Fall into Reading - Final Summary

So, here we are just a few days from Christmas and I'm amazed at the number of books I've read as part of Fall into Reading 2010. I've been enriched by reading them. I'm going to post my list by category - good, better, best (there really was not a single book that I didn't like). I can't wait to see what the others have read so I can find my next good read.

All-in-all, 17 books completed - 10 more than I originally planned. 13 Fiction and 4 Non-Fiction.

Best

Havah - Tosca Lee, beautiful writing

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson, complicated and thrilling mystery

The Last Sin Eater - Francine Rivers, unique but captivating

Choosing to See - Mary Beth Chapman, real honest Christianity

Better

Scarlet Thread - Francine Rivers

Fireflies in December - Jennifer Erin Valent

Radical - David Platt

Out Live your Life - Max Lucado

Her Daughter's Dream - Francine Rivers

The Girl who Played with Fire - Stieg Larsson

The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - Stieg Larsson

Lady in Waiting - Susan Meissner

Good

And the Shofar Blew - Francine Rivers

Daisy Chain - Mary E. Demuth

Deadly Disclosures - Julie Cave

Watch over Me - Christa Parrish

Uncle Sam's Plantation - Star Parker

Still Working On

Sabbath - Wayne Muller

Bonhoeffer - Eric Metaxas

Book Review: Out Live Your Life by Max Lucado

Category: Adult Christian Non-Fiction

Format: Hard-Cover, 212 pg

Skomomma's Rating: 4 out of 5

To me, this is just another masterpiece from Max Lucado. I've enjoyed just about every Lucado book that I've read, so I'll readily admit that I came in with a bias. However, Out Live Your Life did not disappoint me. Each of the 16 chapters reads almost like a devotional with a section written by Lucado and ending with a scripture reading and a prayer. Lucado talks about how God has used ordinary men throughout time to do extraordinary things and then leads the reader through the process of discovering their own path to extraordinary - prayer, relationships, service, and humility to name a few.

The last 33 pages are a discussion guide prepared by David Drury and are written to help make the material that Lucado has presented come to action in your life.

I read through the book first to get an idea of the concept and such for writing a review. I plan to kick off 2011 by going through a chapter a week and really making that chapter come to life for me.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com http://BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255

Book Review: Uncle Sam's Plantation by Star Parker

Category: Adult Non-Fiction

Format: Soft-Cover, 248 pages

Skomomma's Rating: 3 out of 5

Uncle Sam's Plantation seeks to show the reader how the government has actually created a system that basically leaves the poor worse rather than better off. For the most part I agree with Parker's analysis. Welfare programs are fraught with corruption and leave people completely dependent on the government. The book gives a detailed history of how welfare started and how it's evolved over the years.

Parker details her experience growing up in poverty and her experience with welfare beginning in the late 1970s. She eventually escaped the cycle and is founder and president of CURE.

I think the summary in the final chapter is extremely well-written and poignant. Parker states that freedom from government in areas such as health-care and education are needed and that self-government should be encouraged in order to improve fiscal responsibility and the institution of family.

The only thing I didn't like about the book is that some of the statistics are old - mid-90s or so, at least towards the beginning of the book. Maybe it is because this is a reprint from 2003. The last couple of chapters are more specific to 2010.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com http://BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255

BBC Reading List

I found this post by Carlyn B at A Fresh Pot of Tea while I was busy browsing a linky on windowsills from Like Mother, Like Daughter. So, I followed it back to Leighann at Living with Three Hobbits and a Giant. Ah...the fun of the internet, I love it.

Anyway, I want to see how I did and get some ideas for 2011 reading...maybe it's time for some classics:

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Well, 17 is better than average.

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