Bookwi.se – Page 132 – A few thoughts about books, kindles and Christianity

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

November 26, 2023January 27, 2014 by Adam Shields

Takeaway: Reading classic children’s books as an adult is an odd experience.

The first time I heard A Wrinkle in Time was from my 3rd grade teacher. I think his name was Mr Bohanna. I know he spent more time reading out loud to us than any other teacher I remember.

I have no idea how much of the book I really understood. I know that I read or re-read many of the books he read to us and he has some responsibility for my love of reading. I must have read A Wrinkle in time again on my own at least a couple more times before the end of high school. But I never attached to A Wrinkle in Time like I did to the third book in the series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I probably have read the third book at least a half dozen times and could have given you a pretty close summary even after more than 20 years.

Royal Flush by Rhys Bowen (Royal Spyness #3)

January 27, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: Third book in a series about a minor British royal that is also an accidental detective.

The Royal Spyness series is a fun light hearted mystery series. In the first two books, Georgie, the 34th in line to the throne in 1930s England, has found herself an accidental detective. What makes the series work, is the mix of humor, a dash of romance good character development and some mystery to move the plot along. Georgie’s family is penniless after her father gambled away most of the money and lost the rest in the stock market. Georgie has decided that it is better to try to make her own way rather than live under the rules and obligations of her sister-in-law (and henpecked brother) back in Scotland.

Making her own way in depression era London is not easy. Georgie tried to start a business of opening homes for wealthy homeowners that are coming from their country estates to their London homes, but no one comes to London in the middle of the summer and she has to find another way to make money.

Pattern of Wounds by J Mark Bertrand (Roland March #2)

January 24, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: A well written standard police procedural that stands out precisely because it is a Christian fiction book

Pretty soon I am going to stop saying I tend to not be a fan of mysteries. Because the books I have been enjoying the most lately are mysteries.

Pattern of Wounds is the second in a trilogy of books about a homicide detective in Houston. Roland March is a cop that has seen better days. But he feels like his work, as little as he likes it most of the time, does something.

In this book, a young woman is found floating in a pool, stabbed to death. Detective March is called and despite what everyone else says, he feels like this case has some relationship to an earlier case that he broke.

Overdrive Drops DRM on Audiobooks

January 23, 2014 by Adam Shields

As I said earlier, I have decided to not buy more than one book a month for the first six months of 2014. This is to force me to read some of the books I have already purchased, catch up on books that I said I would review months ago and to save a little … Read more

God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics by CS Lewis

January 23, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: Wide variety of essays, written versions of talks and letters compiled posthumously.

I have been on a Lewis kick over the last year. But I have definitely slowed down on my Lewis reading. God in the Dock was exactly what I needed to be inspired to pick more Lewis up again.

God in the Dock is a collection of 51 essays and a handful of additional letters. These are mostly on either ethics, apologetics (and really how and why of apologetics more than actual apologetics) and general theology.

With a collection like this, you can really see Lewis’ skill at speaking to his audience. A negative of this is that you see how Lewis covers similar topics with different audiences, so there is a decent amount of repetition, especially of his good one liners.

Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card (Ender #4)

January 22, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: Who knows how to summarize this book?

It is no secret that I am a big fan of Orson Scott Card. I love many of his books (and hate a few as well.) After listening to the Audioplay version of Ender’s Game and then re-reading Ender’s Game as well, I decided to go back and re-read Xenocide and Children of the Mind.

It has been a couple months but I finally finished Children of the Mind. And I didn’t dislike it nearly as much as I remembered. Part of it is the lowered expectations of previous memory. But I also can catch a glimpse of what Card was trying to do.

Originally Xenocide and Children of the Mind were supposed to be one book. But Card got carried away and had to split it into two books. There are just too many ideas and too much going on in these books.

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by GJ Meyer

January 21, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: A history of an incredibly tragic and costly war.

One of the things I love about reading is learning about things that I know almost nothing about. European history is one of those areas. So I picked up A World Undone as an audiobook during a sale late last year. This is not a small book (816 pages or 28 hours in audio) and I split it in half, listening to the first half, then finishing a couple other books before returning to finish it.

A detailed history book like this is hard to review. I am not adequate to evaluate the history (although it seems to be well regarded.) There were long battle scenes that were difficult to understand (and I frequently consulted maps to see what was being talked about.) But overall, A World Undone is a very readable overview of a huge and important war. It did not take long for me to realize that much of my little knowledge of the war was wrong. So what follows is really just some thoughts that I had about the book and the war.

It is incredible to me how large the standing militaries were prior to the war and how quickly (and how large) the drafts were. Russia alone started with well over 1 million troops. Tiny little Belgium had more than 100,000 troops before anything started. At the height of the war individual battles had nearly 1 million troops on each side.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

January 20, 2014 by Adam Shields

Summary: One of the last, maybe the last, human recounts the end of the world.

Last year I listened the audiobook of Margaret Atwood’s famous, and excellent, Handmaid’s Tale. Oryx and Crake is also a dystopian novel, but a very different one.

Both were narrated by a single character. Handmaid’s Tale is from a woman that is at the bottom of the power structure and trying to survive and more of a political story.

Oryx and Crake tells a story about the end of the world but it is more environmental and maybe evolutionary. But my biggest problem with the book is that I really had no idea what was going on with the book until about halfway through the book. The main character is describing a world and his experience of it, but we really don’t know who he is, what the world is or why everything so bad.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Book & Movie Review)

January 17, 2014 by All Old Users

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott is known by many to be an American classic. The novel, which takes place during the American Civil War, is about a family of a mother and four sisters. Because their family has fallen on hard times and their father is off fighting in the war, the story is about these young girls coping with poverty and the hardships of life with only each other and their mother there to guide them. Beloved by many, the novel can be seen as a comedy, romance, tragedy, and drama because the story contains aspects of a number of different genres and is based on real life.

Hobbit Lessons: A Map for Life’s Unexpected Journeys by Devin Brown

January 15, 2014 by All Old Users

There is a lot of hidden wisdom in Tolkien’s writings, seldom explicit (he hated allegory) but usually simple and always profound. His stories are famous for being “Catholic” without being religious, per se. The worlds and plots he crafted are simply soaked in his worldview; they grew out of it organically. This is a good thing.

“Hobbit Lessons” attempts to mine and condense Tolkien’s wisdom found in The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings. Unfortunately, most of the insights and lessons seemed strained, forced and trite–even banal at times. I felt like one could easily extrapolate the same ideas from many other works of fiction with little editing. Obviously, that is impossible to avoid entirely (Solomon was right that there is nothing new under the sun), but this book did so to the point where the insights hardly felt uniquely tied to the source material. In the places where the analysis and application were the strongest, I had encountered them elsewhere. Methinks publishing the book made good business sense due to the concurrent films, but I found it underwhelming.