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Summary: After the death of his grandmother and the revelation that his mother (who he thought was dead) is behind a number of murders, Malik tries to settle into college and figure out how to try to have a normal life. 

Blood at the Root was a bit of a surprise hit. I read it about 9 months after it released and a number of friends or acquaintances had been recommending it. Blood at the Root was a very good opening fantasy book. There was good world building and character development. I alternated between ebook and audiobook for that first book and then I just listened to the audiobook for this second book.

This series is clearly producing audiobooks with the intent of drawing in the YA audience that is used to TV and movies. I don’t traditionally love sound effects and music in audiobooks because I think it often sounds cheesy. And there are definitely some aspects of the audiobook production that I think lean in (intentionally I think) to the cheese, especially during fight scenes where magic duels sounds like star wars blasters being shot back and forth.

As I skimmed through reviews on goodreads, there is a clear split between people who are five stars (“it was great”) and those who thought it dragged. I both really enjoyed it as a whole and thought that the middle dragged and that the book as a whole was trying to do too much. This is a second book and they need to develop differently from first books. I get the point of why it was slow in the middle. It was oriented toward character development and complicating the story by exploring the motivations for a variety of characters to keep them from becoming too cardboard. But I think this is where Ladarrion Williams shows that he is a fairly new writer. He is skilled in plotting and I think he has great intentions with writing a complex story, which I appreciate; but that complexity needs to be shown without as much explicit explication. I agree that the middle of the book drags. (The second book is about 1/3 longer than the first book and I think with some better editing it would have been better if it had kept to the length of the first book.)

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Summary: Not really a devotional, but more of a Christian version of On Tyranny. 

I listened to this as an audiobook. I put it on in my car and listened when I had short drives by myself. It wasn’t a “one chapter a day listening”, but it was roughly about a month of occasional listening.

My initial impression is that this is a book about discernment more than anything else. There are definitely chapters that are explicitly about discernment, but most chapters have some aspect of understanding the world how it is.

Hanna Reichel is a German academic and theologian with a history of studying the theological response to WWII. There is one other book she has in english about theological method, but otherwise her books and articles are in German. She most recently is a systematic theology professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. That matters to the context of this book because she is writing particularly to United States Christians from her background. She is widely familiar with Bonhoeffer and Barth and other Christians within Germany who responded to Hitler. I know that the comparisons between pre-WWII Germany and current US can be over played, but there are a number of academics who study Germany who think that the parallels are worth drawing, as this Bonhoeffer scholar does.

I saw that one reviewer on Goodreads suggested that this was a Christian version of On Tyranny and I thought the same as I was reading it. I thought On Tyranny was worth reading and I think this is worth reading. So that is not a complaint, but I think you need to know that going in, it is not a devotional in the traditional sense. Although the chapters are very short and devotional in length, each was about 5 to 7 minutes in audio.

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Summary: A first person narrative of growing up in a boarding school and moving into adulthood under the cloud of, sort of, knowing their fate.

I continue to have mixed feelings about Kazuo Ishiguro. I really like Remains of the Day and re-reading again recently made me want to pick up another of Ishiguro’s books. I have previously finished When We Were Orphans and I gave up on The Buried Giant.

Part of the issue I think is that Ishiguro very much uses unreliable narrators and understatement in his writing. While unreliable narrators works in Remains of the Day, it tends to make the reader not like the unreliable narrator. And I think that the understatement, at least today, tends to go over the head of people who are not fairly sophisticated readers.

I have not previously read this book or watched the movie. (I didn’t know there was a movie until after I finished the book.) But I was had figured out what was going on pretty early on in the narrative. The understatement of the horror of the concept and the orientation of the narrative to focus on the daily struggles of teens in a boarding school and transitioning to adulthood means that I am pretty sure many readers missed the horror. That stylistic choice, which I appreciate from an artistic perspective, clearly went over people’s heads, at least if I take the Goodreads reviews as exemplary of the general reading public.

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Summary: A systematic theology that is attempting to make love as the center.

I have heard Thomas Jay Oord interviewed on several podcasts, including Gravity Commons and Homebrewed Christianity, which is why I picked up A Systematic Theology of Love in the first place. I had not realized it came out in February until I saw that a friend was reading it. It took me the whole month of April to read it.

I have a mixed relationship to systematic theology. I both appreciate that it is trying to be comprehensive because it is clear that theology is interrelated and choices in one area do impact choices in another areas. But I also am wary of systematic theology because of its attempt to categorize everything and I am just not sure that we can know it all. Many of my complaints here are about the fact that this is only volume one, and I have questions that are not answered yet (because they are going to be in the next two volumes, which Oord is going to try to get out in the next couple of years).

I am pretty persuaded by A Systematic Theology of Love. I think the orientation toward God as love and a God who is loving in a way that we traditionally think of love, is easy to get on board with. John Armstrong’s The Transforming Fire of Divine Love: My Long, Slow Journey into the Love of God I think is a good introduction to God’s love and has a number of overlaps with the early chapters of Oord’s book.

