C.A. Gray's Blog, page 18

Fingerprints of the Gods

Today’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Fingerprints of the Gods. 

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Bright Winter Lights, by Liz Maverick

This week’s podcast review comes from this blog review of Bright Winter Lights. 

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The Harbinger, Jonathan Cahn

This week’s blog review: The Harbinger by Jonathan Cahn. My rating: **** http://www.authorcagray.com/posts/the-harbinger/

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Where the Sky Begins

Today’s podcast comes from this blog review of Where the Sky Begins. 

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The Betrayed

While most of Jeff Wheeler’s books feel very similar to me, and it’s really more about the atmosphere and feel of his books than the actual stores themselves as far as I’m concerned, there is always a commonality. His heroes and heroines are all “every man” and “every woman.” They’re straightforward, earnest, integrous, and deeply good. They know who they are, and they follow The Medium (or the Fountain, depending on which world we’re in, though the two are interconnected and they both refer to God.) They quote the tomes, which are basically the Bible, by a different name. They forgive, they love, they fight for what is right regardless of personal cost. They’re a throwback to a different era, but it works because they’re also set in a different world–one in which people speak in long form, almost poetically, rather than in slang or shorthand.

This is the culmination of Eilean and Hoel’s story, which intertwines with King Andrew’s (who is basically King Arthur). I’m glad we revisited King Andrew because I didn’t feel satisfied with how he was rendered in earlier books–the story had felt unfinished. Another thing about Jeff Wheeler books is that I never have a clue where I am in the time sequence of his world, but that usually doesn’t matter either, ultimately. I guess by the fact that these are called “Dawning” and Kingfountain doesn’t even exist yet, that these must be the prequels of all prequels, and we learn at the end of this story that Eilean eventually fades in myth to become the Lady of the Lake (or I think here they called her the Lady of the Fountain.) It’s an interesting twist, as I always thought of her as the evil character who bound Merlin in the original Arthurian legends, but in this one she is definitely good through and through. In this version, Queen Genevieve doesn’t actually cheat on Andrew with his best knight, but she’s falsely accused, while Andrew becomes corrupted by deceit, and this leads to his downfall.

As I’m writing a high fantasy novel now myself, in which I start with loose threads of a real character and then try to create a fictional world around him, I’m now much more impressed with Wheeler’s ability to retain creativity while borrowing from legend. Even so, I only gave this one four stars because somehow I never came to really care about the characters much, so their victories at the end didn’t really do it for me. I can’t quite say why. Maybe I’ve read too many of the same type of story?

My rating: ****

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Violence: fantasy only 

Political content: none

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Review of Think Like A Freak

I absolutely loved “Freakonomics,” and was amazed by the authors’ innovative way of looking at problems and whittling them down to essential components that almost nobody else had ever thought to see before. The title of this book made me think that they would teach me how to think like they did, which is why I picked it up.

I’m not sure if it delivered on that. The main takeaway to me was the same one I got from “Freakonomics,” which was, find the human incentive, and you’ll be able to deduce the behavior that will follow. That is certainly worth the price of the book… they just reinforce it in various examples, from potty training (don’t offer candy to a child for doing their business, or they’ll suddenly “have to go” all the time and never do anything else), to job and college applications. (In that case, don’t lower the bar too low — if you make them just cumbersome enough to complete, you’ll get fewer applicants, but those who aren’t serious about the position will self-select themselves out. There’s always a balance, of course–raise the bar too high and you’ll get no applicants at all… and I was incidentally in process of hiring while listening to this, so it was very prescient advice.)

What I wanted were a set of rules: pay attention to this, don’t pay attention to all this other extraneous information that’s only confounding the issue. Instead I really got “Freakonomics Part 2,” with a bunch of examples, and I still had to do the work myself to distill it down to something usable. But the real gems were there, buried. To fill out the idea of ‘find the incentive’ I suppose I’d distill the message down to, put yourself in the other person’s shoes. What would motivate you is likely the same thing that would motivate them.

