What are you reading?

[Thunderscream872]

Started reading the Ultimate X-Men Comics. I bought volumes 1-6 a little while back and I'm currently on volume 3. They're pretty cool so far. The Marvel and DC universes have really interested me lately, and I figure since I've always loved X-Men, that would be a good place to start.

I also started reading Halo: Helljumper.

[Sheenar]

Reading "Perelandra" by C.S. Lewis. I should hopefully finish the space trilogy before the end of the year.

[the_wolfs_howl]

I recently read Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffry Cranor. I love the podcast of the same name, and this tie-in novel was everything I'd hoped for. The same kind of dark, random, cynical humor mixed with occasional sad or creepy moments. Lots of fun to read.

[LecktheTech]

Reading "Perelandra" by C.S. Lewis. I should hopefully finish the space trilogy before the end of the year.

I read that...Kinda had a otherworldy feel..
I'm going to reread The Angels Command by Brian Jacques. A favorite of mine.

[ClaecElric4God]

Brain Jacques! I love the Flying Dutchman books. I should go reread those...

[the_wolfs_howl]

The Spirit Lens by Carol Berg

I was actually wanting to read a different Carol Berg series, but my library only had this one, so I decided to just read this instead. I really liked it - full of court intrigue, mystery, and many-layered secrets for every character. Definitely need to read the rest of this series.

[Kaori]

The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2, The World: Creation and Deification by Fr. Dumitru Staniloae. Finally finished reading this. Excellent when I understood what he was saying. He includes a lot of quotes from and summaries of the teachings of the early church fathers, which is great, and I found the book particularly noteworthy in its anthropology, as Staniloae fleshes out an anthropology that takes into account the interconnectedness of human beings, how we mutually harm each other and bring each other down by our sin and fallenness and how we were meant to enrich each other and be fulfilled through relationships with others.

The Moon’s Shadow by Catherine Asaro, which is part of a series all set in the same world but which stands alone just fine, is about a teenage boy who suddenly becomes emperor of a vast intergalactic empire of a rather cruel race of people. This change happens not particularly because he wants to be emperor, and he also is unfamiliar with the culture and politics and pretty much everything he needs to survive as a ruler, so he is completely overwhelmed, does not know what he is doing, and has to rely heavily on the know-how of people around him in order to avoid running the government into the ground or getting himself killed. It’s strikingly similar to The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison in its plot, from the premise of a teenage boy reluctantly becoming emperor while knowing nothing about politics or the society that he is thrust into down to the main character’s marrying an older wife. (Maybe the authors thought similarly because they have the same name? :p) However, The Moon’s Shadow predates The Goblin Emperor by several years and is superior in pretty much every way—plot, characterization, politics, world-building—but unfortunately also has some sexual content. I also found the ending a little bit facile, but overall it was very well-plotted.

Still plugging through 日本人の心がわかる日本語 steadily, a bit more so now that I am neither reading three books at once nor studying for the JLPT. Quite a page-turner for me because the cultural information is excellent and it’s also set at exactly the right level for me as a more-or-less 中級 (intermediate by Japanese standards) Japanese-language learner.

[the_wolfs_howl]

The Returning King by Vern S. Poythress (not to be confused with The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien )

This is an easy-to-read general overview/summary of what's in the book of Revelation. I read it as a good foundation for a study of eschatology I'm doing in my free time.

Your Life Well Spent by Russ Crosson

A book that was given to all seniors at my college, about what our priorities should be in terms of looking to the future, our careers, and our legacy. The target audience seems to be married couples or at least people who are a bit farther along the road of life than I am, but it's good advice to keep in mind for the future.

[Kaori]

日本人の心がわかる日本語[Japanese Words to Understand the Japanese Mind] by 森田六朗 [Morita Rokurou]

Even after having lived in Japan for six years and having a fair amount of exposure to Japanese language and culture, I felt that this book really deepened my understanding.

It is entirely in Japanese, but it is written specifically for foreigners learning Japanese, so it uses easy-to-understand Japanese and has glossaries of key terms (translated into English, Chinese, and Korean). Basically it was pretty much the perfect level for my intermediate-level Japanese ability and was challenging enough that I learned a lot of vocabulary from it but not so dense or difficult that it took a lot of time and effort just to get through a single sentence. It would probably be worthwhile for anyone at an N3 or N2 level to try reading; for someone with N1 ability it would probably be a pretty easy read.

The Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle. Felt that this was a pretty worthwhile read also. It was very English, with an emphasis on merriness and robustness and so on, and more than a little male-oriented and slapstick in the way that characters would beat each other with their staffs and then laugh about it and consider themselves to have had a good time (and depending on the situation, sometimes take a liking to each other and become comrades immediately after the fight), or there would be humor taken from characters hitting each other, that sort of thing. I could also perceive some carryovers from the medieval romance tradition, like the “let’s go out looking for adventure” impulse. On the negative side, the book is heavily anti-clergy (were there no honest and pious clergy in England at the time and were they all rich, fat swindlers?). On the positive side, what I most enjoyed about it was the strong sense of the goodness of nature and of things that are simple but good, like taking satisfaction in simple foods and so on.

[shooraijin]

were there no honest and pious clergy in England at the time and were they all rich, fat swindlers?

No Friar Tuck?

[Sheenar]

Still working my way through Perelandra . It normally doesn't take this long to get through a book, but I keep putting it down --there's a lot of philosophical dialogue between a couple of characters that goes on and on and on --without real plot development going on. My best friend said it gets better, so I'm going to keep going. She told me the 3rd book in the Space Trilogy is her favorite, so we'll have to see.

Also starting Crazy Love by Francis Chan --we're going through the book in my ABF (Adult Bible Fellowship) class at church. I'm looking forward to it!

[Kaori]

No Friar Tuck?

Are you calling Friar Tuck "honest and pious"? . . .and not fat?

[shooraijin]

No Friar Tuck?

Are you calling Friar Tuck "honest and pious"? . . .and not fat?

Not fat? No. But the character seems to be positively portrayed in just about every version of Robin Hood I've ever read, at minimum as well-meaning. Does this book portray him differently?

[Kaori]

He's not negatively portrayed. But in the entire book, there is only one incident I can recall where he does something spiritual, and that is performing a wedding service. Other than that, his personality--e.g. how much he loves eating and drinking (alcohol), how he enjoys singing secular songs, how good he is with a quarterstaff, and so on--is played as humorously incongruous with the life of holiness and self-denial that a monk is supposed to lead. He says at one point that he is living in the woods with Robin Hood and his band because those wayward thieves so badly need someone to look after them, but that is completely tongue-in-cheek: he is never shown actually hearing confessions or praying or doing anything for anyone's spiritual benefit. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that he is portrayed as being more impious than not.

[the_wolfs_howl]

The Truth About Money Lies by Russ Crosson

Like the other Russ Crosson book I read a while ago, this was given to my graduating class. It outlines a biblical view of money, and corrects many of the world's false ideas about the importance and priorities with money. Helpful advice to keep in mind.

Amillennialism Today by William E. Cox

A good, concise overview of the amillennial perspective, how it differs from other millennial perspectives, and scriptural support for the belief. It's proven very helpful in my study on eschatology.

[heero yuy 95]

After telling myself I needed to read it forever, I finally picked up my copy of Dune. And wow, I gotta say it deserves the hype. I'd even say it is to science fiction what LOTR is to fantasy. Gotta have that spice.

[shooraijin]

Dune is definitely a classic. It's easier reading than its bulk would suggest.

[Kaori]

Archimandrite Roman Braga Exploring the Inner Universe: Joy—the Mystery of Life. Fr. Roman Braga was a Romanian priest and monk who passed away recently (just in the past calendar year). He was persecuted by the Communist regime in Romania and was imprisoned for a total of 11 years before serving briefly in Brazil and then moving to the States. This book is a very good introduction to him, I think. It is composed of three small pieces: an interview with Fr. Roman and then two short articles written by him. The interview covers in its course the entire story of Fr. Roman’s life. Was especially moved by his account of his time in prison. For example:

“I cannot say that I experienced prayer as Father Staniloae, but what I do know is that we will never reach the same spiritual level of life as in Communist imprisonment.”

On the Way of Faith: Faith, Freedom, and Love by Archimandrite Roman Braga.

This book is a collection of articles published in journals and as such is a bit of a mixed bag. There were some very good things. There were some rather overlapping things (i.e. one article would have ideas and phrases overlapping with a different article on the same subject). And there were some things were I have to part ways with the Archimandrite. So I wouldn’t particularly recommend it to a non-Orthodox person, though it had some interesting information about the relationship between the Communist government and the Orthodox Church and did contain some very good articles.