In particular I think it is easy to see that the influence of greek philosophy on the early church makes it hard for the early church to conceive of a God that loves in a way that we think of as loving.

“Although biblical writers mostly use “love” to describe actions that promote abundant life, blessedness, or well-being, Augustine defines love as desire. Countless theologians adopt his mistaken approach. In Teaching Christianity, Augustine poses a question: “How does [God] love us?” Because Augustine defines love as desire, he thinks God desires by either enjoying or using us. If God “enjoys us,” says Augustine, “it means he is in need of some good of ours, which nobody in his right mind could possibly say.” We have nothing of value, according to Augustine, because God already has all values eternally. So, God can’t love/desire us in the sense of needing us. Because he defines love as desire, Augustine says God loves by desiring what’s valuable. Being wise, God desires only the most valuable. This means, says Augustine, God only desires/loves Godself…In short, God only loves Godself. By defining love as desire, therefore, Augustine is forced to conclude God doesn’t love the world.” (p12)

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Summary: An exploration of what the bible and Jewish and Christian traditions says about hell, and salvation.

I was talking to someone recently and they asked for a recommendation of a book about Christian universalism. I did not have a good suggestion for them. I am a soft universalist. By that, I mean that I think that Christian universalism is real, that by Christ death and resurrection all will be saved, whether in this life or in the next. But I describe it as soft universalism because I think that this is a hope based on my understanding of the character of God more than “definitive” biblical or theological evidence. And I reject an “all paths are a way to heaven” type of universalism. So going into the book, I thought that what I know of Jersak, this would be a book that I largely agree with, but was looking for good theological and biblical thinking on the matter.

What I appreciate most about Jersak’s style is that he is very clear about the limits of what we can know. There is obviously speculation in a book about hell and the afterlife. But as Jersak walks through the bible and what we know about Jewish tradition that contributed to the Old Testament and the first century culture of the New Testament, he is careful about talkings about the limits of our understanding. This is a book that is filled with intellectual humility.

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Summary: A smuggler tries to save her city.

I really liked The Martian and Project Hail Mary. And I have heard a lot of negative things about Artemis. So even thought I bought it on audiobook at some point in time when it was on sale, I had not previously started it.

Artemis is different for Andy Weir and I am glad he tried something new. I didn’t like it as much as his other two books, but I also didn’t think it was as bad as its reputation. The protagonist is a 26 year old woman. Her father immigrated to the moon when she was six and she has grown up there. Her father is a devote muslim man, a welder, and for a variety of reasons, Jazz Bashara did not want to follow in the steps of her father.

I think Weir does have some problems writing a female protagonist. And he is writing a crook with a strong moral streak which is hard to do well. And the setting of the Artemis city on the moon, a small town with about 2000 permanent residents, but a lot of tourists, is also a hard setting to write well. Any small town has a problem being known as the local smuggler and I think Jazz is both smart and doesn’t seem to worry about that.

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Summary: Novella length magical realism where you are not supposed to know what is going on for quite a while. 

I read The Queen of Ebenezer about three years ago when it first came out. If you want a review without spoilers, I would read that original one. I have been trying to read more fiction this year, I wanted to revisit this one to see if I thought my daughter was ready for it and the publisher, Owl’s Nest, has been expanding their audiobooks. So I picked this up on sale a couple weeks ago and listened to it in two sittings.

The audiobook is well done. A clear narration with good production values that communicated the feel of the book exactly as it should be narrated.

And now to the spoilers.

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Summary: A man who has fooled himself into thinking he has it all together, comes to understand himself once his wife leaves him.

I like novels that are about something. But I also don’t like novels “about something.” It is easy to joke about books that are doing the classic after school special, “on a very special episode of…”

The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell is a fiction book, but one that is largely about spiritual formation and counseling. I don’t object to fiction books dealing with harder things like a marriage falling apart or a man coming to deal with the ways he had repressed his emotions. I do object to the speed of the healing.

I don’t think it is suprising that Intervarsity Press, which also has a series of fiction books on spirituial formation with a group of women has another book that is similar, but written from a male perspective. The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell is different, but I have a similar objection to both, in that a fictional book often wants a cleaner ending and faster resolution than what happens in real life.

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Summary: A children’s book written by James Baldwin and illustrated by his friend.

I very much appreciated the biography of James Baldwin that Nicholas Boggs recently wrote. Part of how Boggs came to write the biography was coming across the out of print Little Man, Little Man and discovering eventually that the illustrator was not dead as he had been told, but very much alive.

Over a couple years Boggs was able to get a new edition of the book into print and interview Yoran Cazac and those around him several times. It was original research on an aspect of Baldwin’s life which had largely not been explored.

Once I finished the biography, I picked up a copy of Little Man, Little Man. It was Baldwin’s only children’s book. And it was written in large part because his young nephew asked James Baldwin to write a book about him. This was a book about a young boy and his community in Harlem in the mid 1970s.

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