Category: Books
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Mary Beard – Women & Power: A Manifesto
At the weekend, we went to Hardwick Hall where we learnt all about Bess of Hardwick – an incredible woman who faught against the patriachy and did some amazing things (Chatsworth House – yep, that was her building project too). They had a great video explaining the various ways that the history of this woman
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Paula Gooder – Phoebe
I picked this book up after seeing an advert for a talk with the author at Southwark Cathedral which just so happened to be while I was in London (this never happens!). I booked onto the event straight away, and the kindle version of the book was only 99p, so I dug straight in. Unfortunately,
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Andrew Pettegree – Brand Luther
I started reading this book as a recommendation when we celebrated the 500th anniversary of the reformation in Church. As the reformation started in 1517, that probably makes it quite obvious that it’s taken me quite a while to read this! The book was a fascinating take on the reformation, focused on the impact that
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Shari Low – With or Without You
An interesting premise, a story that starts with a life-changing decision. Then we split into two parts – one where Liv says Yes, and one where she says No. But is your life actually pre-destined to end up a certain way no matter what decisions you choose? That’s what is explored in this book. I
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John Ousterhout – A Philosophy of Software Design
I think the fact that this book has taken me so long to read probably says all I need to say. I had quite a few issues with this book, and found myself disagreeing with a lot of points that were made – I’m looking forward to doing a talk on this book to my
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Pete Greig – How to Pray
I pre-ordered this book when it first came out, but it’s been languishing in the middle of a rather large stack of books that I want to read so I hadn’t got around to it, until my vicar mentioned it as part of a sermon on prayer on Sunday and I decided that I’d move
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Giovanna Fletcher – Dream a Little Dream
Giovanna Fletcher is one of my favourite people to follow on the internet, and I have always loved her books, but if I’m honest, I found this one really hard to get into. I think I was probably about half way through before I felt like the pace picked up enough for me to be
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Gary A. Haugen – Good News About Injustice
I seem to usually start a book review saying whether I enjoyed the book or not, and I can’t in all honesty say that I ‘enjoyed’ this book, but it was necessary and eye-opening and quite frankly a must-read. So the fact that I didn’t ‘enjoy’ it should not put you off from reading –
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Onjali Q. Rauf – The Boy at the Back of the Class
A warm, engaging and inspiring look at an all too relevant topic, I would recommend this book to everyone, but particularly as a very engaging and relatable way to introduce the topic of the refugee crisis to young children. I first heard of this book when it started winning awards, namely the Waterstones Children’s Book
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Paige Toon – The Last Piece of My Heart
Another E-book by an author that I’ve heard of but never read before, picked up because the e-book is currently free on Amazon, and the perfect book for a long train ride home. However, I did have extremely mixed feelings about the book, which you might understand as you hear more. In the book, we
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Cathy Bramley – We’ll Meet Again
What a sweet, perfectly romantic book. It was less than 50 pages long so you wouldn’t think you would have much time to become invested in the characters, but the way this was written made the characters feel like friends almost immediately. I’ve never read any of Cathy Bramley’s books before, but I decided to
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Sarah Bennett – Spring at Lavender Bay
I’m in two minds over how to review this book – on one hand, I read the book in just a few hours and I felt really invested in how Beth’s story would turn out. But what was really jarring for me was that there were so many editorial mistakes that I kept being jolted
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Rainbow Rowell – Fangirl
It would be really easy to judge this book by the title and assume it’s ‘just’ young adult fiction and doesn’t have a serious point. But although this might be young adult fiction, it showed that the only way to get through social-anxiety and other mental health problems is to open up to people and
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Sarah Turner – The Unmumsy Mum
It’s been ages since I read anything, so I really needed to find a light-hearted book to get me back into the swing of things. And this one was perfect (although not as light-hearted as I’d imagined). I’ve been following Sarah on Instagram for a few years, so I have seen what her posts are
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She Reads Truth – Job: Suffering and the God who speaks
I have read many SRT plans before using the app on my phone, but this was the first time I’ve bought one of their study books to use. I had read online that their study books didn’t contain as much information as the reading plans online – the ones in the app/online come with a
Louise Douglas 