Grace & Knowledge Blog

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

Yesterday the public library in Oxford held its annual used book sale.  Hardback books were a dollar, paperbooks fifty cents.  I browsed for about 90 minutes and picked up 6 hardbacks and 8 paperbacks for a total of $10.

I look forward to this sale every year.  Since I've been to 25 of them now, I suppose I must have accumulated around 300 books from them all together.  Out of all of these books, the one I've used the most has been a hardback copy of the NRSV, with apocrypha, that I picked up in excellent condition one year.  (At that point, hardbacks were probably 50 cents.) 

Some of the best bargains over the years:

• Edersheim's Bible History , an old 7-volume set in decent condition, for $1.50.
• James R. Newman's four-volume anthology, The World of Mathematics, in good condition for a dollar.
• A 1969 edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia in good condition for a quarter (back in the 1980s when hardbacks were a quarter and paperbacks a dime).

Along with the gems I've picked up some junk that I'd never have purchased if the prices were higher.  It is for a good cause, and funding for public libraries in Ohio is being slashed...

Tags: books

Last July a colleague at work found out that he had cancer.  It was detected early, and it was a type of cancer that , if treated promptly, had a nearly 100 per cent cure rate.  He decided to undergo the treatment. 

The chemotherapy would keep him away from work for a couple of weeks, however, and so he needed to find someone to teach his precalculus class.  I was available, so I filled in.  Afterward, the colleague thanked me with a $25 gift card from a prominent book store chain.   

Since I love bookstores, I was very happy to receive the gift card.  But I don't often visit malls and suburban shopping centers, so the gift card gathered dust on my desk for almost a year.  Finally, a few days ago I happened to be in the neighborhood of an outlet of the book store chain and took the opportunity to stop by. 

 I spent a blissful hour checking out what the store had.  The selection wasn't especially impressive, but it was good enough to enable me to spend $25 with no problem.  I picked up Resurrection:  The Power of God for Jews and Christians by Kevin Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, a book I've heard lots of good...

Tags: 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

The Copper Scroll contains plenty of material for writers of adventure stories.  It lists 64 stashes of hidden treasure that include large amounts of gold and silver.  But the locations given for the treasures are vague enough that no one knows exactly where they are. 

Then there are those mysterious sequences of Greek letters after a few of the entries in the list--e.g., Kappa Epsilon Nu after the first entry.  Is this treasure the property of the Kappa Epsilon Nu fraternity on some college campus?  (Perhaps at Marshall University, where Indiana Jones was a faculty member. )   The 17 talents of silver in that batch of treasure could finance a few keg parties.

It's no wonder that the Copper Scroll is showing up in novels--like Gold of Kings by Davis Bunn, a new thriller published by Simon and Schuster.  

In this story, an antiquities dealer named Sean Syrrell is murdered at the beginning of the book.  It turns out that he has found clues to the possible location of some of the Copper Scroll treasure.  He bequeaths the clues to his granddaughter, who along with a treasure hunter and a federal agent set out in search of  Sean's killer and the treasure.   

It's an entertaining story.  It includes enough action--e.g., car crashes--to...

Tags: archaeology, books

Recently, while  my wife was watching "The Bourne Supremacy" on TV, it occurred  to me that any four-syllable noun could potentially  generate a title for another book/movie in this series.  For example:

• The Bourne Prosperity---Bourne finally remembers where he put his wallet.
• The Bourne Ventriloquy---Bourne throws his voice around.
• The Bourne Spectroscopy---the plot of this one includes a range of elements too numerous to mention here.
• The Bourne Philately---enemy operations stamped out.
• The Bourne Monotony---a marathon of these movies shown one after another.
• The Bourne Lobotomy---the end result of watching The Bourne Monotony.

Tags: books, humor

A few years ago I wrote a review of A Skeleton in God's Closet, a novel by Prof. Paul Maier, a history professor at Western Michigan University. This 1991 novel is one of the first examples of the genre of "archaeological thrillers."

Now there are a growing number of books in this category, including:

• Cross Bones (2005), one of the Temperance Brennan novels by Kathy Reichs (the books on which the TV series "Bones" is very loosely based). James Tabor, a colleague of Reichs at UNC Charlotte, was a consultant for this one.
• The Lazarus Effect (2008) by biblical scholar Ben Witherington III and his wife Ann.

I was at the public library yesterday and found a copy of Bunn's book on the shelf of new fiction. I'll see if it lives up to its hype.

Tags: archaeology, books

Since last May I've been "playing chicken" with Garrison Keillor (unbeknownst to him).  As big a fan of his as I've been over the years, would I really be willing to lay down $40 to see his one man show in Oxford?

 As March 18, the day of the performance, approached, the pressure mounted.  What comments would he make about Miami University?  What song would he have his audience sing?  To find out, I would need to buy a ticket.

 Finally, about 6 hours before the show, I flinched.  I relented and purchased a ticket.

It turned out to be a great show, full of stories, sonnets, and songs.  My favorite line was his reference to contemporary praise and worship anthems as "7/11 songs"---7 words repeated 11 times.

The monologue culminated with a retelling of the main plotline of his novel Pontoon.  

I enjoyed that book, and  it was fun to hear him rehearse the story personally.

I'll post a report at Grace and Knowledge.

Tags: books, garrison keillor, humor, lectures

One of the great joys of an academic life is easy access to lots of great books. 

In Ohio, all the college and university libraries belong to a statewide system called Ohiolink.  Anyone with borrowing privileges at a member library has access to the whole system.

So  when I hear about a great new book, chances are that it's  in the system somewhere.  

Some books I've been working on:

• God's Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World by David Rowe, the first academic biography of William Miller. After reading this excellent biography, I went back and checked out Rowe's dissertation on the Millerite movement in New York, which is also very good.  I hope to complete an article on Miller over the next couple of months.
• Hamas vs. Fatah:  The Struggle for Palestine  by Jonathan Schanzer.  Schanzer has lectured at Miami a couple of times.  He's quite an expert on the Middle East, and his book highlights one of the biggest problems in the Israeli-Palestine conflict:  How can a  peace be negotiated if there's no legitimate representative of the Palestines for the Israelis to negotiate with?
• The Deniers by Lawrence Solomon.  Solomon is a Canadian...

Tags: books, climate change