Start of the Best of the Year Lists

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I love reading through best of the year Book lists to see what I missed. I tend to read a lot of books that are a few years old and not that many that are brand new. So rarely have I read more than a handful of any of the best of the year lists. Instead I use them to add to my wish lists and pick them up in the future.

So far I have noticed four “˜Best of 2014′ lists. Let me know in the comments if you have come across others.

  • Goodreads Best Books of 2014 – this is a reader choice award list with over 3 million votes cast. It tends to be a bit of a popularity contest but still interesting. It also has a lot of different categories and includes the nominations not just the top books.
  • Huffington Post Books Best of 2014 – this is from the editors of the Huffington Post Books section. It includes Lila, which is my book of the year
  • Bookriot.com’s Best of 2014 – Bookriot is a very good Book oriented website. The contributors have a best of list and are asking readers to contribute their best books of the year.
  • Amazon’s Editor’s 100 Best of 2014 – Amazon will have a best selling of 2014 later, but this is the editor’s choice list.  The book of the year is Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. I picked it up and am half way through it.  I understand the choice but I am having a hard time making it through. It is a very sad and tragic book.

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Essays on the Church by CS Lewis

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Summary: Three essays about the church.

I have been working on a two month free trial of Scribd, a Kindle Unlimited and Oyster competitor that offers unlimited access to their library (a Netflix for Books) but also has 30,000 audiobooks. It is the audiobooks I am interested in. Scribe has a far better selection of audiobooks than Kindle Unlimited. And the ebooks selection at Oyster is roughly the same as Scribd’s.

I will post a review of the service in the next week or so. By that time I will have used the service for a month.

Included in the audiobooks is several short collections of CS Lewis’ essays. These are all included in the larger CS Lewis: Essay Collection and Short Pieces, which has 135 essays. That is a little too overwhelming to tackle. But these smaller collections are organized thematically and much shorter. This one on the Church is only 3 essays and 36 minutes long.

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Most Read Book Reviews in November 2014

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Takeaway: Someone that has found meaning in a new stream of Christianity may not be the best person to talk about the stream of Christianity that they walked away from. Over the past couple years I have been intentionally trying to read books about Catholicism and part of that has been reading several stories of … Read more

Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement

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“œThe best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl”.

From the very first page of “œPrayers for the Stolen”, Jennifer Clement grabs the reader and does not let go. This is the story of a young Mexican girl, Ladydi Garcia Martinez, growing up in a rural mountain village of Guerrero. The men have left to seek a better life in America. The women are left behind to raise their families and contend with the daily threats of drug traffickers who control the region. The girls are either disguised as boys or made ugly in order to avoid being stolen. Mothers dig holes in the ground for their daughters to hide in at the first hint of an approaching vehicle. It’s a life of constant fear. Hiding in a hole saves Ladydi but not her friend, Paula who is snatched from her home by a drug lord and is missing for over a year.

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Why We Run From God’s Love by Ed Cyzewski

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Book Review: Why We Run From God's Love by Ed Cyzewski - a short (19 page) ebook about a spiritually dry season. Worth readingSummary: Short book about the common reality of not wanting to seek after God.

This is a short little book, only 19 pages.  The cheap distribution of ebooks has made shorter works possible again and I think that is a good thing. Not everything worth reading or writing needs to be 200 pages.

Ed Cyzewski, author or co-author of five other books including Coffeehouse Theology, Hazardous and Divided We Unite, has written this short book about being distant from God.

I read this over two late night feedings of HG. It feels real and present to me.  We all free distant from God at times and it is good to acknowledge it.  (I have spoken before about seeking out a spiritual director this year because of my own spiritual dryness.)

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God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew with John and Elizabeth Sherrill

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Reposting this review from earlier this year because the kindle edition is on sale for $1.99.
God's Smuggler by Brother AndrewTakeaway: A Classic 20th Century Missionary Biography

Christians have been writing missionary biographies for a long time.  The purpose of these biographies is to raise interest in the work, to raise money for the work, to encourage Christian to evangelism and missions in their back yard and to build greater trust and devotion to God in the reader’s lives.

