A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

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Reposting this 2016 review from Bookwi.se contributor Vikki Huisman because the Kindle Edition is on sale today for $4.99 (Audible.com Audiobook is $4.99 with purchase of Kindle Edition.) The opening chapters of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara seem pretty straight forward. Characters graduate from college, work at entry level jobs for low pay, live in … Read more

Sacred Texts of the World (The Great Courses) by Grant Hardy

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Sacred Texts of the World (The Great Courses) by Grant Hardy book reviewSummary: An overview of many of the sacred texts of world religions.

After my last positive experience with a Great Courses audiobook, I picked up several more when they were on sale last month.  The first of those that I have listened to is Sacred Texts of the World by Grant Hardy.

As Professor Hardy notes in the opening, this is an introduction. As someone that know a good bit about Christian scriptures, I had some quibbles with his presentation of Christian scriptures. But if I can assume that the rest of the presentations were of roughly similar quality, then I think this was probably fairly accurate.

Part of being educated about the world is being educated about the world’s religions. This is not primarily about evangelism, although I think it is a good idea to know about for evangelism reasons. Primarily this is about understanding additional context to international news.

My overwhelming feeling is how much the ‘Protestant Bias’ has effected the way we think about other world religious scriptures. As Hardy presents it, Protestant Bias comes into play because so many of the early scholars of world religions were Protestants that assumed that other world religious scriptures acted like the Christian bible (and they often do not.)

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Introduction to Christian Liturgy by Frank Senn

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Summary: Helpful, but dry, look at history and variety of practice within the Christian Church’s liturgy. Frank Senn’s Introduction to Christian Liturgy was recommended to me as a good method to understand the historical elements of Christian practice across a variety of traditions. And although a bit dry, it is very helpful. Senn takes different aspects … Read more

Pines (Wayward Pines #1) by Blake Crouch

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Pines (Wayward Pines #1) by Blake Crouch book ReviewSummary: A secret service agent wakes up in the woods outside of small town where nothing seems quite right.

The Wayward Pines trilogy hit the world a few years ago and many people I know recommended it. Last year Fox turned it into a TV show. And because I signed up for Kindle Unlimited a couple weeks ago, I decided to pick it up since the audiobook is part of the subscription. I thought I had picked up enough hints from reviews and discussion that I knew what was coming. But I was just enough wrong about the story to be surprised while thinking the big reveal was just ahead.

As I said in my review of Countdown City, reading these two books back to back has left a bit of strange taste in my mouth. For Wayward Pines, it is more about the violence than anything else. The creepiness and fear of madness that runs throughout the book totally makes sense. The flashbacks to torture in the Iraq war and in the current timeline just felt over the top. It is not that they do not fit in the story as written. It is more that I did not want to read (or listen in this case) to them. (There is enough horror in the world right now for me to want to intentionally ingest more.)

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Countdown City by Ben Winters (Last Policeman #2)

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Countdown City by Ben Winters (Last Policeman #2) book reviewSummary: The end of the world is coming soon, but there are still cases to solve and people to help.

Maybe it is just too easy to envision the end of the world, but I am having a hard time reading the apocalyptic and dystopian fiction lately. It has been a steady part of my book diet for years. But reading Countdown City and Wayward Pines back to back, during political convention season, was probably a bad idea.

Countdown City is true apocalyptic fiction. Hank Palace is a former police detective. At the end of the The Last Policeman he gave up his job and now he is ‘working’ as a private detective. The problem is that the world is going to be ending in a few months and society is falling apart. (A giant asteroid is coming.)

What is interesting about the trilogy is Detective Palace’s desire to solve the crime in the face of impending doom. What is maddening about this book (and clearly it is intentional) is Palace’s focus on the crime as a tactic to avoid reality. Palace is not getting paid. He is doing the impossible to find a missing man when the whole world has gone missing and at a time when society and infrastructure is crumbling. The minor issues of pay and preparation for the end of the world all end up in the back seat. The constant question from others, ‘why are you doing this?’ annoys both Detective Palace and the reader.

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The Grace Outpouring: Blessing Others Through Prayer by Roy Godwin with Dave Roberts

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Summary: A wandering, but very encouraging story of how obedience can be used by God.

