2013 Reading - Books 13-15

I had a good reading weekend, adding three more books to my annual tally.

13) Miss Jacobson's Journey, by Carola Dunn. This was my February selection for my TBR challenge, so I'll be posting about it in more detail later in the month. Suffice it to say I liked it a lot and will be reading more by the author.


14) Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics, by Jonathan Dudley.

A quick read--it only took me 3-4 hours--which surveys how the American evangelical church's beliefs about abortion, gay rights, environmentalism, and evolution developed. Dudley doesn't have the page count to go into any of these topics in detail, but he makes a convincing case that the views much of the church considers "the plain sense of Scripture," are recent innovations, and that rejection of evolution is particularly problematic because it's led so many evangelicals to distrust ANY science that's inconvenient for their worldview--such as the evidence for global warming or the innateness of sexual orientation. I wish I'd had this book years ago when I was wrestling with some of these very issues.

15) Book Which Shall Not Be Named, #3 - Let's just say that if every Rita judge likes this one as much as I did, it'll be a finalist. The author was new to me, but I'll be reading more of her work in the future.

Reading update - religion and romance

The next two steps toward my goal of reading at least 100 books this year:

84) The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously, by Marc Zvi Brettler, Peter Enns, and Daniel Harrington. A series of essays on how to balance a scholarly, historical approach to the Bible with a religious/devotional one, from Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant perspectives. It's as dry as you'd expect, but interesting for someone like me who's trying to find such a balance after coming from but stepping away from a very conservative Protestant background.

85) Unclaimed, by Courtney Milan. Second in the Turner brothers series, and I liked it even more than the first book, Unveiled. Milan writes such intense, intelligent, emotional, and character-focused romances, and this story of a celebrity virgin hero and the courtesan who'll get a payment big enough to leave her set for life if only she can ruin and discredit him is no exception.