Rich Mullins

Nearly every year I re-read the book Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven because I think it has such good stuff in it. I rarely re-read books, but this is one I have referred to time and time again. There are some quotes in it that are so good, too. Because I'm now Episcopal, I appriciated some of the things it said even more than before. Rich Mullins is my favorite recording artist, and unfortunately I never got to hear him in concert.

A "Plain" book

I recently saw Christmas in Plains at and decided to order it. I wasn't disappointed. This is a fun little book about Jimmy Carter's Christmas memories, from a boy growing up in Plains until he was President and spending Christmas at Camp David, to his post-presidential years helping build a house for some people in Plains. I know this is a book I'll enjoy again in the future, and will likely pack it with my Christmas items so I can enjoy it every Christmas.

Amish gone wild

I recently received Devil's Playground from Netflix. I never realized all the trouble that Amish teenagers are allowed to get into -- with a blind eye from adults! This documentary would probably be rated R if it were rated. There's a lot of bad language, sexual situations, and the main boy it follows is fighting a drug addiction. Who would ever think an Amish boy would be addicted to drugs? It was a facinating look into the world of Amish teenagers, though!

Yet Another Newberry book

I've been reading a number of children's books as well as enjoying books set in the past, and A Year Down Yonder was both! Mary Alice is sent to live with her grandmother in a small town, very different from the Chicago city life to which Mary Alice has grown accustomed. Small-town happenings are quite different, and Mary Alice soon adjusts, which is hard because everyone in town is scared of her grandmother!

A bad church

I saw When a Church Goes Bad in a thrift store for 25¢ and I thought it looked interesting. It was basically about a man who started out in a good church, and was even an elder, and eventually a pastor in the church, but over the years it went from being a good church to being very cult-like. I've read books on this subject before, esp. on the abuse of power by ministers, but this it the first one I've ever read from the pastor's perspective.

Another Newberry book

I don't know how I never read Plain Girl as a child, but somehow I missed this book, and I loved it! The copy I read was from the library in the drab 1950s cover, the same copy in our library for 50 years, so maybe that's why it didn't appeal to me as a child. It's a book about how an Amish girl goes to school and she's fearful of the "first step away" that will spiral her out into the non-Amish world.

Another Christian Diet book

I recently ran across the book How to Flip Your Flab--Forever I started laughing the moment I picked it up. It wasn't meant to be a funny book, but I laughed nearly the whole way through it. I'd never heard the devil refered to as 'sleu foot' before in a book. And his alleteriation was hillarious! I know it was suppossed to be a serious book, but I thought it was funny. It was from the late 70s and I actually bought it for a gag gift exchange but I had second thoughts in case some "Porky Patty" might be on the receiving end. (That's the type of names he used the whole way through the book!)

Everyone loves Ronald Dahl

I have thought Ronald Dahl was cool since I was eight years old and wrote him a letter and sent him stamps. He sent them back saying I should have known the United Kingdom used different stamps than the United States and didn't I learn that in school already? (I thought maybe he'd someday be traveling and it would be a way to 'pay' him for his postage to write back to me.) So, he's been a bit of a hero to me since that time. So when I saw the book Boy : Tales of Childhood I couldn't wait to read it. It was great, and I couldn't wait to finish it. It told about his beating by schoolmasters as well as summers in Norway. (I now hope to visit Norway someday after hearing his accounts of it!) This was an excellent book and I finished it quite quickly.