I know that some dismiss books that are written “˜with”¦’.  These are books where a person has a story to tell but does not have the time (and usually skill) to tell it well in book form.  Whenever I have hear automatic dismissal I think of the work that John and Elizabeth Sherrill did in bring the stories of Brother Andrew, Corrie Ten Boom, David Wilkerson and many others where their names did not clearly appear in the “˜with”¦’ section.

I do want to say clearly, that while I am supportive of people like the Sherrills and Dave Roberts in this book, I think these cowriters need to always be acknowledged and Christian publishers in particular need to stop the practice of hidden ghost writers.

In the Grace Outpouring, Roy Godwin tells the story of how God has used him and the Ffald-y-Brenin retreat center in Wales to bless others and bring God’s power to the people that visit the retreat center, the community around the retreat center, and even people that have never been there.

Testimony stories like this are an important part of Christian literature.  Sometimes I can forget how important a part they are.  These types of books are usually not great literary works, but instead are simple narratives of Gods work in normal people’s lives.

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The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good by Peter Greer with Anna Haggard

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Reposting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.99.

The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good by Peter Greer with Anna HaggardTakeaway: Serving God and others can be its own reward, and that is the root of the spiritual danger.

I have spent my whole adult working career in the Christian non-profit world.  I have witnessed a number of situations where there has been burnout, mistreatment of staff (in the name of doing good), failure of leadership, leaders ending badly and more.

Peter Greer is the CEO of Hope International, a micro-credit non-profit working in 16 countries in Africa, Asia, South American and Eastern Europe. In a very readable, and story laden book, Greer (and his co-author Anna Haggard) walk through 14 different spiritual dangers that particularly affect those that are trying to do good, especially doing good in Christ’s name.

I remember reading an article while in grad school that people in service professions, especially those that view themselves as doing good, can actually be more likely to lie and mislead those around them because they feel they deserve it or because their good works off-set any ‘small mistakes’ that they make.  That article had a lot of influence on the ways I thought about doing good work.  This is only one of the areas that Greer mentions, but he does give a lot of examples of how we can miss what we are actually striving for in the process of doing good.

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All Hallows’ Eve: A Novel by Charles Williams

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All Hallows' Eve: A Novel by Charles Williams book reviewSummary: A ghost story about the nature of good and evil.

Charles Williams was one of the Inklings, the famous literary group that included CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. Charles Williams books have been picked up by Open Media, an ebook publisher that has focused on 20th century literary fiction that is out of print. Open Media has a daily sale with five sale books and a free public domain books. Over the past couple months I have picked up two of Charles Williams’ books for $1.99. All Hallow’s Eve is the first I have read (and the last book he wrote.)

When I read review of Charles Williams’ books they are most often described as odd or strange. Williams was interested in the supernatural. While I would not consider All Hallow’s Eve all that odd of a book, it is a ghost story. Which I think is an odd choice for Christian fiction. Charles Williams was not writing ‘Christian’ fiction. The category did not really exist in the 1930-1940s when he was writing. He was writing fiction and he was a Christian. His faith is evident in the story, but it is not explicit like Lewis’ fiction but more a part of the worldview of the author like Tolkien’s fiction was.

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Chronicle of a Last Summer by Yasmine El Rashidi

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Chronicle of a Last Summer by Yasmine El Rashid book reviewReviewed by Bookwi.se Contributor Vikki Huisman.

A young Egyptian woman recounts her personal and political coming of age in this debut novel by Yasmine El Rashidi.

The reader meets the unnamed main character across three decades in Egypt: as a very young school girl, a college film student and then as a writer in modern day Egypt following Mubarak’s overthrow. Her father’s physical absence and her mother’s emotional absence dominate the writer’s life. As friends as relatives disappear through death, imprisonment, fleeing to America or just vanishing without a trace, she contemplates how absence and silence have defined her life.

Chronicle of a Last Summer is a gentle but heavy book. El Rashidi doesn’t heavily detail the violence, oppression or suffering the main character experiences throughout her life but the reader can feel it. The character’s cousin frequently chastises the young lady and his fellow citizens for not getting angry. Her uncle begs her to use her resources at the university and make a film that will make some noise, to serve as a rally cry for the Egyptian people but instead, she embraces the silence she’s always known and buries herself in her writing instead.

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