The first time I ran across Brother Andrew was a comic book version of God’s Smuggler originally published in the early 1970s.  I think I later read the full version of the book as a teen (but I may not have).

A couple months ago Christianaudio.com was giving away an MP3 of the audiobook of God’s Smuggler and I picked it up.

It is interesting that in light of my recent reading of God of the Mundane, I spent most of the book thinking about the relationship between special callings (like Brother Andrew) and the mundane calling of the majority of us Christians.

God’s Smuggler is the story of Brother Andrew, a Dutch Christian who became famous for smuggling bibles to Christians behind the Iron Curtain and into China and more recently for his work in the Muslim world.  God’s Smuggler spends a lot of time making Brother Andrew seem like an average guy (barely any education, married with several children, poor background) except for the fact that he trusts God to blind the eyes of border guards so that he can sneak bibles into the eastern block.

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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is novel that shows the reader what many Germans (Jewish, Communist or otherwise) might have felt and experienced during World War II. Liesel, a young girl at the beginning of the novel, is the center of the story and we mainly follow her around as she attempts to navigate through a very painful and trying time. Through the use of Death as the narrator, the author gives us a window into the soul of Liesel and the other characters in the novel and makes us think about how we, as humans, might have reacted if we were a “œregular” German in a time when our friends, family, and strangers were being mistreated and taken away to their deaths.

The value of humanity: this is the theme that kept going through my head as I digested this novel and its movie. It could be that my brain is more finely tuned to this line of thinking because I had also recently finished To Kill a Mockingbird (review soon-to-come), a novel that takes place during this same time but in the United States where there was also a group of people who were being devalued due to their “œrace”.  What is it that gives us, as humans, value and what is it about us that makes us think that we can assign different levels of value to others? What makes a German less of a German because they celebrate Hanukkah or have a last name that signifies their background is other than simply German? To Kill a Mockingbird reminds me that it is not just Hitler’s Nazis who are guilty of these crimes of devaluation. And, it makes me think am I guilty of devaluing other humans?

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The Three Dimensions of Reading from Alan Jacobs

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Alan Jacobs recently gave a talk at Vassar College about the three dimensions of reading attention. He posted his slides and some comments to give commentary. The important insight of the lecture is that when discussing reading, it is not good enough to talk about either the attention of the reader or the differences between … Read more

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

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I’m a big fan of actress and comedian, Amy Poehler. I admire her ability to completely immerse herself into any character she played on SNL with fearless abandon. As Leslie Knope on the hit show “œParks and Recreation”, Poehler is fantastic in giving the audience a complex but likeable character who is brilliant, bossy, demanding, loyal, fiercely dedicated and very funny. With these thoughts in mind, I was looking forward to reading her debut book “œYes Please”.

Unfortunately, I am disappointed. Part of my reaction was unfairly assuming “œYes Please” would be very similar to Tina Fey’s “œBossypants”. Setting that expectation aside, I still couldn’t fall in love with this book. From the very beginning, Poehler frequently laments to the reader on how hard writing a book is””which gave me the impression her heart was not into this project. Poehler utters this complaint so frequently throughout, I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s why fellow SNL alum, Seth Meyers, and both of Poehler’s parents wrote pieces for this book.

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Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Edward Craig

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Summary: How out we to live? What really exists? How to we Know?

Very Short Introduction series has been pretty hit or miss, as are most short introductions. It is hard to introduce a subject that has thousands of books and thousands of professionals working in the areas.

Philosophy is one of the better ones. My background in philosophy was pretty weak. I have tended toward theology instead of philosophy and while there can be some overlap, as I am getting older I feel my lack of background more and more often as I am reading.

Craig made some good decisions in structuring the books. He focused on the three questions in the summary as three of the questions that have been a part of philosophy since the beginning and continue to be important. Then he looks at Plato, Hume and an unknown Buddhist philosopher to illustrate how those questions were handled.

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