2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke

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2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C ClarkeTakeaway: The unknown may be the greatest horror of all.

I am a fan of science fiction.  And I know I have seen 2001 at least twice.  But I did not really remember much about it outside of the main story and the beautiful space shots.  So when it was the Kindle Daily Deal last week I picked up the kindle version.  And since the audiobook was discounted to $1.99 with purchase of the kindle book I picked that up as well and alternated between reading on kindle and listening to the audiobook.

(If you have a kindle and like audiobooks you really should try whyspersync.  It is Amazon’s ability for you to move seamlessly between your kindle and audible.com audiobook without losing your place. I have started using it quite a bit.)

This edition of the book opens with an introduction by Arthur C Clarke.  He read the introduction in 2000 (when he was 82 and 8 years before he died.)  In audio, it is actually him reading the introduction and his age is evident.  I had no idea that the book and the movie were written together at the same time.  Clarke and Kubrick made changes to each in order to incorporate elements from one into the other.  But there are differences and I will go back and watch the movie soon.

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Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose

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Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose is a play that recounts the deliberation of a jury in the murder trial. The jury is tasked to determine the future of an 18-year-old boy who is accused of killing his own father. At first, the case seems pretty obvious, but as the details of the case are discussed we discover that everything is not as open-and-shut as it seemed. The jury learns that biases and prior experiences play a role, unwittingly at times, in how facts are perceived and how events are interpreted. Tempers flare as the innocence and guilt of the defendant is discussed and a unanimous verdict must be found.

Reginald Rose originally wrote the story as a teleplay for a CBS show called Studio One in 1954. In 1957, it was turned into a film in which Henry Fonda produced and starred as the main protagonist. Other notable cast members are Lee J. Cobb as the main antagonist. Jack Klugman, who went on to star in The Odd Couple, was the sober jurist who grew up in a slum just like the defendant. Martin Balsalm, the foreman, played the unfortunate detective in Hitchcock’s Psycho. In doing research, I learned that while I didn’t recognize John Fielder, juror #2, in too many movies, his voice may seem familiar because he has voiced the character of Piglet for many years. Jack Warden, sports loving juror #7, played the sweet grandpa in the Sandra Bullock romantic comedy, While You Were Sleeping (I definitely loved that movie in middle school). Needless to say, the excellent cast helped to add depth to the rich script.

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Mere Christianity by CS Lewis

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Summary: A classic book of apologetics.

I know it is near heretical in some Evangelical circles, but I have never read Mere Christianity before.  As you are reading this I should by Kayaking around a small island in Georgian Bay of Lake Huron.  This is my 20th trip with my guy friends from College.

For the past couple years I have conned them into reading a book prior to the trip to give us something to discuss.  Since I have some influence and there are two pastor’s kids, a missionary, and a hebrew professor in the group we read theology.  We have read Scripture and the Authority of God and The Lost World of Genesis One (which sparked online discussions of The Bible Made Impossible and Incarnation and Inspiration).

This year we decided to read Mere Christianity.  I think only one of us had previously read it.  Prior to the trip I listened to it on audiobook and then re-read it on kindle on the plane ride.

I understand somewhat why it is a classic.  In part, because huge sections of the first part (the more general apologetics section) I have heard in one form or another. So Lewis’ arguments are either standard arguments about God or those that are original have been repeated so much over the past 60 years that they sound standard.

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Citizen Insane by Karen Cantwell

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Summary: A suburban housewife and her two friends find out that their neighborhood struggles (PTA, school year books, crazy neighbors, etc) all might be connected to a much deeper problem than they could have expected.

I am very careful with my purchases of books.  Because I aways have a few (hundred) books that I could fall back to reading from my library, I tend to only buy books when they are on sale or I really have a specific interest.  But I also tend to always pick up free Audible credits or promotional books.  Recently there was a $10 promotional credit for Audible.  And I used it to buy audio companions to books that I already had on Kindle, but I had not ever gotten around to reading.  I try to be adventurous because after all I didn’t pay for the credit, I might as well go out of my standard reading practice.

As I have said recently, nothing lately has really been pricking my interest.  Usually when I get in this mood I need to find something funny.

Citizen Insane was billed as a funny cozy mystery.  It is about Barb, a suburban housewife, mother of three and wife of an FBI agent that is a dead ringer for George Clouney.  This is the second book in a series (didn’t realize that when I picked it up, but the first book, Take the Monkeys and Run is free on Kindle). The books in this series are relatively short (less than 200 pages) and funny (almost farcical) look at suburban life.

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Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein

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Summary: It is ignorance, not knowledge that really drives science.

Stuart Firestein is a professor of Neurobiology and a researcher.  At one point he realized that he loved doing research and coming up with new things to research and questions to ask.  But when he taught his upper level undergrads about Neurobiology he tended to focus not on the questions and what was unknown and where the science was going, but on the facts.

He realized that this gave students the impression that what was important was gaining a foothold in the facts so that they could grasp the concepts of the field.  But what he needed to be teaching them was not the facts (although they did need basic information and concepts that were important), he needed to be teaching them wonder and sparking the creative ideas of his students and helping them understand that no matter how much we will learn, that the very fact of learning opens up new areas of ignorance so that there will never be a point when science has solved all the questions of particular field.

