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

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God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and EthicsSummary: 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.

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

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Children of the mind by Orson Scott CardSummary: 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.

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

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

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.

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Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

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Oryx and Crake by Margaret AtwoodSummary: 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.

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

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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.

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

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Hobbit Lessons: A Map for Life's Unexpected JourneysThere 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.

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Bruno, Chief of Police: A Novel of the French Countryside by Martin Walker

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Summary: A small town police chief in rural France must protect his community, in more ways than one.  

Seven years ago, my wife and I went to France to visit friends that live live there.  We loved France.  More than the wonder of Paris, which was incredible, we enjoyed time in the relatively small town that our friends lived in. Walking to get bread in the morning with gardens and old homes and churches on nearly every corner we felt why Europe and US are very different culturally.

Bruno feels very French.  He is interested in food and wine (and we hear quite a bit about that.)  But he is more interested in the people of his community.  This community has adopted him and he loves them.

Bruno is the police chief of a very small community in France.  There has been a vicious murder, not only the first murder in recent memory, but one that exposes some of the nasty undercurrents of the community.  Bruno has the job of not only solving the murder, but protecting the town from outsiders that have no interest in it.

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Theme Testing

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I am not much of a design guy.  I like to write my blog not tweak it.  So it has been over two years since I have had a major re-design of the blog.  A friend of mine is working on a new Theme design and needed beta testers.  So I offered to test it … Read more

Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant

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Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira GrantSummary: A jungle of confused polemics.

I’m not exactly sure who the author is trying to convince in this short book. She claims to want to argue that sex work (a broad category that covers prostitution, stripping, pornography, and anything else in the skin trade) is a perfectly legitimate moral activity. Unfortunately, most of the time she simply assumes what she’s trying to prove and then moves on to secondary arguments that simply aren’t controversial if the reader grants her premises.

Of course the solution to social discrimination and inconsistent enforcement of the laws against prostitutes would be legalization–that is, assuming sex work is truly just like any other banal activity, economic or otherwise, such as nursing nanny work, hair braiding or babysitting. She makes these comparisons often, yet there’s little content here to actually explain why sex work isn’t immoral, let alone why it shouldn’t be treated like any other economic act–apart from pragmatic soundbites unlikely to gain a hearing with any but those who already share her worldview.

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