Deep and Wide by Andy Stanley – Favorite of 2012

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Reposting because the Kindle edition is on sale for $2.99. (And the audiobook is only $3.99 with the purchase of kindle book.)

Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to AttendSummary: The Church at its core is about reaching people outside its walls for Christ.

Right off the top, I love my church.  Andy Stanley is my pastor.

If I had to recommend this book for only one reason it would be because this book, more than any other I can think of, casts the vision for why the church has to be focused on those outside the church. If there is one thing that Andy Stanley is passionate about (and writes about well) it is the fact that most churches need to do everything they can to reach people that are not in church.

I should not need to repeat statistics about the fact that most churches baptize very few adults because of conversion.  Or the recent statistic that says that most Christian adults believe that they are instructed to share their faith, but admit that they have not in the last year shared their faith with anyone.

I do not believe that the attractional church model is the only model for church.  In fact, I think that organic church and missional church are two other models that are very important to drawing in people that have almost no background in the church to Christ.

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Ubik by Philip K Dick

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Takeaway: Is anyone better at writing paranoid fiction than Philip K Dick?

Philip K Dick was brilliant and deeply troubled.  Which seems to make for a good science fiction writer.  Ubik, a 1969 novel, is set in 1992, when psychic powers are common.  Joe Chip works for a “˜prudence organization’.  Prudence organizations specialize in helping people or businesses protect themselves from psychics.  So they use anti-telepaths to protect people from having their minds read by telepaths or other anti-psychics to counter the variety of different psychic powers.

The other plot point you have to understand is “˜half-life’.  In this future, when people die, if they can be preserved in time, they can live in “˜half-life’, a sort of preserved life of the mind.  You cannot life forever this way, but your body is preserved and you can communicate with people outside your preservation chamber.  But at some point you sort of fade out and are reincarnated.

There is basically no way to discuss this book without spoilers, so if you don’t want any spoilers for this 45 year old book, you should stop reading because I am going to disclose pretty much the whole book.

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Among the Unseen by Jodi McIsaac (The Thin Veil #3)

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Summary: Cedar, the new Queen of Tír na nÓg, is trying to adjust to her new life and new powers.  But all the Unseen (the magical creatures of Earth) have started dying. 

The Thin Veil trilogy is one of the increasing numbers of books published by 47North or one of Amazon’s other publishing imprints.  And I think it is fairly similar to the others I have read, better than most self published books, but still not quite to the upper levels of quality of all books.

The Thin Veil trilogy follows Cedar, her daughter Eden, and others through discovering that the Celtic gods were actually an immortal race from another world, and that Cedar is the lost daughter of the last king.

Similar to Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series or the Nicholas Flamel series by Michael Scott, this is a modern look at ancient mythology.  But the Thin Veil series is adult fiction (although I would have read it as a teen and I don’t really have any content warning other than some sexual innuendo.)

This is a good light beach read fantasy.  Nothing heavy, but not terribly original either.

The main story arc of the third book is about the sickness and death of the magical creatures on earth.  There was an ancient spell that protected the creatures from humans as long as humans believed in them.  But now that humans have stopped believing in them, they have started dying.

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The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike #2) by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling)

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Another fast-paced, well-written whodunit from JK Rowling. It’s been 8 months since Cormoran Strike solved the murder of model Lula Landry, and now an Owen Quine, an author of mild success, has gone missing. He ultimately turns up dead–in a gruesome scene that mirrors the ending of his latest to-be-published novel. That novel is a non-subtle attack on numerous celebrities in the publishing world, and the list of those depicted who may respond with murder is a long one. Strike and his assistant Robin meticulously gather the evidence in pursuit of a killer with an impressive ability for planning and forethought.

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Resolving Everyday Conflict by Ken Sande

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Resolving Everyday ConflictSummary: Very practical and biblical look at the way we are to handle the everyday small and large conflicts in our lives.

Every month Christianaudio.com gives away a free audiobook.  Most of the time I do not get around to reading and reviewing the book before the end of the month.  But this month I am on the ball and have finished it before the month is even half over.