My rating: ****

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Political content: none

Violence: none

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Review of Jesus Revolution

This is such a hard book to rate.

The first half was an incredible overview of history. It took me emotionally through the 50s as a setup for the 60s and 70s, so that I could experience what it was like as if I had been there, reading almost like a narrative version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” I’d never really been intrigued by my parents’ era before in the same way I was as I listened, and later I went and asked my mom what it was like when this or that happened, where she was, and what she remembered.

All of this was a cultural setup for the experience Greg had as a young man in the early days of the Jesus Revolution, when hippies seeking something different than what their parents had experienced and pursuing it in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll found that all those things were hollow. Because these were real seekers, I had the impression that was the actual setup for the hunger for God. As he described what these communal churches were like, it took me back to my college days when I was in Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru)–the good parts of it, anyway–even down to the place where we once had Bible studies in what we called “The Underground,” complete with bad 70s couches and green shag carpeting. He really captured the feel of getting swept up in the emotion of the era, even though he was rather explicitly against emotionality for its own sake. And I agree… those who seek God only for the emotional high are likely to be like the shallow or rocky soil of Jesus’ parable (and he quotes that parable in the book).

What I disliked about the book isn’t really something I can fault him for, it just didn’t hit me right. The author never came out against Pentacostalism, but everything he said about it was implicitly negative. I can see why, at least as seen through his experiences: Lonnie Frisbee was the main example he had before him, and he was clearly out of balance, which led him to very unwise choices. It just seems to me that in general, humans have a tendency to swing to one extreme or the other. If signs and wonders can be abused (and of course they can — look at the Corinthians), then the reaction is to completely shun them. If believing God for prosperity and health can be taken to an unhealthy extreme, better to embrace tragedy and pain, believing those are His only true and reliable means of refining His people.

In nearly every subject, I think, it’s human nature to seek extremes (ironically for emotional reasons, as a backlash against a distasteful opposite), but wisdom and truth is usually found in the nuance of balance between the two. And I could tell the author was attempting to strike this balance at the end, when he made a statement about how no one denomination or ‘stream’ in the body of Christ has it all right. I give him credit for this… but the substance of what he said didn’t convince me that he really believes it.

My rating: ***

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Violence: none

Political content: historical only

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Because You Loved Me

Beth Moran has become one of my favorite authors, but this isn’t my favorite of her offerings. Some of the themes are pretty grim, though it does have her signature happily-ever-after.

The story follows Marion, a 20-something girl trying to find both herself, and the mystery of who her father was in the Sherwood forest where all Moran’s books are set. Marion had a rough childhood: her father died when she was young, and her mother blamed her for his death. This led to a diagnosis of selective mutism, in which Marion literally found herself incapable of speaking for long periods of time. During this time, she was raped by the next door neighbor, repeatedly (though fortunately we never get the nitty gritty details of this) and was saved by a boy who later becomes her fiance, but whom she never truly loved–she just felt indebted to him and didn’t know who she was or how to advocate for herself. When she goes to Sherwood, she intends just to research who her father was (since her mother will never speak to her about him), but she ends up getting hired on at a local retreat property on accident by a gorgeous middle-aged woman named Scarlett who becomes the mother Marion never had. Scarlett has one natural daughter, Grace, filled with teen angst, and one semi-adopted daughter who probably has Asberger’s named Valerie, the natural daughter of a troubled woman in town named Amanda.

Almost as soon as Marion arrives in Sherwood, she finds herself the target of attacks from someone unknown, trying to frighten her away, though she can only guess who or why. She meets Reuben, the son of a local lord and lady, and he’s her dream man even though he has a perfect girlfriend already, and Marion doesn’t see herself as being particularly attractive.

Like all Moran novels, this one is episodic, more complex than just “chick lit,” including a mystery, a little bit of thriller, and it explores all kinds of relationships, not just romance. The themes include forgiveness, as well as coping with tragedy (which I could have done without, but I wasn’t as attached to the characters as I might have been so I suppose it was all right.) I like my chick lit a little less gritty than this one, though it was still enjoyable.

