BookAnon.com

Earlier this year - back in February or so - Jonathan Merritt told his social media followers that his new book was on pre-order already and would be released in a few months. I've been a fan of Jonathan's since his 2012 book A Faith of Our Own, so there was no question - I immediately pre-ordered the book. Didn't even have to know anything about it other than he wrote it.

I actually recently had a chance to actually read the book as an ARC, and - to steal part of the title of his 2014 book - it was "Better Than I Imagined".

The setup was a familiar tale of a kid from the suburban South moving to the Big Apple... and realizing he couldn't communicate with anyone using the words he had grown up using an...

When I read Rachel Held Evans' Searching for Sunday a couple of years ago (technically listened to Evans herself read it to me via Audible as I ran many miles along the Lake Murray Dam outside Columbia, SC), I was blown away. Here was someone who was roughly my age, who had grown up in roughly my part of the country (within a couple hundred miles as the bird flies), and who was speaking to one of the things I have been doing for seemingly twenty years already - searching for a way back into the church that she cherished as a child, but that she had grown disillusioned with as an adult. I didn't agree with her ultimate conclusions then (read the book to find them for yourself), but at least the fact that she did find answers gave me hope that one day I too might find what I've sought for so long.

When I recently saw a Facebook ad to sign up for the launch team for her new book, INSPIRED: Slaying Giants, Walking On Water, and Loving the Bible Again, I was extremely excited. I've been doing ARC work for various authors for a few years now, some public and some private, and this was a chance to give back to someone who had so inspired me just a couple of years ago. So I applied and, along with around a thousand others, was accepted. This would not be the small, intimate ARC groups I am much more familiar with. And following posts from 1000 people, all excited about this new venture and at various stages of reading the book in question as well as introducing themselves to each other and everything else that goes into a large new group of people joining together for even a limited purpose, well, let's just say that I probably missed more than a few. And that there is no probably...

New blog, new features. One of them I want to do every week will be to feature a new book that I've either read that particular book or at least read another book from that author.

For the inaugural edition of this feature, I want to talk about the newest release from one of my author friends that I've known for several years and who happens to live in the next county down from me at the moment. This book is Death Warmed Over by Kent Holloway.

I did have the privilege of reading this book as an ARC a couple of weeks ago, and I found it to be a refresh...

Shane,

We've never met, but from what you said about yourself in Executing Grace, we come from a roughly similar background. You grew up in Tennessee, I grew up on the exurbs of Atlanta. We're within a decade of the same age, and we were raised in similar conservative church backgrounds. We've both made something of ourselves that those in our hometowns may never have suspected us capable of back in those days.

I'm currently working on what I call a "2018TBR" project, where I set before myself a set list of books I wanted to read in 2018 - over 100 books in all, and I allowed for books to be added due to my Advance Reader Copy work with a few authors and publishers. Your book, Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It Is Killing Us, was on that list and I finished reading it today after having just started it yesterday. (Such is the norm for many of the books, and why yours was the 30th book I have read this year.)

Just so we are upfront with one another, despite agreeing with the premise of Executing Grace wholeheartedly and finding the stories you presented moving, the overall execution of the book was simply lacking. I won't rehash what I've already put openly on Goodreads and Amazon, my normal places for reviewing books. Instead, I want...

Earlier today, I read a post on BookRiot titled HOW THE POLITICAL CLIMATE LED ME TO ROMANCE NOVELS, and the title held such promise. Unfortunately, the article itself went on yet another political diatribe. So allow me, if you will, to explain in my own way how the political climate of late has led me to read ever more.

In 2017, I read 80 books. In 2018, I've got closer to 120 or so on deck, and we'll see how many of them I actually read. This, after struggling in 2008 to even read 53 books. Of course, 2008 was very different in terms of the US political climate and my own life. In 2008, I was newly married and working 100 miles (one way) from home. This was before the era of eBooks, and even audiobooks weren't quite on full mp3 the way they are now. So I had to lug around physical books and could only read on my lunch break or a few hours at home - hours dominated by sleeping, eating, and spending time with my new bride. So 53 books that year was quite an accomplishment - one that my new bride...