This is one of those books that I have already recommended to a number of people.  Everyone deals with conflict on a daily basis.  It may be small or large, but conflict is a part of life.

One of the reviews I saw on Amazon played on the biblical phrase in its title, “Where two or more are gathered there is conflict.”

Ken Sande starts with a simple definition of conflict, “Conflict comes because we see something we think we deserve and cannot have it.”

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Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

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Reposting my 2012 review of Fuzzy Nation because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.99

Fuzzy NationSummary: A first contact story with cute small fuzzy beings.

One of the things I really like is reinterpretations.  I like to listen to remakes of classic songs.  I like to watch remakes of movies and I like to read reinterpretations of old stories.  Some authors have make their entire careers from this type of writing.

As far as I know Fuzzy Nation is the first time that John Scalzi has tried it.  A classic 1962 book by Beam Piper is the inspiration for Fuzzy Nation.  I have not read the original yet.  (But the original is included in the Audible.com Audiobook and available for free on kindle.  So I will read it soon. Reviewed it here.)

The story starts on a foreign world.  Corporations have started buying up the exploitation rights for newly discovered worlds.  Jack Halloway is a surveyor that looks for new areas to mine.  Halloway is a loner and works hundreds of miles from the closest real settlement.

While away, his house is invaded by several small mammalian type animals.  As Jack gets to know them he realizes that there may be more to this world than anyone has realized.

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I Am a Church Member: Discovering the Attitude that Makes the Difference

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Reposting this review because the Kindle edition is on sale for $0.99.
I Am a Church Member: Discovering the Attitude that Makes the Difference by Thom S. RainerSummary: Short discussion oriented book about what being a church member really is all about.

Someone at Rainer’s publisher has been paying attention to the blogosphere. I Am a Church Member (on sale last week) is a good response to Rachel Held Evans CNN post of two weeks ago.

This is not the only good response, but it is a one method of responding. Evans, I believe, was trying to describe her desires for the church based on her frustrations with the dysfunction of the church. (I don’t think she was trying to ‘demand’ that the church change to fit her desires as some have charged.)

Thom Rainer instead is trying to start with a healthy church and discuss what it means to be a good church member to that healthy church.

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Evangellyfish by Douglas Wilson

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Summary: A skewering of some convenient targets.

I don’t read a lot of Christian fiction.  Most of it I think tries too hard to get a message across and not hard enough to tell a good honest story.  And I think that is the central problem with Evangellyfish.

Douglas Wilson is a good writer.  He strings words together nicely and is pleasant to read.  But from the beginning this seemed like a book that was just too safe and predictable.  It is held up as good satire.  And that does seem to be what he is attempting.  But I happen to really love some good satire.  Christopher Buckley is one of my favorite authors.  Coffee with Jesus, the Colbert Report, Jonathan Swift, etc have left us with a world of satire and so in an age that is cynical about pretty much everything, satire needs to be even more carefully crafted than ever.

What I think that Wilson missed is that the best satire is not only from the inside, but against your own side. Evangellyfish is safe in particular for Wilson. A review on Amazon that I read after I finished captured my thoughts exactly,

“The book bills itself as dangerous and edgy, but it came across to me as par for the Wilson course. Pop quiz: which pastor lives like a hypocrite, full of deceit and sexual sin: the mega-church pastor or the Reformed pastor? Of course the mega-church pastor! What sin does the youth pastor struggle with? Of course sexual sin! Which female character villainously manufactures a campaign of vicious slander: the reporter, the secretary, or the midwife? Of course the midwife! After all, she’s already guilty of near-manslaughter just for having babies outside the hospital (at least according to the book!). To anyone familiar with Douglas Wilson, none of these caricatures are surprising.”

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The Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

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Summary: An IT worker, tasked with reading company emails, falls in love with one of the people he is snooping on. Last year, Rainbow Rowell started getting a lot of attention for her 2012 book, Eleanor & Park.  In part, the attention was for winning several awards including the 2014 Michael Printz Honor Book for … Read more