My rating: ****

Language: none

Sexual content: nothing major

Violence: nothing major

Political content: none (what a breath of fresh air! There easily could have been)

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Fingerprints of the Gods

2nd read:

I picked this up again, because I was looking to do research for my next book… mostly just looking for inspiration. I downloaded the e-book version so that I could highlight relevant portions, and then listened via audio to the portions that didn’t seem as important for my purposes. This time, I loved it!

Relevant for me were the beginning and the end primarily, with respect to the potential deep prehistory of Antarctica. Hancock made a compelling case that it was, essentially, the site of the lost island of Atlantis (though he never used that term that I can recall… but I do remember when I was researching how Plato described Atlantis while writing “The Atlantis Bloodline,” the way Antarctica was described on the ancient maps sounds eerily accurate.) He then jumped to South America, and then spent a chunk of the book on Egypt, which was a repeat of the previous book I’d read by him that was entirely about Egyptology… there, he was making the point that a race of demigods had apparently visited the ancient peoples of our known civilizations, and left behind “fingerprints” in the form of unparalleled architecture with astrological purposes. Then he brought it home to the idea that this advanced civilization of demigods had actually come from Antarctica.

I disagreed with some of his fundamental worldview that shaped some elements of his conclusions, but for purposes of fictional research, none of that mattered. It was a fascinating and very helpful read.
_____
The concept started out fascinating, and I was especially intrigued by implications that there was once a very advanced civilization around 5000 years ago (which would fit with the biblical flood story quite well, though the author clearly had no intention whatsoever of implying this). But I was listening to it rather than reading, and I wasn’t doing research for any particular project at the time, so I found that I just wasn’t interested enough to listen to a whole book about it. I read a Graham Hancock book on Egyptology when I was writing “Invincible”, and his alternative ideas were extremely useful for that, though, so I suspect I may revisit this in the future if I’m ever working on another project that requires conspiracy theories of ancient civilizations.

My rating: *****

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Violence: none

Political content: mild (and I’m sure he didn’t realize it was there)

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The Hunted

Every time I read a Jeff Wheeler book, I marvel at how I get so swept up into his world (they’re all set more or less in the same one, or rather the same interconnected series of worlds, on a timeline I’ve never been clearly able to define.) All of his main characters are the same ordinary, courageous heroes whose defining characteristic is their integrity, but there is nothing otherwise remarkable about them. I think this is important because I once heard someone say (maybe it was Jeff Wheeler!) that the more fantastical your world is, the more vanilla, “everyman” your main character must be in order to still be relatable. I think it’s the fictional equivalent of the concept that stripes don’t mix with a floral pattern or it becomes too “busy.” But because of this, I don’t think I could even name which of his main characters go with which book or series, nor could I ever recount the specific plots of any of them after I finish reading them. And yet I somehow always zip through them, thoroughly engrossed. Why? What is it about them, when neither character nor plot is especially memorable?

One thing that is consistent in each story that I absolutely love, is how the main characters and their mentors quote the Bible without calling it the Bible (they call it the “tomes”), and teach Biblical values in a way that doesn’t come off at all preachy. The stories are too intricate and complex to have been created as pure morality tales, and I don’t at all feel like I’m being patronized, even though I know the way I phrased that, it sounds that way. Instead, they’re instructive. Wheeler’s books remind me a bit of the way Jordan Peterson describes Dostoyevsky’s characters: they’re not just entertaining characters, they’re a study in human psychology. You become vicariously wiser by reading Dostoyevsky’s fiction, or at least Peterson thinks so. That’s how I feel about Wheeler’s stories. They seem “important,” in a way that pure entertainment could never be.

I realize I’ve said nothing about this actual book, though. It’s a continuation of “The Druid,” and it’s a middle book- the last isn’t out yet. Often that’s frustrating, to read partway through a series and have to stop for months at a time, but because all the books blend together, somehow with Wheeler’s books it doesn’t bother me nearly so much.

My rating: *****

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