“I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing, Can I go back to my books now?†~Lynn Sharon Schwartz
Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.
I decided to read as many of the books as I can find that are shortlisted for the INSPY awards this year. A Plain Death is one of the five books shortlisted in the Mystery/Thriller category.
This Amish country-setting mystery is the first in the Appleseed Creek Mystery series, and it’s an adequate beginning to a promising series. When Chloe Humphrey moves to Appleseed Creek to take a job as computer services director with a small private college, she doesn’t expect to gain an Amish roommate and a new crush on said roommate’s handsome brother all on the first day. Events snowball quickly from first-day surprises to real danger as a local Amish bishop dies in an accident that may have been more than an accident, and Chloe feels compelled to help out her new friend by investigating the death and the suspicious circumstances surrounding it.
I enjoyed this book as a “bedtime story” last night even though I did find a couple of continuity errors and some minor editing errors. I’m also not sure I totally bought into the ending, but the story was engaging enough that I didn’t really care.
What is it that’s so fascinating about Amish culture anyway? I don’t read a lot of so-called “Amish fiction”, but I do see the attraction. I guess it fits with my reading and life fascinations: communities, religious communities, broken relationships and healing of those relationships, prodigals, utopian communities. I do like reading about people who have chosen a different lifestyle from the norm and about how religious communities in particular work or don’t work to bring people to a saving knowledge of the grace of God in Christ.
A Plain Death isn’t a book with a profound message about being Amish or about gospel in general, but it did have a nice flavor of AMish country. I would enjoy reading the next book in the series, A Plain Scandal, which was just published in February. A Plain Disappearance, the third book in the series, is due to be published in September, 2013.
“The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.†~Agatha Christie
Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.
It’s National Poetry Month, and I haven’t done much poetry. It’s been one of those months so far, fast and furious and full of sounds, signifying I’m-not-sure-what-yet.
At any rate, here’s a poem by one of my favorite people, G.K. Chesterton. Does anybody know of a good, well written, popular biography of Chesterton? I’ve read his autobiographical Orthodoxy and others of his writings, but a really cracking good bio would be of interest.
The Convert
by G. K. Chesterton
After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white.
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead
The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.
Cindy at Ordo Amoris is hosting a read-along book club for the next twelve weeks or so to read Edith Schaeffer’s beautiful book, The Hidden Art of Homemaking. I call it a “beautiful book” because it’s all about beauty and creating beauty in practical ways in your own home. She doesn’t advocate the Better Homes and Gardens kind of decorating beauty, out of my price range and beyond my abilities anyway, but rather a simple effort to use one’s God-given talents and abilities to serve the family and make our homes a beautiful place.
I was inspired by Ms. Schaeffer’s book a long time ago when I read it as a young wife and mother. Now, I am a “more mature” wife and mother, and some of the lessons I learned from Mrs. Shaeffer’s book have been absorbed into my lifestyle other have been abandoned in the busyness of my life and need to be relearned. I’ve recommended The Hidden Art of Homemaking to other moms, young and old. I’ve given it as a part of a wedding gift or even a baby shower gift. I’ve had my daughters read it.
I’m looking forward to reading and discussing with others how the inner beauty that God commands us to have expresses itself in outward ways making our homes and our service to our families and others beautiful also.
I Peter 2:3-4 Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.
I forgot that I’m supposed to be introducing myself in this post. I’m Sherry. I have eight children ranging in age right now from 11 to 27. My husband is an engineer at NASA. I read a lot. I have lots of ideas. I try to put some of those ideas into practice. I love the Lord Jesus Christ, and I am deeply thankful for His mercy and grace in my life.
I don’t always have a gentle and quiet spirit, and my home is not always beautiful. My home is full of beautiful people, and I need to remember that more often.
“John W. Otte leads a double life. By day he’s a Lutheran minister. By night, he writes weird stories.”
Failstate is kind of weird. Robin Laughlin aka Failstate and Robin’s brother Ben aka Gauntlet are both unlicensed superheroes. Failstate is a “cognit” who can mess with the power grid. The theory is that Failstate’s super-power can create “a potential failstate within covalent bonds at a molecular level.” Gauntlet is a “strapper”, a hero with lots of muscle.
Both of the brothers are competing in a reality TV show. The winner gets a real superhero license if he or she is voted best superhero in the show. Unfortunately, Robin/Failstate is pretty sure that the winner is not going to be him.
