This is a list of the books I read in 2014. All the reviews were written in 2014 and are archived on this site in (roughly) the order I read them in.
Book Reviews 2014
September 25, 20192014 / Book ReviewsSo I’ve been recommended “Fight Club” by several different individuals. Even after seeing the movie, I thought I would give it a read to see the differences. And there are some, as is the tendency with books-to-movies.
I wonder if the themes of Fight Club the book and the movie are similar however. To be frank, the movie was very well done in keeping true to the premise of the book. The themes must, therefore, be similar and I think they are. What I think the overall theme of the book is must be the fragility of life and to “seize the day,” Carpe Diem. There is a scene in the book (also in the movie) where Tyler Durden pulls a man working at a convince store outside and puts a gun to his head. He asks him why he stopped going to college. He gives some excuse and Tyler threatens him that if he isn’t enrolled in school the next time he sees him, he will kill him. While harsh, the point does not go unnoticed: live life like it’s your last.
The other major theme revolves around the culture of men in our society. At the beginning of the book, the central character (unnamed in the book) is living in a high rise apartment building full of Ikea furniture (which becomes an obsession for him) and going to seminars for various diseases he doesn’t have. The book has an underlying theme that suggests that men have been emasculated in our society. We are now house-keepers, never taking a chance or experiencing something incredible but fine with the microcosm of the mundane. In the most revealing scene arguing for this point, the main character goes to a support group for men with testicular cancer and meets a man who literally has been emasculated due his cancer treatment and now has large fat deposits around his pectoral muscles (in the vernacular, “man-boobs”). This man later dies in efforts for “project mayhem,” but the idea is not lost: he seized the day and lived his life to the fullest, for something meaningful. But I’m getting ahead of myself: the main character meets a man named Tyler Durden. Tyler tells the main character one day to hit him as hard as he can. They start fighting and start a “club” called, “Fight Club.” This effort is a subtle ploy in the overarching message of the emasculation of men to regain their manhood. Not to say that fighting “makes” you a man per-sey, but rather it is the concept of the return to embodying what a man is.
I’m not sure if this is what the author intended, but I definitely see that as I looked back on this book. I’m not sure if I would recommend this book. It is full of interesting anecdotes that might be considered inappropriate. In this same way, there is a bit of coarse language that makes me apprehensive about a recommendation. [...]
September 25, 20192014 / Book ReviewsEver since reading Rainbow 6, I was captivated by Clancy’s literary style. I was recommended to read “Without Remorse” which chronicles the beginnings of John Kelley, or John Clark, the CIA mastermind behind Rainbow 6. It was a fitting novel to follow up Rainbow because it tells the backstory of the main protagonist.
As we have discussed, some fiction novels do not always have a coherent message behind them: some are purely for entertainment purposes. This novel however, is chock full of subtle political and social messages. Essentially, the novel begins with John Kelley picking up a strange women who joins Kelley on his boat and home. We later find out that she is a prostitute that has escaped her captors who provide her with involuntary drugs. He falls in love with her but she dies when they go to stake out the old stomping grounds. This enrages Kelley and he goes on a rampage to end the lives of her captors.
At the same time, Vietnam is still raging on in the Pacific. Kelley was a Master Chief Petty Officer with the Seals but has fulfilled his obligations to his country and is living the civilian life. His shadowed past included an operation that put his life in grave danger in the jungles of Vietnam. He trekked through miles of a river to a base deep in enemy territory to rescue a fellow Seal. Sometime in the book after he retired, the CIA approaches Kelley to help guide another team into the same base where the Soviets and North Koreans are holding POW’s with vital national security information.
Right off the bat, there is a signification moral issue that arises in this book: “Is it a moral obligation to right something you know is wrong?” In the case of Kelley’s lover, he knows that more women are being held captive by these evil men. When he starts murdering them systematically and rescuing the imprisoned women (dropping them off at nurses house), a moral conflict is raised by those who are informed of the situation: is Kelley justified in exacting vengeance outside of the law when he knows there is evil being committed? Perfectly mirrored by the conflict in Vietnam, as a superior fighting force and a nation with the power to intervene, were we (are we) obligated to engage in foreign war by military intervention when we know there are atrocities happening in the country?
