Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections

by Mollie Hemingway

No comment.

Dying to Live: The Power of Forgiveness

by Harold L. Senkbeil

Pastor recommended this book very highly and said it highlighted many “Lutheran distinctives.” It took around 50 pages before I began to appreciate it, but I am glad to have read it.

Through Death Into Life

The title “Dying to Live” comes from a frequent theme in the book. “The road of …

Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife

by Ariel Sabar

What’s more important, the Truth or a good narrative? Karen King is a Harvard Divinity School professor who specialized in Gnostic writings. She received an email about a new papyrus that seemed to indicate that Jesus was married. She dismissed it for a year, then suddenly …

God and Man and Monkey at Yale

by Christopher N. White

This was a 44 page pamphlet about Darwin, the loss of his daughter Annie, and his loss of faith.

Late in life, he told a friend that “he would very much like to hear Handel’s Messiah again, but he was afraid to try it. ‘I dare say I should find my soul too dried up to appreciate it as in old days; and …

Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve

by Ben Blatt

Another win for the interlibrary loan system. The author applies statistics to the words in books and reports his findings.

In the 1960s, this was done by hand with The Federalist Papers to convincingly show that Madison (not Hamilton) was the author of a particular group of 12 of those essays. Little details gave it away …

Kon-Tiki

by Thor Heyerdahl

Thor Heyerdahl spent some time living in the South Pacific on an island called Fatu Hiva. He observed to his wife that “the huge stone figures of Tiki [the chief Polynesian god] in the jungle are remarkably like the monoliths left by extinct civilizations in South America.” (13) He developed a theory that the Pacific islands were …

First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

by Robert D. Richardson

I learned about this book from Austin Kleon’s newsletter and this blog post and ordered it through interlibrary loan. Emerson would read, take notes, mine those notes for his journals, and mine his journals when writing essays and speaches.

There are useful thoughts here about writing, …

Later

by Stephen King

I read this in less than a week, which for me these days is saying something. After my disappointment with his last Hard Case Crime book (The Colorado Kid), I got this one from the library. It was much better.

There’s not much I need to record about it. Jamie, the narrator sees dead people for a while after they die, and something more is alluded …

Peter and the Starcatchers

by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

We listened to this as a family on our Florida vacation. Great! Went well with the Disney trip, Peter Pan ride, etc. And there is a character in this book named Little Richard. When we were on a bus tour in New Orleans, we saw the building where the musician Little Richard recorded Good Golly, Miss Molly.

Out of the Silent Planet

by C. S. Lewis

We listened to this as a family. Smart people like this book (“Better than Narnia!”), but it’s not my favorite.