Going from the sacred to the profane, I've read forty-some percent of the 800-page-long Varney the Vampire and I am giving up on it at least for the time being (may or may not pick it up again later). It has some historical interest as an extremely seminal and influential work in the development of vampire fiction; for example, this is where we get the vampire coming in the window of the bedroom of the pure, beautiful young lady trope, and the appearance of the vampire in the early vampire film Nosferatu was taken directly from the character of Varney in this book. Also, the character of the vampire in this novel is much more developed and round than the title character of Dracula, which Varney predates. However, as expected of a book for which the author was paid by the word, it is unendurably long-winded and full of digressions. It is not badly-plotted in the first several chapters, where one thing is followed by the next with a good progression and a sense of unfolding events, but after a while it starts to lose its way, and from the summaries I've read it apparently is even more meandering and without focus in the parts of the book that I have let to read. It's not that I think that reading it to the end would be a total waste of time, but right now I just can't bring myself to continue to the end when there are so many more valuable things I could be doing.

[the_wolfs_howl]

The Bible and the Future by Anthony A. Hoekema

A very good, detailed summary of different views of what the Bible says about the future - death, resurrection, heaven, the millennium, etc. It was obvious which views Hoekema was most sympathetic to, but I think he treated them all fairly and pointed out their strong and weak points.

The Healing Spell by Kimberly Griffiths Little

A surprisingly touching YA novel about a girl who tries to perform a magic spell to heal her mother from a coma. You can see it either as modern fantasy or just as a completely realistic and plausible story. Even though the main character and her family are sort of nominal/superstitious Catholics, there was actually a very good, sound perspective on God and miracles and the power of faith. It was more than just the wishy-washy, "The dreams that you wish will come true." You actually have to put your faith in something, and act on that faith. I cried a surprising amount while reading this book; it awoke in me some emotions I didn't know I was dealing with, since my relationship with my dad is actually quite similar to the main character's relationship with her mom (though he's not in a coma, thank God).

[Kaori]

The Faith We Hold by Archbishop Paul of Finland is a very short volume (less than 100 pages) that covers a few of the most central points about Orthodox Christianity. Not a bad little volume, but it is not exhaustive or systematic and is not meant to be; it just discusses at some length a small number of things that are at the core of the Orthodox faith.

The Lenten Triodion. This is the Orthodox service book for the services during Great Lent and Holy Week. Very rich and profound. I'm doubtful about whether it would be of interest to a non-Orthodox person (most people don't go around reading service books for denominations they don't belong to, right?) Also, it is really good to read it--if one is going to read it at home, in contrast to using it to celebrate the services--while having had the experience of the Orthodox services. It's not that it wouldn't have any value or benefit for someone who hasn't experienced the services; it would probably have some. But it makes a lot more sense if you have been in the services and know what that experience is.

The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. Okay, so this is a Christian allegory, but it's not well-written and I don't know why it was considered a classic. Vastly inferior to the Divine Comedy, the Faerie Queene, Pilgrim's Progress, Pilgrim's Regress, Hind's Feet on High Places, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Lord of the Rings, G.K. Chesterton, and George MacDonald. Also, what is it with these long-winded Victorians? Unlike Victor Hugo, Kingsley goes off on tangents that contribute nothing to plot, characterization, or atmosphere, are not well-written stylistically, and are just the author's inserting his own biased opinions about matters in which he most likely does not have any expertise. The overall story itself was not too bad (if one could cut out all the pointless verbosity), and there were a few good passages, but the book as a whole was completely spoiled by the author's blatant racism and bigotry. For example:

"Yes; when people live on poor vegetables instead of roast beef and plum-pudding, their jaws grow large, and their lips grow coarse, like the poor Paddies who eat potatoes."

It seems like this Reverened wasn't too familiar with Daniel chapter 1. Or with what kinds of foods are healthy for human beings to eat.

. . .

The Bone Knife by Intisar Khanani is a very lovely short story (and also free!) It centers around a happy and loving family with two living parents and three daughters, so the strong, positive family relationships are really nice to see. Also the concrete details of the place the family is living in and of their daily lives were very well-drawn, I thought. The story ends with quite a bit of unresolved SPOILER: Highlight text to read: romantic tension, so it is not a story that wraps everything up neatly but rather a story that opens up some questions about how the main character is going to develop as a person and leaves them there for the reader to ponder.

Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani is a novella, first in a two-part series, so a little bit longer than The Bone Knife and a little bit less free. :p It wasn't bad despite more or less falling into that juvenile paranormal category, which I am not terribly interested in, and also having some SPOILER: Highlight text to read: unresolved romantic tension. But the main character is an "honest thief," and throughout most of the book she is always escaping from somewhere or someone or trying to help someone else escape from something or both, so the action is fast-paced and engaging. I didn't take to the main character as much as to the main character in The Bone Knife, though I didn't dislike her either. She is pretty much your typical spunky heroine, the kind we have all seen a thousand times before, whereas the heroine from The Bone Knife seems both more unique as a character (i.e. not falling into common tropes) and more real.

[K. Ayato]

Starting on book 4 (out of 5) of the Bright Empires series by Stephen R. Lawhead. Also on my list are Kim by Rudyard Kipling, 1984, and Brave New World.

[the_wolfs_howl]

Insomnia by Jabra Johansen

Really interesting thriller about a boy who can't sleep because he's forced to watch the dreams of the last person he made eye contact with before falling asleep. As he grows more and more sleep-deprived, he starts to lose his grip on sanity. Exactly the kind of dark, psychologically interesting story I go for. It's apparently the first book of a series, but I thought the character development reached a very satisfying place and all of the important plot questions were answered, so I don't really feel inclined to read more.


The Spindlers by Lauren Oliver

<3 OH MY GOODNESS I LOVE THIS BOOK. Seriously, it's going to be a childhood classic I foist upon any children who come within my grasp from now on It's a kind of dark, creepy, but still kid-appropriate story (sort of like Tim Burton's claymation movies) about a girl whose brother's soul has been stolen by spindlers - huge spider-like creatures who live in the world Below ours. So she goes on an epic quest to retrieve his soul, despite all odds. It was a brilliantly original, fun world and also just a really great story of friendship, family bonds, and tenacity. There were a few moments where Oliver broke the fourth wall a little too much for my taste, but overall it was excellent.

[Kaori]

Reread Howl’s Moving Castle. It seems like it has gotten cleverer and funnier since I last read it . . .

On the other hand, I am a little bit uncomfortable now with the acidity and sarcasm in the interactions between Sophie and Howl, and the way that Sophie is generally caustic and sarcastic to everyone and about everything. Was the UK the original source of American sarcasm and snark?

Started reading Shadows by Robin McKinley and somehow or other finished it despite strongly disliking it from the very beginning. It’s one of those books with an extremely annoying teenage narrator, and said narrator uses all sorts of very obnoxious slang (McKinley is trying to create an in-world slang, which is quite mixed together with real-world-present-day teenage slang, and she is overdoing it by quite a long shot, since this sort of thing really only requires a small amount in order to get the proper flavor).

Equally obnoxious but in a different way, the narrator has a half-Japanese friend and knows a handful of Japanese words, some of them pretty typical words that a foreigner with a mild interest in Japanese might have (e.g. 馬鹿) and some of them rather out of the way. Sometimes the narrator is misusing Japanese words in the way that one would misuse them if you don’t actually speak the language or have a sense of how words are used in context but just look up isolated words in an English-Japanese dictionary. But the native-Japanese-speaker character also says various things in ways that a native speaker would definitely not say them, and that is clearly the author’s fault, not the ignorance of her narrator.

Overall, the heroine has a few good qualities but is rather immature and floundering her way through things while having no idea what she is doing. I get the impulse to write about characters who have real problems and aren’t perfect and don’t have everything put together, but I used to teach teenagers, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with tons of teenage students who were also not perfect but who were far more admirable and had more good qualities and were more mature than this character, and I really wish that young adult fiction would have heroes and heroines that can be held up as an example to aspire to—still realistic, but having qualities worthy of emulation. For example, there’s the clever resourcefulness of Tanaquil in Tanith Lee’s Black Unicorn; the patient endurance and fortitude under trying circumstances of Harry from The Blue Sword, also by Robin McKinley (okay, she is in her lower twenties, but still); the pure-heartedness of Lucy from The Chronicles of Narnia; or there’s the way that the narrator of Green Angel, by Alice Hoffman, after losing her entire family and being overwhelmed with grief, gradually goes through a healing process and learns to reach out and help others who are in need.

Easily the worst McKinley novel out of those that I have read (which is, I think, most of the ones she has written).

Followed that up by rereading the best McKinley novel, which is Deerskin, partly because I wanted, as a counterbalance to other fiction I’ve been reading recently, to read something with a heroine who wasn’t totally fixated on the physical appearance of the men around her (the male lead of Deerskin is not attractive, and this is significant to the plot). More significantly, I don’t think I have encountered any other fiction that gives this kind of thorough, weighty, and respectful treatment of the issue of rape and of how extremely difficult it is to overcome the trauma of rape and to be able to heal. Although there is a love story involved, the male lead doesn’t even appear until halfway through the book. It really is primarily a story of Deerskin’s arduous journey of healing and only secondarily a love story.

