Books Recap

I'm back! Not in town yet (we've got one more week, this one in Myrtle Beach) but I should be online and able to post a little more regularly this week. Finding a wi-fi signal on Ocracoke Island is no small challenge and proved not worth the effort as the week went on, hence the lack of blogging. Besides, isn't part of vacation being able to disconnect for a while?

Anyway, Annie and I had a great time on Ocracoke. We spent most mornings at the beach (see previous post) and spent the very hot (at least by Minnesota standards) afternoons doing puzzles or laying around reading books. We'll probably post some vacation highlights and pictures on the family blog at some point but in the meantime here are a few highlights from my reading this week.

By far the best book I read last week was The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning. This is the best presentation of grace I've ever read. Manning again and again hammers home that it's not what we do but what He did. It's powerful, deeply moving, and definitely one I'm going to need to revisit often.

As expected Philip K Dick's, The Man in the High Castle was a mind trip but a great read. The book takes place in an alternate post World War 2 America where the Axis powers won. The Nazis control the eastern part of the country and the Japanese the Pacific Coast. Slavery is legal and the holocaust is in full swing in America. All that sounds straightforward enough but the story is told through several loosely connected tales that range from somewhat straightforward to very bizarre. There's also an alternate history novel within this novel where the US won the war but not as it happened in actual history. This only gets more weird as two of the characters begin to suspect that their world is really fiction and the novel is real. Confused yet? Me too! I love books like that!

I'll avoid anymore history talk for now but tonight I finally finished John Adams by David McCullough. It's simply brilliant. One of the best books I've ever read and worth reading no matter how boring you find history.

I finished G.K. Chesterton's Heretics at the beginning of the week but I'll hold my fire on that one for the moment. It's a great book and sometime in the next day or two I'm hoping to discuss some of what it talks about more in depth.

On the docket for this week: Eye in the Sky, A Canticle for Leobowitz, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and rereading some C.S. Lewis.