Soon, real life and real crime collide with the fantasy crime competition on TV, and Failstate must decide how to avenge his friend’s death, whom to trust, and how much protecting his secret identity is worth. Is it worth more lives? What if he has to lose the competition and his secrets to gain his ultimate goal, the protection of innocent citizens?
Failstate was just nominated as a finalist for the Christy Awards in the category of Young Adult Books, along with Child of the Mountains by Marilyn Sue Shank and Interrupted: A Life Beyond Words by Rachel Coker. I think Failstate is a worthy competitor, both the character in the book and the novel in the Christy Awards.
Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn. Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors. ~Thomas Brooks
Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.
Adam Shepard, the author of Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream, has a new book out. It’s called One Year Lived and like Scratch Beginnings it’s a memoir of a a year in the life of the author, Mr. Shepard. However, this time Mr. Shepard decided find out how the other half lives in a different way: he saved up his money and spent his 29th year traveling the world. He spent less than a year of college would have cost him (>$20,000), and he visited seventeen countries on four continents.
What did Adam Shepard do on his journey around the world? Well, according to the publisher’s blurb, he dug wells in Nicaragua, rode an elephant in Thailand, mustered cattle in Australia, and went bungee-jumping in Slovakia, among other exploits and escapades.
Even better than all of that adventure, Mr. Shepard read seventy-one books on his way around the world, including one in Spanish. Who says you can’t read and experience the world at the same time?
From the back of the book:
“I’m not angry. I don’t hate my job. I’m not annoyed with capitalism, and I’m indifferent to materialism. I’m not escaping emptiness, nor am I searching for meaning. I have great friends, a wonderful family, and fun roommates. The dude two doors down invited me over for steak or pork chops–my choice–on Sunday, and I couldn’t even tell you the first letter of his name. Sure, the producers of The Amazing Race have rejected all five of my applications to hotfoot around the world–all five!–and my girlfriend and I just parted ways, but I’ve whined all I can about the race, and the girl wasn’t The Girl anyway. All in all, my life is pretty fantastic. But I feel boxed in. Look at a map, and there we are, a pin stuck in the wall. There’s the United States, about twenty-four square inches worth, and there’s the rest of the world, seventeen hundred square inches begging to be explored. Career, wife, babies–of course I want these things; they’re on the horizon. Meanwhile, I’m a few memories short. Maybe I need a year to live a little.”
I haven’t actually read the book yet because it’s been kind of crazy-busy here in Semicolonland lately, but I’m looking forward to immersing myself in Adam Shepard’s around the world adventure. Mr. Shepard seems to have a knack for challenging himself and his readers with projects that demand a fresh outlook on life and inspire readers to try something a little crazy.
Like maybe fighting a bull in Nicaragua???
If you’re interested in a FREE copy of Adam Shepard’s book, One Year Lived, share a link to this post on your Facebook or Twitter either today or tomorrow. By special arrangement with the author, if you email me (sherry.early@gmail.com) or leave a comment here (with your email address) telling me that you have linked to this post on Facebook or Twitter, I will send you the link where you can download the book in an electronic format for free.
Mr. Shepard says: “People need to travel more, not only because it is satisfying and fun and inspires purpose and provides service to a world that needs it and sparks creativity, but because we need to open up our eyes to what is really going on out there. . . . The bottom line is this: in this increasingly global world, it is essential that more people (young Americans, especially) step foot out of their country.”
People are becoming aware of what Dr. Kermit Gosnell did to cruelly and callously murder possibly hundreds of babies in Philadelphia and what he did in providing sub-standard, dangerous, and horribly unsanitary “health care” for abortion-seeking women. If you don’t know about this doctor and his criminal actions, here are some links to help you to become informed about this unspeakable case and the the ongoing trial that is taking place now in Philadelphia:
That’s what happened for years at Dr. Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia. And here are some implications and conclusions that I draw from the horror that was Dr Gosnell and his accomplices:
1. The media–newspapers, television, and other outlets– cannot be trusted to tell the truth about abortion.
Indeed, the silence had been stunning since the Gosnell trial began back on March 18. No mention of the story at all on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, or MSNBC, and no front-page stories in any major paper. National Review, the Weekly Standard, Breitbart.com, and Michelle Malkin, on the other hand, provided early and consistent coverage.