Now following that fiction binge up by starting a bunch of nonfiction reading, as follows:

The Orthodox Study Bible
A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D.
Unseen Warfare (as edited by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and revised by Theophan the Recluse)

More on these later, since I am just starting each of them.

[Animeniac]

I've started reading kiss by Ted Dekker and Erin Healy

So far it's cool it's about a girl who has had a bad life....I just started so I'll post the wiki page
ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_(Dekker_novel

[the_wolfs_howl]

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
<3 A beautiful graphic novel that is a collection of short horror stories. The artwork is just gorgeous, full of a striking juxtapositioning of drab colors and stark, vivid ones. All the stories were delightfully chilling, and had wonderful twist endings. I definitely need to buy this and keep it on my shelf forever :3

The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton
Less enamored with this one. On the one hand, it's set in a beautifully described, rich and unique fantasy world with a lot of depth and carefully thought-out aspects, many of which are drawn from existing real-world folklore and just kind of extrapolated a bit. But on the other hand...I did not like Dart-Thornton's style Way way waaaaaay too wordy. I don't think I've ever seen such a bad case of I Must Exchange Every Common Word For Something You've Never Heard Of Before That I Found In My Thesaurus. I mean, I have a pretty good vocabulary, but I had to make a long list after each chapter of words I'd never even seen before. And she didn't use them in good ways, where you could at least guess from the context what they meant. No, she would just slap down an excessively long paragraph chock-full of all of these obscure terms, and blithely move on as if everyone could follow her descriptions

The story itself was decent - a young man with no memory and no voice stumbles into the servants' quarters of a castle, his face marred from a poisonous bush. He sets off on a quest to find answers and healing, and the quest takes him through many different settings with various companions. It offered an interesting view of this intricate world, but the style completely ruined any enjoyment I would have gotten out of it, I think :/ Also, there's an Aragorn-wannabe character who comes in rather late who was just too perfect, and I hated his guts. Which I suppose is probably the opposite of the effect she was going for. But competence and chivalry isn't enough to win my affections

SPOILER: Highlight text to read: I did, however, like twist-reveal where you realize the protagonist you thought was male all along is actually female. It's probably the best of any such reveal I've ever seen. I did not see it coming at all, yet it made complete sense, and the transition was handled really well. Probably the only time you could use the term "he/she" and get away with it. It also wasn't some weird transgender thing, which I appreciate in our current cultural climate.

[Panda4christ:3]

Finished the Harry Potter series a couple months back! Never read these as a kid, growing up in a strictly conservative Christian magic-is-bad home. I enjoyed them, though I felt the series wrapped up a little too neatly for my personal tastes.
On the third book of Heroes of Olympus, Haven't had time to read but I'm getting back into it

[Thunderscream872]

Been listening to the audiobook of Star Wars Darth Bane: Path of Destruction. Loving it so far!

[the_wolfs_howl]

Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard

As the title suggests, this book takes a closer look at The Hound of the Baskervilles and concludes that Sherlock Holmes actually accused the wrong person of the murder he was investigating. The explanation of the mystery was interesting and I'm totally sold on Bayard's idea of who the real murderer is, but what was truly fascinating about this book was what he had to say about the nature of fictional characters. He argued that, in a way, characters in a story are real and alive, because we give them that power when we suspend our disbelief to enjoy their stories. And because they're real, they have a certain amount of control over their own lives and our perceptions of them. For a writer and a lover of literature, this was a fascinating little book.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

This fun children's book felt like a cross between A Series of Unfortunate Events and the Professor Layton games Like those stories, this book doesn't talk down to its young audience, but assumes that the kind of kid who would pick up a thick book like this can figure out the tough words and concepts for themselves. The story follows four children who are recruited to infiltrate an evil man's operation to brainwash everyone in the world. Each of the four children has their own special skills, and they all have to work together to thwart the villain's plot. There was even a(n unintentional) sort of allegorical parallel to how God uses us to fight against the devil's lies.

The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern William Golding

This is, if possible, even more hilarious and awesome than the movie. I loved all of Golding's little asides and interruptions, and just the whole overall joke of this being the abridged version of an old classic. After reading this, certain things about the movie make a lot more sense than they used to, and it just makes me appreciate what a great adaptation it is. Which it had better be, since Golding wrote the screenplay

[TheChocolateGamer]

Reading John Piper's "Desiring God" -

This book is the biggest (along with the Bible) eye-opener in all history of books. Read this book and it will make you 1000% more happy, calm and confident in God. I certainly recommend it.

[Sheenar]

Just picked up Howl's Moving Castle book 1. Good stuff so far!