Book Reviews

My favorite book I have read recently is I Am Enough by Grace Byers and illustrated by Keturah A. Bobo. This beautifully written and illustrated children’s book is the reminder we all need that you are enough.

”I’m not meant to be like you and you’re not meant to be like me.”

This book reminds us we are each uniquely created in the image of God. We are all different. And we are all enough!

I encourage you to read this book yourself and read it with anyone you know who needs a reminder that they are enough!

The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the Horse
Charlie Mackesy

My mother handed me this book and encouraged me to sit and read it immediately. What an uplifting, beautiful book. It is easily readable in a very short time, and yet it is a book that deserves to be savored. With statement like, “the truth is everyone is winging it” and “sometimes just getting up and carrying on is brave and magnificent”, this book made me smile and want to reread it.

Meet these four unlikely friends who discover their devotion to each other and ways they can uplift each other. With beautiful illustrations and sparse words on each page, this book can be enjoyed by people of almost any age.

So as my mother recommended this to me, I recommend it to you. You can check if out from your local library and read it daily until it must go back. You can buy it and read it repeatedly until you give it to a friend who needs a reminder that they are loved. I invite you to read this book and remember you are loved more than you know

I have been reading this book for so long because I didn’t want to hurry through it and finish it. I was sad when I came to the last page because I loved the book so much that I wanted it to go on and on. (If you love this book like I do, please listen to her podcast, Everything Happens with Kate Bowler. And when searching for the exact name of her podcast, I learned there is a podcast called Everything Happens for a Riesling which I have not listened to although the name makes me laugh).

If you believe that everything happens for a reason and find comfort in that belief, then I am not here to change your mind. The author of this book would encourage you to not say those words outloud to others as they may not find them comforting. This book is what happened when one person learned that she had non-curable cancer and her whole world view needed to be reexamined.

In these pages, you be challenged in what you believe and how you support others who are suffering. You will laugh at the absurdity of life. You may cry as you remember that we were never told that life is fair even though we’d life for it to be.

“What if rich did not have to mean wealthy, and whole did not have to mean healed? What if being people of “the gospel” meant that we are simply people with good news? God is here. We are loved. It is enough” (21).This book is for people who read a sentence like this and want to hear more of the story.

“Everyone is trying to Easter the crap out of my Lent,” I say to my friends though gritted teeth and tears” (134). It is a book for people who love Easter and know real life contains so much Lent that doesn’t need to be rushed through.

I encourage you to read this book, and then we can talk more about it.

Last year I read the Bible with a group of wonderful people who helped me stay on track. Together we talked about our favorite and least favorite sections of reading. It required dedication and a commitment to reading every day for 365 days.

This year I read, The Holy Bible: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith. This 67 page (small) book is a quick read.

Now, you might wonder why there are 67 pages and only 66 books in the Bible? The answer is that Revelation gets two pages. 

So now you are wondering how the author condenses each book of the Bible to so few words? Here is one example. “Amos becomes like the 14,000th prophet to note that Israel is making God mad and when you make God mad things go bad” (30). Or something from the New Testament. Mark-“Basically, Matthew’s Gospel, but with less boring, more ACTION, and your choice of two endings!” (41). That one reminds me of an informercial. 

This book was a Christmas present from a friend and it has brought me hours of joy as I read and reread it. And then, I read it to other people. I was thinking about how this little book might be helpful in the life of faith. I think he has a really great idea here. What if for your next Bible study, everyone tried to summarize a book of the Bible in one page, one paragraph, one sentence. What is the essence of each book? Or if you are studying a book of the Bible, compare what this book says to what you think is the main point. Is this author correct? How would you rewrite or change his words? 

So, if you need a new Bible, this might be the one for you. Only if you are willing to keep an actual Bible next to it for reading along this abridged one. Enjoy!

The End of Your Life Book Club

Will Schwalbe

Here are a few things you should know about me as you read this review.

1-My Mom and I love to read!

2-My Mom has cancer.

This book was shared with me by a friend who first asked how my Mom is doing as this isn’t a book you recommend to most people who are actively grieving (anticipatory or otherwise). When she heard that my Mom was doing well through her treatments, she encouraged me to read this book.

