Living Unabridged

This week I finished a truly fantastic book. I told my husband he has to read it. We're going to buy a copy because we think our daughter needs to read it too. If you attended the Great Homeschool Convention and heard Professor Carol speak on "Beauty Over Decadence: Winning the Battle Against Pop Culture", you are already primed to appreciate this book.

The book is Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist The Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning by Nancy Pearcey. I think it needs to be required reading for Christians. It's that good.

This is a scholarly book, but it's not hard to read. It's challenging in all the best ways.

Quotes like this one on a Christian's motivation:

Of course this quote ended up in my commonplace book.

This isn't "just" a book about art.

This is a book about worldviews. This is a book about apologetics. This is a tool for a well-equipped, engaged Christian.

I think Russell Moore said (although he may have been quoting someone else) that the tragedy is not that Christians lost the culture war, the tragedy is we never really had one.

Professor Carol said in her seminar that you can't show up in a culture war without a culture (I'm very loosely paraphrasing).

In Saving Leonardo Nancy Pearcey isn't telling us all the things we ought to be against, she's telling us what we are for. What we believe. What reality is.

That's powerful stuff.

(I hope I've convinced you to read it. It really is one of the best things I've read this year!)

Recently Finished

In addition to Saving Leonardo I also finished:
Death Descends on Saturn Villa by M.R.C. Kasasian. This is the 3rd in the series. I think the series is improving as it goes on. It's still gritty (and sometimes preposterous) but the construction is fairly tight and the flashes of wit are a relief.

A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary is the first in a set of memoirs Cleary wrote. Cleary's 100th birthday this year inspired me to order these from the library. It's not hard to see where Cleary's irrepressible characters came from when you read this.

Recently Added

Didn't add any physical books but I did get another book by Nancy Pearcey from an online lending library: Finding Truth.

Current Read Aloud

We're reading The Wind in the Willows at bedtime. It's possibly the most British thing I've ever read. After The Railway Children, with Nesbit's sparse but action packed style (a read aloud selection we all loved), Willows is definitely slower going. I love the story, and the girls do too, but I wonder if it might be a better "read alone" rather than a read aloud. And, despite the fact that the characters are animals, it really feels more like an adult book than a children's story. (Not because there's anything bad, you understand, just because of the thoughts and feelings of the characters.)

Current Book to Review

Nothing currently but you can see my most recent review here: Better Together.

Current Kindle Deals

These are some of the iBoy's favorite books. I highly recommend the board book editions, but these Kindle editions are only $0.99 each so if you have a young Star Wars fan - or if you are a Star Wars fan yourself {cough} - you should snatch them up:

Jeffrey Brown's adorable Star Wars books are also on sale for Kindle right now, only $1.99 each:

I know those aren't the type of book deals I usually share, but if my kids hijacked my blog for a day, these are the kind of recommendations you might find.

What are you reading now?

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