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Books I’ve read the past couple months:

Waypoint Kangaroo by Curtis C. Chen

A fun little sci-fi story I discovered on the library shelf. A sort of space-based adventure / mystery story where the main character has a special ability that comes in quite handy at times.

Traitor by Jonathan de Shalit

A not-so-memorable spy novel.

Immeasurable: Reflections on the Soul of Ministry in the Age of Church, Inc. by Skye Jethani

A hit-and-miss collection of essays. When Jethani is on, his insight into the issues in evangelicalism are really good.

Kangaroo Too by Curtis C. Chen

Hey, I liked the first book in the series… The second one was pretty good, too.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt

An overview of the various historical perspectives on Adam and Eve. Easy to read, fairly interesting.

City of Endless Night by Douglas Preston

I have always enjoyed the Agent Pendergast series from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. This one was no exception.

What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson

I typically love Robinson’s essays, but this book left me a bit cold. Its themes are more repetitive than her previous books of essays - perhaps because they’re condensed from various talks she’s given?

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

A fascinating account of growing up as an unschooled Mormon survivalist in Idaho and the journey out to the real world. And it has some really great cover art.

Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith by Richard J. Foster

Foster reviews key contributions to the Christian faith from various Christian traditions. Encouraging precisely because it recognizes first that these truly are all strands of the Christian faith (an angle that too many in my current flavor of evangelicalism would dispute) and second, that they provide rich value to believers.

The Night Trade by Barry Eisler

Eisler knows how to write a thriller.

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

I picked this one up from the library against my better judgment, but thought the topic was interesting and that I’d go into it with an open mind. The author admits in the preface that she is telling a one-sided story, and then she grinds that axe for the entire book. Sure, Christianity has a checkered history, but to hear Nixey tell it the world would be a rich nirvana of love and learning were it not for centuries of hateful narrow-minded Christians.

The Deceivers by Alex Berenson

I’d never read Berenson before. This one’s a passable spy thriller adopting a ripped-from-the-headlines plot of Russian interference in a US presidential election. They just don’t make spy novels anymore like Tom Clancy used to.

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

Following my sad pattern of being prompted to read famous authors after hearing of their deaths, I picked this one up after Tom Wolfe passed away last week. Now I’m gonna have to go find some of his other books. While the story of the test pilots who became the first round of US astronauts in the late 1950s is interesting enough on its own, what’s truly memorable is Wolfe’s voice and style.

Books I’ve read over the past month or so:

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles An utterly charming novel about a Russian nobleman confined to hotel “house arrest” after the 1917 revolution. His adventures interacting with hotel staff (which he soon becomes) and guests are full of wit and grace and humor. I don’t recall who recommended this one to me but I owe them my thanks.

The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage by Jared Yates Sexton A memoir from a liberal writer who covered the 2016 US presidential election. Heartfelt, but not as interesting or memorable as I had hoped it might be.

House of Spies by Daniel Silva OK, the Gabriel Allon series is getting old. I probably should’ve figured that out seeing as this is book #17 in the series.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami I first became acquainted with Murakami through his Absolutely on Music book that I read a couple months ago. Having discovered he was a novelist I figured it was worth reading one. 1Q84 was just interesting enough to keep me going through its 900 pages. I guess it’s a love story at heart, albeit one with some odd and unexplained sci-fi twists.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon A YA sci-fi novel with strong race / slavery / gender themes. Interesting in that it tried hard to represent a lot of racial and gender diversity. Managed to do it while only a little bit heavy-handed with the message.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler Heard about this one on an episode of NPR’s Fresh Air. Fascinating (to me, a bit of a con law nerd) history of how American law has treated corporations with regard to rights and freedoms. Some cases, it seems, have had unintended consequences as the years went by; Ralph Nader’s efforts to win corporate speech rights back in the 1970’s seemed meant to benefit ordinary people by freeing up information that the government had restricted. Those same rights were used as the basis 30 years later for deciding in Citizens United that corporations could dump unlimited money into political campaigns.

Crimes of the Father by Thomas Keneally The author of the novel Schindler’s List takes on the Catholic church abuse scandal. Pleasant yet forgettable prose.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable Realized I didn’t know much about Malcolm X, and this particular biography was recommended by Ta-Nehisi Coates somewhere. A very readable picture of a fascinating man.

I’ve gotten seriously slack at listing all the books I’ve been reading. Consider this my year-end catch-up post. (Not to be confused with my year-in-review post which will come next week sometime.)

Here’s what I’ve finished reading since last time I posted:

Fiction

• City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
• Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
• Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
• The Berlin Project by Gregory Benford
• Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper
• The Force by Don Winslow
• The Quantum Spy by David Ignatius

Non-Fiction

• A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples by Ilan Pappe
• Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972 by Edward K. Kaplan
• Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God by Brian Zahnd
• The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency by Chris Whipple
• How to Think by Alan Jacobs

I’m currently reading The Punch Escrow by Tal M. Klein, which if it stays on track will climb pretty high up my favorites list for the year. Stay tuned!

Two weeks, two business trips, it was time for light reading. Trolling the fiction shelves found me these:

Price of Duty by Dale Brown

Dale Brown has managed to crank out 21 books in the Patrick McLanahan series over the past 30 years. I’ve read far too many of them. They crossed the line into ridiculousness several books back… and this one is no different. This one reads more like the script for a direct-to-video action movie (a genre, I fear, that has been killed off by Netflix!) than a proper novel.