The book is split into two large sections, the first is a description of what Ignorance is all about. Eventually, Firestein started teaching a class on ignorance. He would bring in prominent scientists in their field and talk about what was unknown, what areas were driving their research, what things that scientist would love to know, but can’t because of limitations of equipment or observation.  Essentially, the scientists talked about all the areas of their field that they were ignorant of and how that was driving their science.

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Waterfall: A Novel by Lisa Bergren (River of Time #1)

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Summary: A surprisingly prepared 17 year old gets sent back into time to 14th Century Italy.

I have a pretty high tolerance for cheesy stories. But Waterfall really pushed the cheesy factors. I was pretty tired of all the teen slang that felt like it was included to try and be more authentic, but ended up being annoying and making the book feel younger and less professional.

Gabi is a 17 year old daughter of a pair of archeologists. Her father recently died and she and her sister and mother are on site in Italy trying to excavate an ancient tomb. While exploring the tomb, Gabi and her sister touches the wall and somehow Gabi gets sent back to 14th century Italy. When she walks out of the tomb she is in the midst of a small battle between two neighboring keeps (and her sister is no where to be found.)

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Sort of Off Topic – The John Yoder Problem

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John Howard YoderThis is out of place in my normal book blogging.  But over the past several months I have been thinking about the John Yoder problem (or to a lesser extent the AW Tozer problem that I discussed on my review of Tozer’s biography.)  What prompted me to write this post was a very good article in The Other Journal about Yoder and the problems of his legacy.  (Although I started writing this about a week before Mark Driscoll was removed from Act29, so there are some parallels there as well that I did not intend when I started the post.)  The actual issues, while I think grounding them in some real cases makes them more concrete are not particularly about Yoder, or Tozer or anyone else.

In simple terms, the John Yoder problem is what do we do with Christian leaders, authors and pastors that sin.  Of course all Christians sin.  But there is sin that would seem to disqualify a person for public ministry based on some of the implications of I Timothy 3:2 and the surrounding passage, but also examples from the Old Testament with Eli’s sons and others.

This is not a topic I take at all lightly. But I believe it is a rejection of the teaching of scripture to allow pastors and other Christian leaders to remain in office while flagrantly sinning.  The issue, of course, is what the line from normal sin that is part of the human condition and the sin that is such that should remove a person from office within the church.  Different parts of the church would highlight different sins as disqualifying, which is again part (and benefit) of the problem of a diverse church.

As an example, I think that AW Tozer was probably a bad father and husband, but not someone that I think should have been removed from ministry. It would have been appropriate for a community of people around Tozer to attempt to help him become a better father and husband, but that is not the same thing as removing someone from office.

The example of Yoder is clearly different.  Yoder, from evidence that has been gathered over a long period of time, was sinning in a way that deserved some type of censure and real rebuke.  The accusation is that he sexually harassed women, exposed himself, and abused his power with female students. It is likely that he also coerced women into having sex (which may have crossed the line to rape, although no charges were ever filed with police).

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Time’s Echo by Rysa Walker (Chronos Files #1.5)

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Time's Echo by Rysa WalkerSummary: A short novella (about 100 pages) from an alternate perspective to keep interest in the series until the next book comes out later this fall.

I really do feel for authors.  It used to be that authors could write a book a year, or maybe even a book every couple years.  But these days that does not seem to be enough for many.  Publishers and fans seem to want authors to put out a couple books a year or at least have the first couple books ready to published is quick succession.

Timebound was a KindleFirst book in December, but was officially published in January 2014.  Then Time’s Echo is a novella that was published at the end of April.  And Time’s Edge is the second full length book scheduled to be released Oct 21, 2014.  So two full novels and a novella published in the span of just 10 months.

The Chronos Files is a young adult time traveling series.  Kate is a high school student at the beginning of the series and she finds out that her long lost grandmother is actually a time traveler from the future.  And Kate has to learn how to use the time traveling medallion to stop her grandfather and aunt from changing history and maybe making her family cease to exist.

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Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (Book and Movie Review)

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Reposting this review from earlier this spring because the audiobook is on sale today only (Aug 13) for $1.95.
Breakfast at Tiffany's Book Review Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of Truman Capote’s best well known works.  It is considered a novella as it is quite short with a listening length of just under three hours.  The short novel is about an enigma of a young girl, Holly Golightly, who is residing in New York making a living by hanging out with rich men.  This “œAmerican geisha” (Capote’s words) lives downstairs from this unnamed narrator whom she calls Fred because he reminds her of his brother.  Through the narrator’s interactions and conversation with Holly we slowly learn more and more about the contradictions in her life and what makes her a “œreal phony”.

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Mercury Falls by Robert Kroese

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Summary: Did you read Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett? Well this is basically the same plot.

I am trying to give KindleUnlimited a good shot.  As I am posting this, I have finished nine KindleUnlimited books since it was released a bit over three weeks ago.

What is good about a program like KindleUnlimited is that it have a very low threshold to try something new.  There is no cost for the individual book, just the monthly subscription.

Mercury Falls is one of the better reviewed fantasy books on KindleUnlimited and it has free audiobook narration included.

The bad part of subscription book programs is that there is a lot of junk you need to sort through in order to get to the good stuff.

Mercury Falls is not a bad book. I actually enjoyed it, but if you have read Good Omens, it really is basically the same book.  (My review of Good Omens.)

In both Armageddon is about to happen. In Good Omens, an angel and a demon work together to stop it from happening.  In Mercury Falls, an Angel (Mercury, he also was mistaken for a god by the Greeks and Romans) and a human reporter (Christine) decide to try and stop Armageddon.

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