Grace & Knowledge Blog

The advent of ebook technology is enabling authors to make their out-of-print books available to new audiences.  If the authors charge, say, a buck or two for the books on Kindle, they can supplement their incomes nicely.  And they can pick up some extra reviews for their books by occasionally making them free for a short time.

I follow a blog that gives daily lists of free kindle books, xome of which I end up enjoying.  Today while proctoring a calculus exam I was looking at one of the kindle freebies, a novel about an English professor/private detective in Los Angeles named Simeon Grist.  Author Timothy Hallinan originally released the series back in the 1990s.

Popular fiction doesn't usually offer much in the way of vocabulary building, but this book at one point used the word "inspissate", which means to thicken.  While looking up the word in the Kindle's dictionary, I remembered that a year ago I ran across another interesting word, floccinaucinihilipilification, while reading one of Paul Levine's Jake Lassiter novels, another series from the 90s.

Tags: amazon kindle, books, words

One big trend in books over the past decade has been the profusion of detective stories from various countries.

The most famous example is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I haven't read. But I have read a couple of good ones recently.

One is The Ambassador's Wife by Jake Needham, a book set in Singapore and Thailand. When the body of a brutally murdered woman is found in a supposedly unoccupied suite of the Marriott in Singapore, the case is assigned to veteran police detective Samuel Tay. Tay is a quiet middle-aged guy who has trouble being arouind corpses. But he is also very tenacious. After it is determined that the dead woman is the wife of the American ambassador, the American embassy wants to handle the case itself, and there doesn't seem to be much Tay can do about it. But he refuses to give up and eventually gets to the truth.

I picked this one up free on Kindle. It is not available in hard copy..

Another one, even better, is Thom Satterlee's The Stages, a novel set in Copenhagen. The story is narrated by Daniel Peters, an American who has lived in...

Tags: amazon kindle, books

Methodist publisher Abingdon Press has been especially generous in providing free electronic copies of their recent titles. 

One book that they made available a few weeks ago is an archaeological thriller called Shrouded in Silence by Robert L. Wise. 

This novel has an interesting premise, the search for a solution to one of the most intriguing New Testament textual questions--the sudden ending of Mark's Gospel.

Some have speculated that the original ending was lost, perhaps accidentally torn off the scroll.  The main characters in the novel, Jack and Michelle Townsend, come to Rome hoping to find such a missing scroll fragment.  When a newspaper article publicizes their quest, a man comes forward who says he can help the Townsends.  But there are others who want to stop the Townsends, including an anti-American terrorist and a Gnostic Nazi.

I really liked the ending of this novel.  On the minus side, the writing is often clumsy, and the bad guys are rather cartoonish.  But I'm not going to complain about a free book.

Tags: amazon kindle, books

One of the attractive benefits of the Amazon Kindle is the frequent opportunity to download free books.

Recently an archaeological thriller called Elisha's Bones was free for a short time.  I picked up a copy and finished it today while I was giving a calculus exam. 

This book takes inspiration from a tantalizing scriptural passage:

" Elisha died and was buried.  Now Moabite raiders used to enter the country every spring. Once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man's body into Elisha's tomb. When the body touched Elisha's bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet."(2 Kings 13:20-21, NIV)

Nothing else is said about Elisha's bones, leaving us lots of room for imagination.  Don Hoesel, the author of the book, imagines a scenario where a terminally ill billionaire believes the bones have been preserved over the centuries and hires an archaeologist to find them.  The search for the bones leads the archaeologist to exotic locations on three continents. 

It was a fun book, one I would have picked up at ten times the price.

Tags: amazon kindle, books

There is a blog that provides frequent updates on the latest free Kindle Books. 

Its entry on March 26, 2010 mentions that Lois Tverberg's Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus is free for a limited time.  I hope that this promotion will serve to expand the readership of a very worthwhile book.

Tags: amazon kindle, books, lois tverberg, rabbi jesus

I like to check out the Amazon Kindle bestseller list frequently. 

One way that publishers are promoting their authors is to offer the Kindle version of one of an author's books for free for a short time.  Those free books tend to quickly find their way to the bestseller list.  

Among the free books i've picked up recently are:

• thrillers by Joseph Finder, Steven James, Randy Singer, and Noel Hynd.
• books by J.I. Packer on the Apostle's Creed and the nature of the atonement.
• Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis. 
• a biography of John Newton, mentor of William Wilberforce and author of the hymn "Amazing Grace".
• The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher, a satirical novel about a real estate agent who, although not a Christian, decides to start a megachurch in an Oklahoma town.

Tags: amazon kindle, books

I was pleased to learn about a week ago that some of P.G. Wodehouse's early novels can be downloaded to the Amazon Kindle for free.

About 15 years ago, Sherry and I had a great time reading through all of Wodehouse's Jeeves stories.  I'm now reading to her Uneasy Money, a romantic comedy that was first published in the U.S. in 1916 after appearing in installments in the Saturday Evening Post. 

Although this novel was written during World War I, it mentions nothing directly about the war.  Wodehouse's characters are concerned about things like golf, baseball, and marriage, but they live in a world without wars and rumors of wars.  His readers, who were weighed down enough by world events, no doubt appreciated the opportunity to escape temporarily from the bad news reported daily in the press. 

Uneasy Money was made into a silent movie in 1918.  There's enough physical comedy (e.g., a pet monkey that throws eggs) and twists and turns of plot in the book to support a good silent movie, but there's no way the movie could have done justice to Wodehouse's dextrous use of the English language, the thing that makes his writing so much fun to read.

Tags: amazon kindle, books

In 2008 my son Timothy gave me a wonderful Father's Day gift--an Amazon Kindle ebook reader.

It didn't take me long to fall in love with this amazing little gadget, which I find is often as pleasant to read from as a conventional book.   (There are exceptions. The Kindle doesn't do well with pictures or graphs,  and I can't imagine trying to deal with a mathematical monograph in this format.) 

 My favorite features of the Kindle include:

• the ability to adjust the font size, effectively making every book a large print book.
• the ability to easily look up endnotes with a simple click.
• the fact that free samples are available. Most samples include about a chapter.  One very generous one--for the recent book Newton and the Counterfeiter--gives the first 60 pages or so.
• the fact that a number of classic literary works can be downloaded free of charge, and many others are just a few dollars.
• the fact that one can order a book or free sample and start reading it right away.

Tags: amazon kindle, books

I've been reading War in Heaven, one of the seven novels written by Charles Williams, friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.  (Amazon has several of these novels available in Kindle editions for just $3.19 apiece.)

Early in the book, Williams has one of the characters thinking that Christianity

"was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist."

I think there's some real insight in this observation.  When we understand that we're living in a fallen world, we're not going to expect more from the world than it can realistically provide.  At ths same time, we're not going to be overcome with despair at the extent of the brokenness of the world, because we know that God is carrying out his plan of restoring his good creation. 

Tags: amazon kindle, books