- Night Embrace – Sherrilyn Kenyon
- I’ve read this wonderful series over and over again. This time I’m listening to the books on Audible)… I love her characters… even the vampire-ish ones! 🙂 Just a great, not-using-a-lot-of-brain-cells books!
- Good Manners for Nice People – Amy Alcon
- This book started out promising, and finished on a positive note, but I was left with feeling like this woman was a busy-body who spent a LOT of her time spying on other people, reporting online about people, and taking it upon herself to point out which “rules” people are breaking. Some of what she says is spot-on and pretty funny, but some of it is borderline obsessive and at one point she says she enforces a “no cell phone rule” in her favorite coffee shop. It’s important to say that she’s not employed by this shop, but she takes it as her duty to tell people not to use their cell phones saying she really wanted to “tackle them to the ground” for using their cell phones. I would think she’d go to the coffee shop to maybe have coffee or maybe write (since she’s an author and a columnist), but I wonder how much she can be enjoying her coffee and time in the shop if all she is doing is watching everyone who walks in the door to see if they are using their cell phone. I want to tell her to get a life and do something she enjoys. Then she tells a story of her organizing her friends to set up rotational visits to a single friend of hers who was dying of cancer. Something completely selfless in the midst of a book filled with things she does that makes me wonder if she does anything other than spy on other people breaking “social rules”. Anyway… I did finish the book, although twice in the middle I wanted to stop… I finished it and will probably give it 3 out of 5 stars!
- The Power of Six – Pittacus Lore
- This is a wonderful series!! It’s a YA (young adult) series about 9 teenager aliens. Okay… that just turned off a bunch of people, but it’s amazing how sucked in I get into this drama… This is the second book in the series, and you need to start from the beginning to know what’s going on. So, I am Number Four is first… get it and then move on to this one… I can’t wait to read the next one.
- Price, my 11 year old boy, LOVES these books… he’s on the 5th one now and about to start the 6th book. He was really mad about the 4th book because “they said the F word two times… can’t they write without putting that in there?” So that’s really the only complaint we have… I promised to find him an action/adventure novel with no cussing.
- The Tale of Despereaux – Kate D
- We read this one as a family. I really liked it, especially the narrator part. I love that they talk to us “dear reader” throughout the whole book. It teaches new vocabulary words as we go along… like empathy and things like that. We then watched the movie and decided we didn’t like how different it was from the book. We think the book was better than the movie. Wesley (9 year old boy) thought that the movie was better because “no one dies”. The rest of us liked the book better!
- For the Love – Jen Hatmaker
- Y’all… I cannot express how much I loved this book. I laughed out loud and read parts of it to anyone who happened to be near me! I am definitely putting this one back in the rotation to re-read. If you are married, or have children, or hope to be married or have children then this book is for you. If you are nearing 40, or over 40, or under 40 then this book is for you. I immediately put her other books on my wish list and will continue to talk about the things in this book for years… I just know she and I would be great friends!! So, I’ve also added “Meet Jen Hatmaker and make her feel very uncomfortable (since she’s an introvert) by gushing over how good friends we already are because of the conversations I’ve had with her in my head”. This book is for you… for the love!
- St Thomas Aquinas – G.K. Chesterton
- This book was so far over my head that I probably only understood about 1/4 of it. It was like reading C.S. Lewis to me. His books take me forever to read because I have to go back and re-read the sentences over and over to understand what he’s saying. Chesterton was the same, or maybe it was just Thomas Aquinas who was so hard to understand. My favorite thing I did get from it though was the idea that philosophers weren’t always the way I think of philosophers. Aquinas was definitely a philosopher who was also a Christian and had no problem working those two things together. It dawned on me that most Christian theologians are, at their essence, philosophers. They are all putting their own interpretation of scriptures, and spreading their ideas about it. When a lot of them agree on one interpretation, it becomes a denomination and it becomes the basis of their belief system. Aquinas was alive when science was just beginning… it was the beginning of science the way we view it. With an idea, a hypothesis, experiments, and conclusions… aka the Scientific Method. Aquinas believed that the bible was so vast and that humans were really able to understand everything it says and everything it means. Because of this, we take the scriptures and “guess” at what it means… Interpret it in the way we feel is best. Not to further our cause, or to prove that we are right, but just interpret what it says in the BEST way we can. THEN, if science is used to prove there is another meaning for something in the bible, something that might go against the way we have interpreted it, we change the interpretation. With this theory in place, he was able to use science in conjunction with his faith instead of opposed to his faith. He took the “heretics” of his age and really tried to understand where they were coming from, so he could show them where they went wrong in their beliefs. I would LOVE to see how he would act and what he would think if he were alive now. He was a great thinker, and apparently it’s important to note that he was a really big man. 🙂 I love the way Chesterton speaks in his writing, and I am adding more of his books to my list. Now off for something MUCH lighter than this!! 🙂
I try to read books from different genres and about a variety of subjects. I feel like it keeps me from getting bored and constantly generates questions that lead me to research and learn even more things. Let me know if you’ve read any of these books, or if you have any books that you think I REALLY need to read.
**Also… check out my new goodreads profile (and be my friend!) to see what I’m reading now and what’s on my to-read list!!
Welcome to my world… it’s pretty great around here!!
Amanda
Always Walking Forward 