Conservative, liberal, or in-between, please do not depend on one or two sources that agree with your point of view for all of your news and opinions. First of all, reporters are just as fallible as the rest of us. They have their own blind spots, and sometimes they actually make choices that are just wrong, such as the choice not to cover this trial in all its horror and with all of its disturbing implications. If I only listen to or read conservative news sources, I am just as likely to miss important issues and news and viewpoints that will inform my decisions and add information to back up or negate my opinions. If you only listen to or read the mainstream media, you are only getting a slanted, and partial picture of the range of opinion and news that is making our world.
But especially, do not continue to trust the mainstream media to tell you the truth about abortion. Many journalists will continue to try to use the Jedi mind trick and tell you to “move along, there’s nothing to see here.” You and I have a responsibility to know what evils are being perpetrated in our own communities in the name of “choice” and “women’s rights.” If you have turned your head and pretended not to know that abortion is the gruesome and unjustified killing of a human being, then the Gosnell case is a wake-up call.
2. A person’s a person no matter how small. The 20-30 week old babies that Dr. Gosnell killed by snipping their spinal cords with scissors had exactly the same humanity as the baby boy in the video embedded below:
Abortion advocates and supporters of a “woman’s right to choose” must face the question: why did baby Samuel get the care he needed to live while hundreds of babies at Gosnell’s clinic, thousands around the nation, are instead being burned with saline, injected with poison, or “snipped” after being born alive? What makes a person a person? Is it really logical or morally defensible to say that a baby, inside the womb or outside, only becomes a person deserving of life, liberty and medical care when the mother says, “I choose you to be a real person”?
Abortion advocates in reference to the Gosnell case are saying essentially that what Dr. Gosnell did would have been perfectly fine if only he had done it in cleaner surroundings. This logic is untenable and unpardonable. A baby who is three inches inside the birth canal or three days less than the legal age for being protected from an abortion is no less a person than Baby Samuel or any other wanted baby located inside the mother’s womb.
3. We have no idea how many facilities like Gosnell’s are still operating in the United States.
In an egregious example of twisted and backwards logic, abortion advocates are arguing that too much regulation of abortion clinics caused women to seek abortions from Dr. Gosnell, and so therefore abortion clinics in general should receive less regulation and less scrutiny instead of more. They say that women “are forced” to go to doctors like Gosnell because of the lack of availability of cheap, safe abortions elsewhere.
There were and still are multiple abortion clinics and hospitals that do abortions in Philadelphia. Gosnell’s practice went on for over twenty years, without inspections for most of that time, while abortion was legal and available in Philadelphia. Gosnell’s horrors didn’t happen because abortion was over-regulated or because abortion clinics were held to high medical standards. And most of what Gosnell did should not happen to babies or women anywhere, no matter how sanitary the facility is where the “snipping” takes place.
I found these articles in a cursory Google search:
There are many more examples. And I could not find anything that told me which states have regulations in place for abortion clinics or how often those standards are upheld if they have been enacted into law. I did find this page at the National Abortion Federation website in which we are told that “abortion is very safe” and “abortion is already regulated.” NAF opposes what they call TRAP laws because they “discourage health care providers from offering abortion care and can make provision very burdensome and/or expensive for smaller providers.”
Would that someone had “discouraged” Dr. Gosnell a long time ago.
About the first book in this fantasy series by N.D. Wilson, I wrote: The Dragon’s Tooth by N.D. Wilson. Too much action and it moved way too fast for me. I think there was a sub-text that I just didn’t get, and I think Mr. Wilson is too smart for my Very Little Brain.
Reading the second book in the series helped my little brain a little bit, but I really should just wait until all of the (three?) books in the Ashtown Burials series are out and then I could read them all together. I’m pretty sure my little brain would thank me for not asking it to remember a book I read over a year ago and put it together with a book that I’m reading now that demands a lot of thought and remembering on its own merits.
Anyway, The Dragon’s Tooth is “the only object in the world capable of killing the long-lived transmortals, and Phoenix (the bad guy) has been tracking them down one-by-one, and murdering them.” Cyrus and Antigone Smith had the dragon’s tooth in the first book, but they lost it to the bad guys, and now almost everyone is mad at them. Transmortal Gilgamesh is especially angry, and he and his fellow transmortals have come to Ashtown to demand that the Order of Brendan offer protection or justice or something. So Antigone and Cyrus end up on the run from the Order, from Gilgamesh, from Phoenix, and from other evil characters who are out to destroy everything and take over the world.
If that paragraph doesn’t explain what the Ashtown Burial books are all about (and it doesn’t), then maybe this book trailer will help.
For what it’s worth, I like the books, but I think I’ll like them better when the series is complete.
