Book Review: Out Live Your Life by Max Lucado – (not what I expected)

Awhile ago I joined BookSneeze.com and spoke for Max Lucado’s new book Out Live Your Life ... You Were Made To Make A Difference. In exchange I am to write a review, post it here and on some place like Amazon. So, here is my review.

I am not sure what I expected – but this book wasn’t it.

Perhaps I thought Max Lucado would be offering something personal to me, telling me how to come out of blah living, rise up out of the occasional doldrums, and get a new and exciting perspective on life. Instead he creatively reminded me of how good I have it in this part of the world, and how so many are lacking in the comfort things that this world offers. He reminded me of my comfortable Christianity, and of the spiritually depraved, and of those who hunger to know God, and of those who dare to know Him in places where Jesus is not welcome.

Max challenged me to look beyond my supposed needs to consider once again the needs of others and what more I can do to help make another’s life a little more bearable. I have often thought that if we each were to make a positive difference in one other person’s life – what an impact and growing influence it would have on our world. Max gives many simple examples of how to do that, never straying far from the word of God.

So, even though this book wasn’t what I expected, it is more, and what I needed to read. Max Lucado’s writing style doesn’t disappoint. This book will take you beyond your own narrow space in the world and open to you a panoramic view that will broaden your horizons. If you really pay attention, put time and thought into each chapter’s study questions in the back, and seek God’s direction for where your focus should be – you can out live your life. In so doing you will find excitement through making a real difference in this world, one person at a time, in Jesus’ name.

You can find Out Live Your Life ... You Were Made To Make A Difference listed on my BUY THE BOOK! page.

Have you read this book yet? Any thoughts?

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂

I love books! Know of any new ones to tell me about?

I ‘love’ books. Did I say yet that I love books? Well, I do.

Last Saturday on Twitter I got into a chat thread in which author Susan Gilmore was being interviewed, Twitter style, by Bookmaven. I made a comment about not seeing any of her books yet, but her new one being discussed … The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove … I must purchase! It sounds like a great read. During the two hours of tweets from people asking questions of Susan and making comments about her books, there were five copies of her new one being given away. And what a surprise, I won the first copy! Imagine that! I love books!

Tonight I read on http://lauraabest.wordpress.com/ about a new book by Jan Coates who lives a few miles from me, but whom I’ve not yet had the pleasure to meet. Her book is A Hare in The Elephant’s Trunk. That is another must have. Jan wrote about the true experiences of Jacob, a Sudanese boy who suffered through much while fleeing for his life with other “Lost Boys.” I knew I had heard about this book through a radio interview, and I’m sure I heard Jacob on there. Anyway, I am eager to purchase a copy of this YA novel, and maybe even meet Jan at a local book signing. I love books!

Another new book is by KC Dyer and is called Facing Fire – a time travel book. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Note the interview at http://evbishop.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/facing-fire-by-kc-dyer-win-a-free-book/ I just thought I would add the link for the fun of it, which you can too, and be entered into the draw for a copy of the book. Because … well … I love books!

Finally, I want to make mention of something else rather important. Please go here and place your vote :

http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/2010/09/canada-reads-top-40-contest-reader-recommendation-form.html

Laura Best’s novel “Bitter, Sweet” has been shortlisted for the Geoffery Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People – so I voted for her. And because it’s a really good book, I enjoyed my copy signed by her. And she is a nice person .. does that count? 🙂 And … yes, you guessed it … I love books!

So, now that I have all that good news out of the way I must get back at putting together another issue of Valley Sunshine publication. Time is ticking away.

Oh, and in case you missed it, I love books! — just sayin’. 😉

So, do you know of any new books to tell me about that I must read? Sure want to hear about ’em! ‘Cause … you know …

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂

Is the book as we know it disappearing?

I have been observing. There is a lot of discussion in all arenas about the traditional book eventually disappearing from use. This is mainly because of e-books – those online electronic books you can download to read, and whatever else technology will – and has already – come up with to simplify things for us. Just to let you know … I am not educated in that because I love books as they are and have been for centuries! Well, the scroll was a little difficult to handle and pack around, maybe, but .. you get my point.

I am not interested in reading a book on a hand-held device, nor am I excited about sitting at the computer to read one on the screen. I am all for holding a made-from-paper-and-ink writing, turning those pages and flipping back and forth as I need to, underlining or highlighting (did I hear a gasp?) when the occasion calls for it – which is rarely because I also use bookmarks and sticky tabs. I fill my bookcases with old favourites (some saved from my childhood), and soon-to-be-loved stories. I have books all over the place, a few in the living room and our bedroom, many in my publishing room, my ‘computer room’, the main room downstairs, and even packed away in boxes in our storage room. My husband, not a voracious reader, also has a few titles on hand.

Most of my children’s storybooks I have kept, and my grandson now enjoys those. I have books that made me laugh out loud, made me cry (and hide behind), pulled me in so deep I didn’t hear anything going on around me. I have books the Lord used to teach me something important. And there are many volumes in my collection which I have yet to cuddle up with and appreciate their written pages. Somehow, I doubt very much that I could enjoy an electronic book the same way, it would even be annoying to me.

I don’t get to the library much at all anymore. There was a time when I would take my daughters there to pick out books for their extra reading, and that was fun for us. I borrowed several for myself when I was taking a writing course and wanted to read the ones mentioned in it. But I prefer to own the books I read, I like to gather them and add them to my own personal collection. Would I feel the same way about having them filed in a little electronic device? I doubt it! It is NOT the same thing!

So, is the way of the traditional book one of antiquity? Is it disappearing? Will my great-grandchildren not even know what it is to own a printed-on-paper book, to smell its ‘bookness’, to experience the thrill of a page-turning story on paper filled with bright pictures and powerful words?

Now I ask you …. what do you think?

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂

Customer service worth talking about

Just a quick post to tell you about some good customer service I experienced today.

I have an online account with Chapters.Indigo … (Coles bookstore is a few miles from where I live. Same thing.) I recorded birthdays on my account page and they send me reminders with a percentage off coupon against purchase of a book. I try to use them but don’t always. Yesterday I was pleased to receive the reminder as there is a book I want to buy, but even though it said the coupon was attached – it wasn’t!

Now, I appreciate those coupons. I like books. And I like to buy books as gifts. So, I sent Chapters.Indigo an email to inform them of the discrepancy. A few hours later I received an apology, there was a technical glitch, and if I set up another birthday reminder they will resend. I did that.

This morning I received a new email from them saying the coupon was included – again it wasn’t! So, I sent them another email simply saying sorry but the coupon is still not there. A few hours later here is part of the reply that came — “Due to technical difficulties, our coupon generation was turned off during a recent upgrade to our warehouses. We are unable to re-issue a new coupon, and we apologize for the inconvenience.” Then they kindly informed me that they had deposited a credit into my online account to replace the coupon!
Now that is good business practice, and Chapters.Indigo is a company that has my business!

It is wonderful to be treated well, don’t you think? Customer satisfaction can go a long way.
Do you have any such uplifting tales to tell?

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂

Would you knowingly write a potentially ‘banned’ book?

I have been thinking more about the writing process, since NaNoWriMo is coming up in November and I probably will participate in that. I have been reading more, too, and you will see the updating of ‘my “have read” book list’ page.

In wondering about banned books and those that are challenged – the hope of the challenger being that the book will be banned – I posted a list that I found of some of those classics:

Banned and Challenged Classics:

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Ulysses by James Joyce
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
1984 by George Orwell
Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Native Son by Richard Wright
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run by John Updike

I would think that books with that reputation would get an increase in sales, thanks to the curious. What do you think? Have you read any of those books, and if so do you understand why the book is on this list? Do you agree?

Let’s take this a little further. Have you ever written a book that has been challenged when it was not your intention for it to receive that kind of publicity? Or, do you have a subject burning in your soul that you want to write about, but you know it could be challenged or even banned? Would you write it anyway?

I hope to hear from many of you on this topic.

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂

101 great books to read

A friend who loves books directed me to this list tonight. It is called “101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers”. Some titles are also on the ‘100 books’ list I posted here in January.

Have you read any of these? I did even worse with this list than the other one, having read only four of these and parts of four others. (If I get bogged down I usually put the book away to pick up later – much later.)

TITLE                       AUTHOR
1. Beowulf   – —
2. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
3. A Death in the Family – James Agee
4. Pride and Prejudice   – Jane Austen
5. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
6. Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
7. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
8. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
9. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
10. The Stranger – Albert Camus
11. Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
12. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
13. The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov
14. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
15. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
16. The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
17. The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
18. Inferno – Dante
19. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
20. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
21. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
22. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
23. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – Frederick Douglass
24. An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
25. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
26. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
27. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
28. Selected Essays – Ralph Waldo Emerson
29. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
30. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
31. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
32. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
33. Gustave – Madame Bovary Flaubert
34. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
35. Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
36. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
37. Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
38. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
39. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
40. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
41. The Iliad – Homer
42. The Odyssey – Homer
43. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
44. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
45. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
46. A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen
47. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
48. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
50. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
51. The Woman Warrior – Maxine Hong Kingston
52. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
53. Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
54. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
55. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
56. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Marquez
57. Bartleby the Scrivener – Herman Melville
58. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
59. The Crucible – Arthur Miller
60. Beloved – Toni Morrison
61. A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor
62. Long Day’s Journey into Night – Eugene O’Neill
63. Animal Farm – George Orwell
64. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
65. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
66. Selected Tales – Edgar Allan Poe
67. Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust
68. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
69. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
70. Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostand
71. Call It Sleep – Henry Roth
72. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
73. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
74. Macbeth – William Shakespeare
75. A Midsummer Night’s Dream – William Shakespeare
76. Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare
77. Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
78. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
79. Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
80. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
81. Antigone – Sophocles
82. Oedipus Rex – Sophocles
83. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
84. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
85. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
86. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
87. Vanity Fair – William Thackeray
88. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
89. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
90. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
91. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
92. Candide – Voltaire
93. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Jr.Vonnegut
94. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
95. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
96. Collected Stories – Eudora Welty
97. Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
98. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
99. The Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams
100. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
101. Native Son – Richard Wright

So how did you do? Are you looking forward to reading any of them? Or have you already enjoyed any which are now among your favourites?

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂

Delayed surprise!

This is my second posting today, but I want to tell you about my surprise. Our yesterday got all turned around – the way life happens sometimes – so we forgot to pick up our mail. When my husband brought it in early this afternoon … yippee!! The book I won – A Black Tie Affair by Sherrill Bodine – had arrived in Friday’s mail! It was postmarked Jan. 26, so took about 11 days to get here from Florida. That’s not bad.

I am excited to read this book, which just became available January 1. Sherrill personalized my copy for me and included a publicity photo of herself. Also, in response to her note on an included postcard, I will be writing to Sherrill to let her know her book has reached its destination.

The next time I mention A Black Tie Affair it will be to share my thoughts about it. 🙂

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