I started out the year on a roll, writing up posts for the first few books I read. And then life happened... here we are, 6 months later, and I haven't posted a book review since January. I can take comfort that not many people have noticed, I suppose! Here at the halfway point, I'm 24 books in, with just over 8,000 pages read.
I recently finished up Mel Brooks' autobiography All About Me, which was a really fun read. I'm a huge fan of his movies, and hearing the stories behind them was a delight. What was most interesting was the story of his rise to being a producer -- he put in a lot of work to get there, and it wasn't easy. It's a helpful reminder that people who make it to the top of any field have usually poured themselves into their careers, often at cost to family life or other commitments, and that overnight success is rarely overnight.
Before that, Abir Mukherjee's latest book, The Shadows of Men, was beautifully written, as always. It's a really interesting detective series set in colonial India, when tensions are high and an English and Indian detective are working together while caught up in the ways their cultures are at odds. I love the sense of place in these books, and the way that cultural conflict plays out, particularly in the way dismissed people reveal how vitally important they are. It's a reminder to really see people, not just to look at and through them, and to value them as individuals.
I waited for ages for the library to have Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and I was ready to love this story of video game designers who create an immersive world. I found it... forgettable. It felt like it was trying to be very profound, but it didn't resonate with me. Amazon reviews indicate I'm clearly in the minority on this one, but I was disappointed. It kinda just felt needy.
I'd been carrying around Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August for ages. I finally made it through the heartbreaking tale about the origins of WWI. As an American with little knowledge of European history outside of the major events, the book helped place WWI in the midst of the larger history of conflict between France and Germany, and I understood better how inevitable the war was. I couldn't help but read it with heartbreak, knowing the horrors of trench warfare that was to come as a result of the decisions made. Having been to Verdun and stood beside the ossuary filled with the bones of those chewed up by the machine of war, it's tragic to read the decisions that sent so many to their deaths.
H.G. Parry's The Magician's Daughter was a fun read, a story of a girl who lives in the midst of magic and is raised by a man trying to restore magic to a world losing it. It's an action-packed tale of friendship and heroism that was hard to put down. This is what I expected Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to be.
Finally, Michael Horton's Recovering our Sanity is a book that teaches us how to fear. Horton, professor of Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary, orients our fear towards God. When we talk about fear of God, it's not the same as fear of spiders, but a respect and admiration that leads us to love. When we properly fear God, we acknowledge that God alone has power over us and the world, and when we grasp this, we're not afraid of anything else in the world, which allows us to live unfettered and unafraid of all the things the world tells us to be afraid of. It's a short read that is a critically important message in the social media world where every other message is a new urgent reason to be afraid of government and neighbor and disease and everything else.
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