This interplay between the two stories is quite captivating. The book does a great job between dishing out a fantastic story while interweaving a complex socio-political message underneath. I am sure this will not be the last Clancy book I read! [...]
September 25, 20192014 / Book ReviewsI started S nearly a year ago and just got around to finishing it. I have to say: it is one of the most intriguing novels I have ever personally read.
The plot of this whole project (I hesitate to call it merely a “book”) is this: think of leaving a treasured book on a library rack by accident one day, to pick it up the next only to find someone had written in it, admiring your notes from when you were 16. Not only this, but this particular book was written by a man with a mysterious past. He never revealed to the world who he really was. This is the premise of S.
There are two connected stories taking place: the book itself is called “the Ship of Thesus,” written by V.M. Straka. Straka’s past is veiled but there are clues to his identity from various people, including the translator of “Ship” who also writes footnotes throughout the book (that are also threaded with codes). The book reads like a normal book, but in the margins are pen marks from two different individuals talking back and forth between each other. One is disgraced graduate student Eric, who’s work was stolen by a professor and who claimed he was a fraud. He prints in block letters that are easily discernible. The other is Jen, an undergraduate student who is struggling admidst the pressures of school and life. She writes in a cursive scrawl that is sometimes hard to read. They write to each other about the solving the mystery of Straka, point out poetic lines and relate them to their lives, their parents, their backgrounds, meeting up, school, love, etc. all of this is made even more confusing because they write in different colors that represent different times. At first, Jen writes in a blue ink and Eric black. About half way, you start seeing gold (Jen) and green (Eric). Towards the end you see red (Eric) and purple (Jen). Last, you see black and black. Finally, this is not a conventional book in one other way: throughout their time corresponding together, they communicate also by including various items into the book. There are newspaper clippings, a strange device (that I
haven’t figured out yet) that seems to be some kind of de-coder, postcards (Eric goes to Brazil at one point), pictures, longer notes about their lives, etc. These are all inserted and made reference to in the margins.
Ship of Thesus is essentially about a man who wakes up and cannot remember his past at all. He is simply known as “S.” He meets up with various people throughout his travels, figuring out who he is and more importantly, trying to reconnect with a woman he see’s and feels pulled towards. Her name is “Sola.” He finds himself in the middle of a chase after a bomb explodes, only to jump into the sea and onto a strange ship. The ship’s crew has an odd air to them, made worse by the fact that they all have their mouths sewed shut. They communicate by a whistle. The ship’s captain, Maelstrom, is the only one who talks (not very well I might add). There is much more about the plot that I do not want to reveal, but suffice it to say S becomes involved in an organization that has vast implications for Jen
and Eric as their families and lives become endangered. Somehow it is all connected in an incredible
interplay that reminds me of the complexity of an orchestral masterpiece.
In short, this book is crazy. There a websites out there dedicated to carrying on the questions of the book, like this one that also features a “how to read guide.” This is a book that will probably leave you more questions than answers how ever. JJ Abrams urged the readers to “dig deep.” What is most confusing is trying to figure out wha to read. Do you read the book first and then go back and read the drama between Eric and Jen? Or do you try to do it all at once? I tried the latter because I just don’t have the time to read all of that twice. Further, you REALLY have to dig in this book. It ends with as much mystery as it began with. As you may see from the linked website, there are a lot of theories on what the resolution is. This can be a little frustrating but for our detectives out there, this might be a welcomed challenge. One more note about the book: the characters that surround Straka are often times of a heritage that is not American. This sometimes is confusing because you have all these strange words and no recollection of who is who. I must pay more attention the second read!
Please pick this book up. It is truly ingenious. Can you go wrong with JJ Abrams? (I guess we will see next December!) [...]
