Becoming Who You Are: Insights on the True Self from Thomas Merton and Other Saints by James Martin

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Becoming Who You Are cover imageSummary: God has created you to be who you are, not to be like someone else.

I picked Becoming Who You Are up on a whim.  I had some promotional credits from Audible and needed to use them on something cheap.  It caught my eye because it was about Thomas Merton.  I read Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain in college or soon after and enjoyed it but I have not picked up anything else by him, although I keep meaning to.

James Martin, the author has been on my radar as well, but again, just not enough time to read everything that pricks my interest.

Becoming Who You Are is short (98 pages, just over 2 hours in audio). It is a meditation on Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Jesus, and a few others. But really, it is Martin’s recounting of how these people helped Martin discover what it means to be himself.

Merton is known for his discussion of the True Self and the False Self.  The basic idea of the book is that to become the person that you want to be, you need to become the person that God made you to be.  Striving to become like Merton, Nouwen, or Mother Teresa will not make us a better Christian or more like what God wants for us, because God made us with a unique personality and purpose.

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Summer Knight by Jim Butcher (Dresden Files #4)

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1402884325_0.pngSummary: Everyone is out to get Dresden and all he is trying to do is save the world.

What makes the Dresden Files work is that Butcher knows when to bend the rules and when the rules need to be held.  Dresden is a Wizard.  A magical private eye, the only one, that works in Chicago.  The series is a mix of hard boiled PI and paranormal thriller.

In this fourth book of the series, Dresden, after defeating a plan to destroy him by the Vampire Court, is being brought up on trumped up charges by the Wizard Court (these are not legal courts, but essentially guild bodies).  A number in the Wizard court are not fans of his and are willing to let Dresden be turned over to the Vampires  (for interference) because Dresden saved a number of humans after the Wizard Court refused to act. (And if the Wizard Court does not turn him over, the Vampire Court will declare war.)

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The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (Book and Movie Review)

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This original book review has been updated with thoughts on the movie

The Fault In Our Stars is a novel by John Green about two teenagers who find love under very difficult circumstances. The two main characters, Hazel and Augustus, meet in support group for children living with cancer. The two can’t deny the attraction they feel for each other but they know theirs love is of the star-crossed variety. The story of their love is a beautiful and heart-breaking one that shows that even though they are coming to terms with their impending mortality that they are still simply teenagers in love.

A note about the author: John Green has had success as an online vlogger, as well as an author.  In 2007, John and his brother, Hank, who lived in different cities across the US, created a vlog series where they only communicated through video messages that were posted on YouTube. I believe that it is fair to say that the Green brothers are two of the original YouTubers. In 2010, they began hosting an annual gathering of youtubers called Vidcon and are very well respected by and connected with many of the big names on YouTube.

Even before I had read this book or even heard about John Green as a writer, I knew of him and his brother as a source for enlightening information on the Internet (the two brothers currently have a channel where they discuss history, science, and divulge other little known facts). I was pleasantly surprised to hear that John was lauded as being an excellent writer of young adult literature. If anything, I would have expected a “geek” to be a writer of sci-fi.  I continued to hear great things about his writing, especially this book, so I decided to give it a listen

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The Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis

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Re-posting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition of The Horse and His Boy is on sale for $0.99.  (Also The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is only $1.99)

The Horse and his Boy by CS LewisSummary: The only the Narnia stories not to include someone from this world magically going to Narnia.

After reading Alister McGrath’s very good biography of CS Lewis I decided I was going to read one CS Lewis book a week for a while.  I have a number of them, some I have read, some I have not.  Last week I read the Silver Chair, this week The Horse and His boy.

Like the Silver Chair, I really did not remember anything about this book except the broadest outline.  A boy who has been raised as a poor fisherman’s son, escapes from his home when he overhears his ‘father’ negotiating to sell him as a slave.  As he escapes, the horse of the man reveals himself to be a Narnian talking horse and they escape together. I had completely forgotten there even was a girl and another Narnian horse that they meet up with.

The Narnia books keep surprising me with their shortness.  It feels like they were so much longer when I was a kid.

Lewis again is using fiction to hide teaching.  In Silver Chair it was about knowing the word of God and following it.  Here it seems to be more about the love of God for those that are not his normal followers.  And a lot about pride and the nature of who is really the hero.

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The Dragon Business by Keven J Anderson

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Summary: A middle ages fantasy version of How I Met Your Mother.

Kevin J Anderson is one of those authors that seems to produce a superhuman amount of books.  He has published 120 book according to his bio.  Many of them are part of established worlds, Dune, Star Wars, X-Files, etc.  I have not read any of those books.

But I did really like his Saga of the Seven Suns series (or most of it.)  It was a good space opera series that got a little bogged down with too many story lines in the middle of the series, but it was still quite enjoyable.

I ran across Dragon Business when I saw that Anderson is starting a new trilogy set in the same world as Saga of the Seven Suns.  The Dragon Business was an Amazon Prime book so I could borrow it for free.

The first line of the description is, “King Cullin may be known as “the Dragon Slayer”, but he fears his son’s legacy will be as “King Maurice Who Speaks with Proper Grammar”.”  This is a book with very modern sensibilities, in the vein of the movie A Knight’s Tale.  Early in the book, the father is trying to tell the son a story and the son complains about the father switching between first and third person and omniscient narration.  It was pretty funny.  And there is a good theme of wanting a child to be everything you couldn’t be, but still wanting them to be well grounded and appreciate the things you appreciated.

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Now Audio and Text in the iOS Kindle App

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Amazon released a big update to the iOS kindle apps (iphone, ipod touch and ipad) yesterday.  This brings it in line with the Kindle Fire apps.

The main new feature is the ability to listen to the audiobook directly in the kindle app.  Previously you could sync your location in the kindle app and the Audible.com app, but you had to alternate between the two apps.  Now you can do “˜immersion reading’ and listen to the audiobook while seeing the words.

For most people, it is just a good feature to keep your place while alternating, but Amazon markets the feature to help kids learn to read.

I do like the syncing feature (although it requires you own a copy of both the audiobook and the kindle edition).  I briefly tried it out the iOS kindle app last night and this morning and it seems to work well.

Any book that you own both versions (there is often a discount if you purchase the kindle edition first) has a headphone symbol in your library.

If you want to try the feature out without spending much money, there is a list of $0.99 classics, where the kindle edition is free and the audiobook is only $0.99.

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Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues by NT Wright

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Summary: Wright at his best tells a new narrative about an old story. In this book too many issues cut short the narrative.

I am an unabashed fan of NT Wright.  I have read most of his popular level books (except the commentary series) and a few of his more academic oriented books.  I appreciate his focus on calling people to a fresh look at scripture and his ability to take scripture seriously while maintaining real academic quality.

But on the whole I was disappointed by this book.  It is a re-working of articles that have previously appeared elsewhere.  Most of them were commissioned by US journals or from chapters in books that were for US audiences, so as a Brit, he is most of the time consciously writing for the North American Evangelical audience.

His basic argument, like most of Wright, is that given historical realities of the original writers and audience, we modern readers tend to be missing the intended point of the original writers.

As with most Wright he needs to go through a fairly long narrative to be able to help the reader understand his point.  And I think that is why his full length book treatments are better than these shorter issue based chapters.

The problem is not so much the individual chapters, but that in almost every case, he has a better response in a full length books (and he frequently tells the reader that there is more to the story if you want to pick up another one of his books.) So his first three chapters on science and religion, the historical Adam and the resurrection were all better handled by his book Scripture and the Authority of God.

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