Rebecca Reads

To my relief, I was not the only one at the book club meeting that didn’t love this month’s choice!
I don’t usually read modern fiction; it’s just not my thing, and I can’t really say way. Maybe I’m just always reading the “wrong” modern fiction and so it has a bad rap in my mind. [...]

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis sets out to share what he believes the core of Christianity is. He makes it clear in the introduction that he is not sharing doctrines of a specific faith, but rather Christianity in general.
I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to [...]

I loved reading Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, despite the fact that it was written with 1700s archaic language, with long sentences stringing thoughts together, with essentially no dialog and no characters (beyond Robinson Crusoe himself), and with basically no plot. And yet, I loved it. Putting in to words why I loved it is [...]

I mentioned at the beginning of the month that I first “got” poetry when I heard a presentation by the poet Andrew Hudgins, so I thought I’d take National Poetry Month to revisit some of his poetry.
Now, I’m a beginner at poetry. I don’t know how to write about it clearly and I don’t know [...]

Christ and the New Covenant by Jeffrey R. Holland contains Elder Holland’s insights into the imperative role of Jesus Christ in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by reviewing Christ’s role throughout The Book of Mormon. Some chapters had a “devotional talk” feel (and in fact were expansions of Elder’s Holland’s previously given [...]

Charles Dickens wrote one book that never appears on his “collected works” lists. That is The Life of Our Lord, a “child’s new testament” that he wrote for his own children for Christmas one year. It was first published in 1934, 64 years after Dickens’s death.
In The Life of Our Lord, Charles Dickens retells the [...]

Equality 7-2521 lives in a dark futurist dystopia in Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem. He has no words for love or self, and being alone is a crime. Yet, as do characters in countless other dystopian novels, he still finds moments to write his story of discovery.
By itself, Anthem is slim – just 100 pages – [...]

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn has the apt subtitle “A Novel in Letters.” Through a series of epistles between friends and family members, we learn of the tragedy most recently befalling (literally) the fictional small island-country of Nollop.
The tragedy is this: Slowly but surely, the letters are falling off of the national memorial:
The quick [...]

The life of the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, although short, was full of faith and controversy. In his cultural biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Lyman Bushman approaches Joseph Smith’s life for all it was, without apology.
Bushman does not omit controversy from Joseph’s life; rather, controversy surrounding Joseph is carefully researched in the context [...]

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood creates a powerful futuristic dystopia in which a quasi-religious political organization has taken control of the United States, creating a men-centered universe determine to procreate, even if via “handmaids.”
In the attitude of George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and I’m sure many others, Atwood’s [...]