September 25, 20192014 / Book ReviewsDietrich Bonhoeffer continues to be a controversial character among evangelicals, and others, even into the 21st century. Some praise the 20th century German theologian for his contribution to “neo-orthodoxy” while others are harshly critical of both Bonhoeffer and friend Karl Barth, condemning both for their intrusion on traditionalism. Regardless what presuppositions you may have on Bonhoeffer (or Barth for that matter), “Strange Glory” was a deep, rich (and quite frankly, most enjoyable) read that solidified in my mind how we should view Bonhoeffer.
I must start off by saying that this book is not without controversy. Indeed, I originally found it on Al Mohler’s summer reading list, where I had recently read an article he wrote called, “Baptist Polity and the Integrity of the Southern Baptist Convention,” which was about the intrusion of homosexuality threatening to split the convention. As I was reading the comments for Marsh’s book on Amazon, I saw a comment condemning the book for the accusation that Bonhoeffer was gay. I have never been one to shy away from controversy, so I read the book anyway and would recommend (and have recommended) for other Christians to read it. So here is what I will say on the subject: do I think Bonhoeffer was gay? No (not only did he die a virgin, but he was engaged to a young woman for some years). And in fact, the Gospel Coalition wrote a fantastic article recently called, “Was Bonheoffer gay? And other adventures in missing the point!” I thought the most striking feature of this article was the obsession our culture has with not just sex but gender and sexual orientation. In our day-to-day lives we are saturated with themes that are sexual-centric and it becomes the pivotal point in determining what is important in the biographies of today (As a side-note, in the book I read earlier this year, “Washington” by Ron Chernow, he is convinced that George Washington was having affairs with various women). If this is the central point in the book (it’s not) to you or the only reason you won’t read it, then you are certainly missing out.
With that out of the way, Marsh is a beautiful writer. The imagery that he writes with made me feel like I was sitting with Bonhoeffer in the mountains as he read a book in the cool of the morning, or inside his childhood home having a most clear picture of what it would have looked like. Marsh explores several very interesting ideas regarding Bonhoeffer, particularly his theological convictions in the “revival” of the Lutheran church. Just like context is key when studying scripture, the same is true in looking at a man such as Bonhoeffer: we must look at neo-orthodoxy and view it through the lens of the early 20th century Lutheran Church to fully understand the perspective in which Bonhoeffer swore his allegiance to. [...]
September 25, 20192014 / Book ReviewsI’ll begin this by saying, this is by far one of the best books I have ever read. I have, for awhile now, contemplated the misdirection of the American Evangelical movement. We are a culture that is obsessed with self: Jesus came to die for MY sins; God wants ME to be happy, healthy, and wealthy now etc. But this is all a farce. The concept of the Gospel does not point to man or self, but to God. Not only this, but we have become the most technological civilization there has ever been at any point. The world is connected by the push of a button; we have hundreds if not thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook; one can know within minutes the latest news stories on the opposite coast and on the other side of the world. But instead of becoming more connected, we have privatized our lives so that community is becoming non-existent. One no longer knows those in his local community which normally would encourage accountability, but this is quickly disappearing. This is a foundation we have built for ourselves: one that rests on emotionalism, felt-needs, a lack of doctrine and other factors that have invaded our churches. And this my friends, is why the American Evangelical church is dying.
Wells contributes this slow death to three movements: the marketers, the emergents, and the postmodernists. He begins the book with “the Lay of the Evangelical Land,” and in the first sentence shocks the reader with this:
“It take no courage to sign up as a Protestant. After all, million have done so throughout the West. They are not in any peril. To live by the truths of historic Protestantism, however, is a entirely different matter. That takes courage in today’s context.”
