, although I don’t think that the parody was all that helpful and after reading the book I didn’t think it was all that accurate either. (Although it does have a few good points.)
Then I read Richard Beck’s review on his blog Experimental Theology (I am a regular reader). As you might expect, it is like Beck and Jason Hood (the Books and Culture reviewer) had read two very different books. But mostly it felt like Hood was taking issue with Rob as a persona than really dealing with the book as a book.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters and Papers from Prison”: A Biography by Martin Marty
Summary: The history of how and why this Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison spread so widely and became so influential.
At this point I have read far more about Bonhoeffer than by Bonhoeffer. That is not to say I haven’t read Bonhoeffer, but to say I have read a lot about Bonhoeffer, especially over the past several years since writing on him seems to have exploded.
I read Letters and Papers from Prison in college soon after I first read Cost of Discipleship and somewhat before I read Love Letters from Cell 92.
It is actually the now out of print Love Letters from Cell 92 that really humanized Bonhoeffer for me and moved him from abstract theologian to real live human person. About the same time as I was reading Love Letters from Cell 92, I started University of Chicago Divinity School and had Martin Marty as a professor.
So Now I Have a Kindle, What Do I Do With It? How to Get Started
So you received a new Kindle for Christmas. Now what do you do. Below the jump you can find out about borrowing books, importing books, audiobooks, tracking the prices of kindle books, finding new books, getting your questions answered and more. This post focuses on Amazon Kindles, but some of the content is also true for Amazon Fire Tablets or other eink readers as well.
Free or Sale Kindle Books
One of the first things you want to do is check out free books. There are a lot of free books, usually 500-600 free books a day (although many repeat at least quarterly). You have a couple of options to find free ebooks. The ones I most I recommend are ereaderiq or ereaderperks. Both will send you a daily email of 30 to 40 recommend kindle books divided into genre, with a short summary and a book cover. You can customize the email to the genres that you are most interested in.
There are also blogs that focus on sale books. Gospelebooks and VesselProject focus on Christian books but there are a variety of others including ereaderiq that post about kindle book sales.
You can also follow Bookwi.se. Bookwi.se posts a free Christian Kindle books nearly every day and several days a week I post about sales. Project Gutenberg and Christian Classic Ethereal Library are excellent for finding public domain books. Baen Publishers maintains a free library of ebooks if you enjoy science fiction or fantasy.
Amazon’s message board system also is a good place to find free or sale books.
Borrow from Your Library
Bookwi.se has a post about how to borrow books from the library. It is fairly easy, free, and most public libraries are now participating. If you like audiobooks, borrowing from the library can help you get discounts on audiobooks from Audible.com
Borrow from other Kindle Users
Amazon got into the borrowing and lending of kindle books fairly late in the game. But they learned from others and made the process very easy. Here is a post about how to Borrow or Lend a book. Many people do not know a lot of other kindle owners, so Kindle book sharing sites popped up. Bookwi.se has reviewed two. Lendle and Booklending. I prefer Lendle, but it requires you to earn credits by offering up books to be loaned (most free books are lendable, so you can get some free books to build up some credits). Booklending allows you to borrow without lending, but does not have as many books. However, there is not a good reason to not check both sites if one site does not have a book you want to borrow.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Movie and Audiobook Review)
To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic and well-beloved fiction novel by Harper Lee. The novel is from the perspective of a young girl, Scout, growing up in a small town in Alabama during the 1930s. Aside from experiencing some of the usual adventures of a small child during that time, Scout and her brother Jem must navigate life as their father, Atticus, defends a black man who has been falsely accused of raping a white woman. Seen in some way as a story within a story, the trial shows the true character of Atticus and how some bravery and standing up for one’s beliefs and dignity really does matter.
To Kill a Mockingbird is not a perfect novel but it is about as good as it can get. It is my impression that critics of the novel had to really search for problems with the novel. Apart from the social lessons to be learned from the novel, the true beauty of the novel is how wonderfully descriptive and visual Harper Lee makes it. I would credit this aspect in part to the fact that many of the characters and the events in the novel are autobiographical. It is a lot easier to be descriptive about people you know and events that you experienced. I am not sure whether I read the novel or saw the movie first, but, when reading the book this time, I would have sworn that some of the scenes from the book had made it into the movie that didn’t because they left such a strong visual impression when reading them. This might be like the chicken and the egg conundrum where the question is was the book so well-written that it was easy to visualize the scenes as if they were a part of the movie, or were the actors in the movie so adept at portraying the characters of the book that it made it easy for me to visualize them in the scenes from the book.
How to Gift Kindle Ebooks
Because of all the sales, I wanted to repost about how to give a kindle book as a gift. First you go to the kindle edition of the book. Then look below the regular Buy Now button and click “˜Give as a Gift’. That brings up another screen that allows you to do one of … Read more
Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense by Francis Spufford
Summary: Maybe, at least for some, the right apologetic is not about logic, but emotion and experience.
It would be hard to over emphasize how many people I respect have been fans of this book. It has been reviewed (and I think generally reviewed accurately) in Books and Culture (long), Christianity Today (short), the New York Times, the Telegraph and the Gospel Coalition (critical but appreciative). (Although not everyone likes it.)
The central idea of the book is that given our culture (and Spufford is writing to a secular UK here, not primarily to an Evangelical US) the idea that we should try to prove our Christianity through logic or proof is the wrong move.
As Alan Jacobs says in the opening of his review, apologetics should be more concerned with rhetoric than dialectical tasks, in other words, follow the interest of the listener, not your own desire to be right.
So Spufford is concentrating here on why, for him, Christianity can be an emotionally right choice, even if he can’t prove it scientifically or logically as many of the New Atheists are challenging Christians to do (or vice versa).
Spufford starts with trying to find the shared belief that we all have about this life. That central shared idea is HPtFtU, which stands for the Human Propensity to F*ck things Up (and he abbreviated most of the time.) Christians call this sin, but I think Spufford is right that calling it the HPtFtU feels more accurate. We can debate the reality or transmission method of original sin, but pretty much no one can debate that HPtFtU is real. We all have been a part of it and we all have seen others participate in it.
Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II by George Weigel
Takeaway: Regardless of whether you are Protestant or Catholic, John Paul II was important.
Last year, I picked up Witness to Hope for Kindle when it was on sale. But the size and time commitment kept me from actually reading it. As much as I would like this blog to not influence my reading, I often don’t pick up long books because of my attempt to keep up, with assistance from several regular contributors, a 5 review a week schedule.
So, I do not often make room for a biography that clocks in at more than 1000 pages. At the same time, I tend to hate abridged audiobooks. If it was important enough to put in the book initially, it was probably important enough to read later.
But when I noticed that the audiobook of Witness to Hope was in the Scribd audiobook library, even though it is abridged, I picked it up.
The actual content is just under half of the original book. And it feels like an abridgment. The biggest problem with the abridgment is that it focuses too much on the political life of John Paul II as Pope and not enough on the spiritual influence. Spiritual is undoubtedly there, but when you compare the time devoted, it seems less important.
Christianity Today’s Best Books of 2014 List
Christianity Today released their Best Books of 2014 list. Like normal they have several categories and with a couple of ties, there are 23 books on the list. The book of the year is Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith by Jen Pollock Michel. It is one among several of this … Read more
Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You by John Ortberg
Summary: It is not a violation of faith in Christ’s work, to pay attention to our own soul.
Lately I have been increasingly frustrated with Christian Living books. Particularly their introductions. I think I first noticed this strongly with James Bryan Smith’s The Good and Beautiful Life, but I have noticed the problem with a number of other books as well.
Maybe it is my problem and not one else need pay attention. But if I have to diagnose a more general problem, it is that for some reason Evangelicals seem to need to over compensate in their introductions for the general feedback that they think they are going to hear. And worse that overcompensation seems to be particularly focused on clichés. The books that are am frustrated with often have some really good content, once I get past the general introductions. But several times I have been so frustrated with the cliche-ridden introductions that I have had to force myself past them.
Soul Keeping has this problem. I really love that John Ortberg is writing a book that is as much about a tribute to the work of Dallas Willard in his life as it is about soul keeping as a subject. But honestly, I don’t need to be convinced that it is important to think about and work on my own spiritual health. I have been seeing a spiritual direction for over a year now. I read Christian books incessantly. I go to church regularly and while far from perfect, I really do think I am paying attention to my spiritual life for a lot of good reason. And the primary reason I don’t need to hear about the importance of spiritual care is that I grew up as an Evangelical (as would most of the readers).