3 posts tagged “books”
It’s nearly here! My copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is in transit. According to UPS, it’s already in Commerce City, which is literally a few blocks from my house. I doubt I’ll get it today…they’re so picky about it being delivered on the release date, but hopefully I’ll get it early tomorrow morning!
I almost wish I hadn’t preordered it through the website so that I could go pick it up at midnight tonight. Almost.
What I do wish is that people understood where us diehard fans (okay, I’m not so diehard I’d get in costume) are coming from when we say we don’t want the ending spoiled. A huge part of the fun of reading is actually getting to the end and going through the same processess the characters do in order to get to the conclusion. Skipping to the end is…just plain wrong. You would think that newspapers would understand that. These people are journalism majors and should understand the value of the written word. But no. They New York Times got their hands on a copy that was “mistakenly” sold in a small NYC bookshop and printed a review in yesterday’s paper, a full two days before the release. This morning on the Jesse and Shotgun show on 92.5 The Wolf, they were reading the ending because someone (I can’t remember which newspaper) printed it. Shotgun is as big a fan as I am and left the room. I had to turn it off. I switched to a different morning show and they were doing the same thing! Although they, at least, had the good sense to let their viewers call in first and tell them if they wanted to hear it. Thankfully the large majority said no.
Not only does this violate the contracts set forth by the publisher, it disrespects J.K. Rowling and the millions of fans who want to read the whole book and not have the ending spoiled. It’s bad reporting, people!
I’ll have my copy read by tomorrow night, and then I’ll post my review. But until that book is in my hands, I don’t want to know anything!
Instructions:
- Grab the nearest book. ('nearest' meaning the nearest book. Don't rummage around for the 'cool' or 'intellectual' book)
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the next three sentences on your blog along with these instructions
From Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (okay, so I had to do page 124 because 123 was blank)
"They realized that something much bigger was going on here, involving them and the people around them and all of creation. Something involving God making peace with the world and creation being reclaimed and everything in heaven and earth being brough back into harmony with its Creator. But before all the big language and grand claims, the story of Jesus was about a Jewish man, living in a Jewish region among Jewish people, calling people back to the way of the Jewish God."
Ted Dekker is my favorite author, and I highly recommend his books to anyone who loves to read. And if you've tried Christian fiction before and found it to be poorly written or too overtly religious, give it another try by reading Dekker's books. Start with his Circle Trilogy composed of Black, Red, and White. Those are probably my absolute favorite books by this author. The books he's written since then, including Saint build off of those three.
He writes the struggle between good and evil better than anyone I've ever read. He's been compared to Frank Peretti (though I'm not a huge Peretti fan).
His style is definitely not the normal writing style for a Christian author. His books are thrillers. Three was a psychological thriller. There's lots of action. Politics. Assassinations. But above all, the love of God is seen through it all. It baffles me how he manages to write the way he does and still convey the essence of the Gospel, but he does.