He then breaks down these three movements but has a consistent theme throughout his book: the lack of a doctrinal foundation. He says,
“What happened, though, was that this doctrinal vision began to contract. The goal that diversity in secondary matters would be welcomed quite soon passed over into an attitude that evangelicalism could in fact be reduced simply to its core principles of Scripture and Christ. In hindsight, it is now rather clear that the toleration of diversity slowly became an indifference toward much of the fabric of belief that makes up Christian faith… The erosion in biblical ways of thinking at first passed almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, after a while it was hard to miss the fact that this was happening. No doubt there were many specific causes. Campus organizations were undoubtedly reducing Christian faith to its most minimal form. And as serious biblical preaching in the churches diminished, ignorance of biblical truth became commonplace. But the largest factor in this internal change, I think, was that evangelicalism began to be infested by the culture in which it was living. And then Christianity became increasingly reduced simply to private, internal, therapeutic experience. Its doctrinal form atrophied and then crumbled.”
He begins with the marketers: these are the “seeker-senitive’s”, those who place the idea of what people think before the Gospel message. For example, there was a church not long ago that sent out surveys to the local to community to find out what kind of music they liked and then, based on the outcome of the surveys, spliced the most popular music into their church service to appease people. He argues this mentality of turning the church into a business comes from our economic world where numbers (such as attendance and money) are placed in front of doctrine. When we begin to let the culture influence the church, the church will crumble, as Wells puts it here:
“The truth is that without a biblical understanding of why God instituted it, the church easily becomes a liability in a market where it competes only with the greatest of difficulty against religious fare available in the convenience of one’s living room and in a culture bent on distraction and entertainment… The constant cultural bombardment of individualism, in the absence of a robust theology, meant that faith that had rightly been understood as personal now easily became faith that was individualistic, self-focused, and consumer oriented. That was the change to which the church marketers attuned themselves. Instead of seeing this as a weakness to be resisted, they used it as an opportunity to be exploited. Increasingly, evangelical faith was released from any connections with the past, from every consideration except the self, and was imbued with no other objective than entrepreneurial success. As the evangelical experience was thus cut loose, it became increasingly cultural, increasingly empty, and increasingly superficial.”
Some churches have gone as far as leaving out key doctrines of the Gospel, such as the doctrine of sin, to cater to the “felt-needs” of the congregation. But the real irony is that Christians will flock to churches that have a strong doctrinal and preaching foundation:
“What were these people looking for in a church? If we believe all the church-marketing hype, we would have to conclude that potential customers wanted, above all else, not to hear issues of truth and belief. These should be avoided like the plague. These are matters, the prevailing wisdom says, that should be hidden from seekers because they are so dreadfully off-putting. Not so! In fact, go percent of those in Rainer’s studies said the preaching was important to them, and not just any preaching. Almost the same percentage, 88 percent, said that what they came to hear was doctrine. The beliefs of the church were important to 91 percent. They wanted to know what the church believed. They wanted to have this laid out for them – with conviction. This was their preeminent concern. The next issue of importance, the friendliness of people, was far down the list – only 49 percent cited it. Is this such a revolutionary discovery? Should we really be so amazed that people would like to know what Christians think and whether, in this age of jaded, faded, transient beliefs, there actually is something that can be believed for all time?”
Wells next attacks the Emergents, those who believe that the social gospel runs supreme, or who believe in existentialism. In both cases, the priority of doctrine is neglected and human thought or reason is the ultimate end to the churches many problems.
Wells ends his book with a word of criticism he seems to get a lot: that it is great to diagnose what is wrong with the church, but how do we fix it? The point he makes is that if we believe that God is sovereign, it is in his will that we are to remain faithful to preaching and teaching the word of God and that he alone is able to make a change in the direction of the church.
I believe that my calling in this life is to enter into the ministry and begin to accept this great challenge: to remain faithful in the things God has given us and to pray that someday He will effect change. Whether I see the fruits of this labor is a non-issue as God is the one who has ultimate authority. This book was an eye-opening look on today’s church in our self-absorbed culture and I recommend it to anyone who is involved in the church. [...]
Black Hawk Down
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Daniel Commentary
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
A Christmas Carol
The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight
The Hobbit
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning
