Summer Book Review

One thing I really want to get better about doing is recording the books that I've read. I often times associate a time in my life with a book or books that I read at that time. I will never forget the summer I spent in East Asia and every time anything about the book "Lonesome Dove" is mentioned I automatically go there.  Anything "The Babysitters Club" brings me back to 2nd grade when I was first introduced to those girls that I loved and wanted to be a part of for many years.  "The Left Behind" series was started and devoured on a family vacation to Colorado so I think of mountains.  I could go on for quite awhile but I'll spare you.

With all of that said my goal is to do a book review every month or two highlighting my favorite books I read.  I actually am not a huge fan of summarizing and reviewing books.  I'll probably give a brief overview and a thumbs up or thumbs down.  I'm not even sure I'll mention the thumbs down books unless they are very thumbs down and should be avoided.  Feel free to visit Amazon and read more summaries and reviews.  Other people are better at that than me:)

So, this summer I read a handful of books but I'm going to highlight my top 2...

1. 11/22/63 by Stephen King.  This was a good book.  I've read 3 or 4 other Stephen King books and enjoyed them but I'm by no means a Stephen King follower.  I picked this book because it was long (900 pages) and got great reviews.  I wanted a novel that I could spend a whole week or two reading and I wanted to be sucked in.  I wasn't disappointed.  This book contained time travel, history, suspense and interesting characters.  It was a page turner and I enjoyed it.

2. 7:An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker:  I've had this book on my to read list for several months but wasn't super crazy about getting around to it.  But then my friend Kortny emailed me and mentioned she was reading it and loving it.  So, I quickly got it from the library to read too.  It was a great book.  The author spent 7 months trimming down areas in her life where she identified an excess.  The purpose of these 7 months was to fast in some way from something to grow in her Christian relationship with God.

I was worried going into the book she would advocate doing things the way she did and getting rid of the same things.  But that wasn't the case at all.  I enjoyed reading her journal like writing and thoughts about why and how she trimmed her life.  It challenged me to think about areas of excess that are clouding out good (namely God and things that would honor Him) in my life.  While my areas are sometimes the same but personally different than the authors and the things I might do to get rid of excess may be less extreme I appreciated the lessons and insights she gave.  Plus she was super funny.