This is the story of a mother and son making good use of their time waiting in doctor’s offices by discussing books they have read. Their book club is how they share their stories with each other and how they support each other. This is a story of grief, family, hope, kindness, and faith.

From the title and the beginning of the book, the readers know Mary Anne (the mother) is going to die. Even knowing that in advance did not diminish the tears I cried at the end of the book. Each chapter features a book (or books) they read together. This book increased my “to read” list as they shared snippets from books always enough to intrigue the reader and not enough to give it all away.

I recommend this book for anyone who loves to read and loves discussing books with others. This book is great for people who want a glimpse into how others cope with death, dying, and grief. And you should read this book if you enjoy smart, funny, and sad books.

“No one in the family has ever really gotten over Bob’s death. We talk of him daily, recounting stories and imagining what his reactions would be to new books and recent events. He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life. When I talked with Mom about Bob, I wondered if I would be able to talk about her the same way when she was no longer here” (57).

“Were you sad to leave Cambridge?” I asked her.

She was, she said. Very sad. But she was also looking forward to being back in New York. “The world is very complicated,” she added. “You don’t have to have one emotion at a time” (88).

“I realized then that for all of us, part of the process of Mom’s dying was mourning not just her death but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don’t really lose the person who has been; you have all those memories” (128).

“I was learning that when you’re with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time” (130).

“And then something occurred to me. “You know the thing about our book club is that we’ve really been in it all our lives.

Mom agreed but pointed out that she’d been doing the same thing with others too–talking about books with my sister and brother and some of her friends. “I guess we’re all in it together,” she said. And I couldn’t help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one” (281).

Recently while logging some miles for work, I heard Adam Hamilton on the radio talking about fear. He is the pastor of Church of the Resurrection United Methodist Church in Kansas and is a prolific writer. The book he was talking about that day was his latest book, Unafraid: Living with Courage and Hope in Uncertain Times. 

The part of his book that he focused on in that conversation was

Face your fears with faith.

Examine your assumptions in light of the facts.

Attack your anxieties with action.

Release your cares to God (35).

In this time of fear and anxiety, his words stuck with me. What role does our faith play in our ability to live with fear? Where do we get our facts and do we check the information we are given? What actions are we taking to lower our anxieties? And then can we release all our burdens to God?

Since my sermon for the coming week was about fear ruling the actions of the disciples, I thought this would be a good book to read. The book was a fast read for me. There were many quotes that made it into my sermon and influenced my thinking while writing the sermon. Because I was so drawn in by the FEAR acrostic, I hoped it would feature prominently into the book. Hamilton did talk about it frequently and yet I wanted him to go into more examples of how we might live this out in regular, daily situations.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the fears of life that are highlighted in every newscast and many conversations with friends and colleagues. You should read this book if you want an easy primer into how fear affects you as a human. This book is good read for anyone who wants to live more by faith and less by fear.

“Jesus preached that the essence of God’s hope and expectation for the human race was that we love God with our entire being, and that we love our neighbor as we love ourselves. He even said that we were called to love our enemy. If this ethic of love sounds too high-minded to be of much practical use, we can start by asking one very concrete question: ‘In the situation I find myself in, what is the most loving things I can do?’” (63).

In his book, Hamilton shares three principles he has learned about the fear of failure. “Most things are never as hard as your fear they will be” (86).

The second principle is “‘Successful people [however you define success] are willing to do things that unsuccessful people are unwilling to do’. Fear keeps many people and organizations from ever reaching their real potential” (86-87).

“And the third principle, which I’ve shared with many leaders over the years, I call ‘discernment by nausea’. Often when you come to a fork in the road, a decision you have to make between taking this path or another, you’ll find that one path seems easier, safer, and more convenient. More often than not, though, the other path—the one that’s harder, riskier, more inconvenient, the one that leaves you feeling a bit nauseous when you think about it—is the one you should take. Jesus used different language to comment on the same phenomenon. He noted that life tends to present us with two roads we could take. One is broad and easy, yet it leads to destruction. The other is narrow and hard, but it leads to life” (87).

“When we fear God—when we revere, respect, and stand in awe of God—we fear everything else a little less” (208).