Tom Clancy - Point of Contact by Mike Maden

Tom Clancy is long dead and buried but his name and book series lives on. According to Amazon, this book is “Jack Ryan Universe book #23”, which is roughly the same output as Dale Brown’s series in roughly the same timeframe. This one was thin enough that, writing this post a couple weeks after finishing the book, I have exactly zero recollection of what this one was about.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland

Now this one was worth my time. While it starts out seeming to be about ’the return of magic’, it’s much more an adventure in time travel combined with some humorous observations about how bureaucracy can take over and ruin even the best ideas. I had a lot of fun here.

A rundown of recent book completions:

A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story by Diana Butler Bass

Bass is clearly giving a nod to Zinn’s People’s History of the United States with her title and approach. It’s not a bad effort, but nothing really earth-shattering, either.

The Art of Curating Worship: Reshaping the Role of Worship Leader by Mark Pierson

Pierson is an Australian who was writing from a very strong emergent perspective. While the worship experiences he describes are a long way from what would work in my midwestern US church, his perspective on the intent of and attitude toward leading worship was right on and gave me a lot to think about.

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman

A very readable biography of the Soviet leader. Still hard to get a grasp on how someone can be so human and yet so depraved.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

This was the first I’ve read of Butler. Won’t be the last. A wonderful voice in dystopian fiction.

Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness by Edward Kaplan

The first of two volumes of biography of a fascinating Jewish thinker from the early 20th century. Now I’ve gotta get volume two.

The Switch by Joseph Finder

I was wanting mindless entertainment, and this book overachieved at that. By which I mean it was even more mindless and boring than I was hoping for. Meh.

It’s been a while since I’ve put a post together, but I haven’t stopped reading… recent books:

Movies are Prayers: How Films Voice Our Deepest Longings by Josh Larsen

Larsen is the co-host of the essential Filmspotting podcast, as well as being an editor at Think Christian. Larsen explores the overlap of his two interests with an insightful look at how movies can be expressions of prayer. Larsen goes deeper into the theology of prayer than I expected, with insightful results. As also happens when I listen to Filmspotting, I came away from Movies are Prayers with a bunch of movies to add to my to-watch list.

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham

Bauckham explores the Gospels and makes the case that their content was primarily from eyewitness testimony. He spends quite a bit of time exploring how oral histories were passed down through various cultures, and how the gospels bear many of the hallmarks of such oral tradition based on eyewitness information. He also suggests that part of the reason some characters (including some very minor characters) are explicitly named in the Gospels is because they were known living people who could be referenced as eyewitnesses. (What a fascinating thought!) This definitely gives me a new perspective when reading the Gospels.

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich

A winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Alexievich interviewed hundreds of Soviet women who fought (often as teenage girls) in the Soviet army during WWII. The details are made even more horrific by the narrative telling. War is hell. Terrible, real, and heartbreaking.

A Colony in A Nation by Chris Hayes

A short volume documenting the discrepancy in policing and justice between blacks and whites in America. Not exceptionally surprising after all that I’ve read the past couple years, but tragic and infuriating none the less.

Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, & Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama by Kenneth L. Woodward

Woodward was the religion editor of Newsweek for decades, in which role he had opportunity to interview many of the major religious figures of the 20th century. A devout Catholic, Woodward provides a measured view of Billy Graham and other early evangelists, the rise of Evangelicalism and its political efforts, the changes in the Catholic church after Vatican II, and the evolution of the Protestant mainline. Woodward’s easy prose felt familiar in some way; finally I realized it must be the deft touch of a newsman similar to that of the late Steve Buttry who I read regularly for nearly a decade until his untimely death last year. All told, a good history of religion in America.

A few more books I’ve completed lately:

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

Stevenson tells the stories of many death row inmates he has represented over the years. He makes a compelling case that the justice system is broken for many of these people, documenting gross negligence of counsel, biased law enforcement and judicial systems, and abhorrent treatment inside of prisons. While the inmate whose story forms the through line of the book has a positive outcome, many, many do not. Sobering.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

A workmanlike path through the immense de facto segregation endorsed by the US government in the early part of the 20th century. It is stunning to understand how zoning laws and public financing were used as weapons to ensure that African Americans were kept out of white neighborhoods. America still has a lot of history to own up to.

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

Completing my bleak trilogy is this account of the rise of OxyContin and heroin addiction over the past decade. The parallels of aggressive heroin marketing by drug producers from one small location in Mexico and the aggressive OxyContin marketing to doctors and patients even after serious concerns were raised about addiction are remarkable. Quite a horror.

OK, so my reading hasn’t all been bleak reading on social issues…

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

A near-future sci-fi in which Doctorow explores the benefits of a communal maker culture. Interesting ideas, but reminds me a little too much of Heinlein - characters having long conversations about the ins and outs of the philosophical position, too much unnecessary sex.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Now this is a fun little fantasy novel. Space adventure in a ship with a diverse, multi-species crew. Easy and fun to read. I have the second book in the series on reserve at the library… any time now, folks.

Summertime seems to make it hard to get through too many, but here are a few more books that I’ve finished over the past few weeks…

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

Ohler’s book is partly a technical explanation of the development of opiates and methamphetamines by German pharmaceutical companies and partly a chronicle of Hitler’s descent into the hell of addiction. A stunning picture of horror and madness.

The Imperfect Disciple: Grace for People Who Can’t Get Their Act Together by Jared C. Wilson

A beautiful little volume that calls readers back to the spiritual disciplines in a way that is gracious and encouraging.

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson

I’ve posted several quotes from this book already, and should really queue up several more. Robinson’s essays are so thoughtful and engaging. Finding someone who unashamedly professes a belief in orthodox Christianity while at the same time discussing that faith in terms and from angles that are far outside traditional theological writing is a huge treat. Destined to be one of my favorite books of the year.