Terrible Book Title

I just ordered a book called Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling.

Let the bad puns roll.

Review - The Eyre Affair

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a very fun, genre-defying book... a little bit of science fiction, alternate history, fantasy, horror, time travel, historical fiction, romance, literary parody... it's pretty much got it all, and it blends them well.

Thursday Next is a LiteraTec in an alternate 1985 UK, except that it's not the UK since Wales is an independent and somewhat hostile state. Everyone is nuts about classic literature, so LiteraTecs exist to combat literary crime. There are over two dozen other special operations units with various functions, and with whom Next comes into contact frequently throughout the book. Her father is a renegade member of SpecOps-12, the ChronoGuard. Next finds herself pitted against a heinous villain, fumbling around a long-lost love, traveling through time, shooting people and getting shot, among other things. I won't spoil the other things like the back of the book does (OMG DON'T READ THE BACK OF THE BOOK WHATEVER YOU DO IT RUINS THE FIRST 200 PAGES).

Despite that annoyance and some obnoxious writing pet peeves (occasional dialogue in which you can't tell who's talking, etc.), it's a very entertaining read. I think there are something like five more in the series now, and I would consider picking up more of them at a later date.

View all my reviews

Review - The Reason for God

The Reason for God by Timothy Keller

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the first book I've read in a long time, possibly even the first book ever, that is a well-reasoned, intellectually satisfying argument for the existence of God and his divinity in Jesus Christ.

One of the things I like most about Keller's writing is that he comes across as a down-to-earth person who obviously has great respect and patience for people's questions. Not having grown up a Christian, I have often had great difficulty relating to people who speak "Christianese" and justify faith using only the Bible, but Keller's arguments put God and Jesus in a rational, scientific, and historical context. He frames the book in two sections: confronting doubts about Christianity (scientific, cultural, Biblical, historical, etc.) and analyzing the foundations of its claims (particularly about Jesus).

The book comes down to a conclusion that I've heard in many other places--Jesus wasn't just an enlightened teacher. If you read everything he says in the Bible, you will quickly conclude that either he was the son of God . . . or he was a stark raving nutcase. But it's one or the other.

I want to summarize parts of the book here, but I would have to water it down too much for a small post, and I don't think I could do it justice. If I had to recommend one book, though, that sums up all of the reasons why I am a Christian, why my doubts six years ago were not enough to keep me from becoming one, and why, though I continue to struggle with faith, I keep coming back to Christ, it would be this one.

You won't find any irrefutable proof of God in this book (or in life, for that matter), but Keller makes an excellent, gently stated argument.

View all my reviews

Library Pet Peeves

Okay, I'm trying to think of some other material to post here other than my Goodreads reviews (although I know some of you don't look at my Goodreads account, so the cross-posting is still useful).

Library pet peeves. Well, really only one is a "library" pet peeve, I suppose.

Newspapers. I can't stand it when people don't put the newspapers back neatly. It is not hard to put the other sections back into the "A" section. I don't care if they're in order, as long as it looks like a whole paper and the front page is the first thing I see. I suppose there could be four people every day who have to rush off to the hospital to tend their ailing great-uncles and can't be bothered to take the five seconds to put the paper back correctly... and if so, I can forgive that. But come on. Otherwise it's just laziness.

I also can't take it when people take their stuff out of the microwave before the time is up, then they don't clear the display. I look at the microwave all the time in order to find out what time it is, and 05 is not a time. It drives me nuts.

But you know... at least I still have two legs and two hands and two eyes, so I can walk around and grab books and read them. That is always a good thing.

Review - Many Dimensions

Many Dimensions by Charles Walter Stansby Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Charles Williams was a contemporary of Lewis and Tolkien, and a member of the Inklings. His stories also deal with the fantastic, but they tend to take place in our world and have spiritual or ethical themes.

Many Dimensions is about a mysterious stone that has been wrongfully taken from the Persian Empire and is said to have belonged to King Suleiman (Solomon) in ancient times.

Lord Arglay, the Chief Justice of Britain, and his secretary Chloe Burnett try to understand the powers of the stone as they act to prevent its use for the wrong reasons.

The stone seems to be a metaphor for God in the story, but also for power in general--how different people seek to use and misuse it. Ultimately, only those who are willing not to use it for themselves at all, but to submit to its own unknown purposes are able to fully experience it.

I can't say I really "got" or liked the ending as much, but the writing was rich and interesting and the philosophical themes challenging. As much as I liked the theme, though, I felt like the story served too much as a vehicle for it and would have liked it to be more integrated.

View all my reviews