Over the last month or so, I've been listening to Frank Viola's Pagan Christianity: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices via Audible on my 10k runs. The entire book has been utterly fascinating, particularly for someone like me who saw quite a bit of this over the years but could never quite give it voice.

The story of the Letters of Marvin Snurdley was a particularly fascinating example found in Chapter 11 (of 12), but the only place I could find it online was on a blog called "Common Sense Atheism", and since they go on to attack Christianity in general, I thought I would copy it here with no commentary other than these notes and a strong recommendation to acquire and study this book for yourself. The story, in case it isn't clear, is a direct examination of exactly what happened to form the largest single piece of the New Testament: The Pauline Epistles. Frank then does a great job throughout the rest of the chapter of examining and explaining why the issues presented in the story of the Letters of Marvin Snurdley unfortunately affect us all in the real world.

Marvin Snurdly is a world-renowned marital counselor. In his twenty-year career as a marriage therapist, Marvin has counseled thousands of troubled couples. He has an Internet presence. Each day hundreds of couples write letters t...

I finally finished reading David Murrow's "Why Men Hate Going to Church (updated)", after having put it down for a couple of months while I read other books and worked on other things.

The best I can say about this book is that it is a gold mine, in the truest sense of the term. You see, my wife watches Gold Rush on Discovery Channel, so I wind up watching quite a bit of it with her. On that show, various crews move around literally TONS of earth, searching for a few specks of gold. That is EXACTLY what you will be doing reading this book - searching through tons of detritus (to put it gently) for the occasional HINT of something wort...

Skye Jethani's With: Reimagining The Way You Relate to God was my first book through the BookSneeze review program, and I'm honestly glad I found the program and this book on it. You see, this is one of the more mind blowing books I've ever read - which is saying something, considering I've read books such as Ted Dekker's Circle Series and most books Bill Myers has put out.

If you want to quit reading this review now, I'll leave you with this: READ THIS BOOK. You will NOT regret it.

Some details: Mr. Jethani - an editor of a leading Christian magazine - uses the first half of the book to talk about the four basic ways most of us relate to God:

Editor's Note, November 25, 2024: This post was originally written in 2010. The contest noted has long since ended. :)

One of my favorite authors, Jeremy Robinson, has a contest going right now for a signed hardcover of his new book due out next month, THRESHOLD, or even just a non-signed hardcover. I have a couple of his self-published paperbacks (ANTARKTOS RISING and ...

There are a few authors who I read virtually everything they write. Early on, they included Tom Clancy and Stephen Coonts, and as I matured I moved on to guys like Dale Brown, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, and Lee Child.

A couple of years ago, when I was still active on MySpace, a new, self-published (at the time) author friended me, and I bought a couple of his early books.

I've been hooked ever since.

The author in question is one you've probably never heard of, but need to if you like solid action-adventure books. You know, the kind that you just do NOT want to put down, where the action is almost non-stop, balls-to-the-wall, what's-gonna-happen-next kinda stuff.

His name is Jeremy Robinson. He claimed that in writing his latest Kindle-only book, THE LAST HUNTER, that it was his best yet, so I wanted to attempt to rank each of his books thus far on my own scale.

First, a brief synopsis:

ANTARKTOS RISING was the first I read from him. This is a disaster story unlike any you've ever seen. It starts out looking like Day After Tomorrow, winds up looking like 2012 - and that is just the beginning. After the crustal displacement (ala 2012), Antarctica is now situated along the equator, and the ice melts off. The earth's remaining population, eager for new land now that much of the former Northern Hemisphere is frozen solid, sees this new land as the perfect place to relocate, and a contest is divised between several nations, with a single goal: whoever gets to the center of the island first gets the prize. What they do...