Monday, June 23, 2008

Summer reading picks: church edition

Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City has a list of recommended books for summer reading. They are obviously C.S. Lewis fans around there, but also list "Patrick O’Brian’s novels of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars," and "Anything by Jane Austen," and the "Miles Vorkosigan series by Lois McMasters Bujold, for sci-fi fans," and lots of other books, nonfiction as well as fiction, for all age groups. It's a pretty wide-ranging list.

A note: They recommend the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters. I am a fan of the early Amelia Peabody books. I had to stop reading them in public because I kept collapsing in laughter and embarrassing myself, not to mention the people around me. Overall, I found them great fun (and that's saying something, because I have an aversion to all things mummy-related, and Amelia adores mummies, and so they keep popping into the storyline, to my distress). However, to me the later books didn't seem to stick to the same standards, and I found them disappointing, and occasionally offensive.

Does your church have a reading list for the summer? Or do you know of a worthwhile list online at some other church? Let us know in the comments, please.

1 comment:

Sherry said...

Eldest daughter and I are doing a bok club this summer, and it looks sort of like this:

http://biblicallyliterate.com/?p=10

Also, I wanted to tell you that I'm starting something new at Semicolon, and you're certainly invited to join in along with any of your readers. It's called Semicolon Author Celebration, and to start with I'm looking for posts about Charlotte Zolotow on this Thursday, her birthday. For more information go to: http://www.semicolonblog.com/?p=2560