Several years ago, a new attendee at my church brought to our attention that the chancel platform in the sanctuary was “missing” an American flag. I was not in a leadership position at the time, but I did hear from the man who, on several Sundays, was not shy about sharing his views on the matter. He seemed to believe our church had overlooked a flaw that he was going to remedy. To that end, he donated a flagstand and pole.

When he engaged me on the matter, I suggested that the church is not an American institution and cannot be limited by placing a national flag in the center of worship. The man’s efforts failed, which I believe was a credit to our church. Reading Jesus and John Wayne helps me understand, in retrospect, what the flag-obsessed man was trying to achieve and what drove his passion to reform our church. He was introducing an early version of Christian Nationalism to an otherwise healthy church. It was a hard book to read and even angered me at times. It explains in historic detail how white American evangelism has failed and fractured our country. If just the mention of those terms in the last sentence bothers you, read the book!

The dual nature of the protagonist Harry Haller, as half human and half wolf, is that of an unhappy man who struggles against the meaninglessness of bourgeois German society after World War I. Death is a repeated theme, mostly centering on suicide and murder. The wolf is an image of hedonism and primal instincts. Steppenwolf exists in a world he cannot understand, causing despair and depression. He sees relief in death, but lacks courage.

The book dissolves into magical realism as Haller experiences surreal visions of various German artists, composers, and intellectuals while he goes about the business of assassination and murder. The author, Hermann Hess, believed the book offered a message of transcendence and healing. That message was lost on me amid depictions of lust, casual drug use, and self-indulgence.

The historical fiction story of Nancy Wake, a World War 2 spy for the British, by Ariel Lawhon. Wake started as a journalist with the Hearst newspapers in Paris, married a Frenchman before the war, then escaped after the Nazi’s invaded France. She parachuted back into France as a British SOE operative, code name Helene, but the Gestapo called her The White Mouse, and the Allies heavily decorated her after the war for her extraordinary service.

This captivating and important story is carefully crafted by the author, who uses both first-person and third-person narratives in alternating chapters. The character development is very well done, although the gay Hungarian radio operator who insisted on calling Nancy “ducky” became a distraction. Some characters are beyond contemptible and mostly get what they deserve, except Henri Fiocca’s father, who is despicable and remains unpunished.

A favorite nephew gave me this audiobook as a birthday present, and I feel blessed. BBC Radio released this Dorothy Sayers collection of plays based on the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus Christ in contemporary language. The plays begin at the Nativity and continue through the Resurrection of Christ, accompanied by musical scores. It was a new way to experience the greatest story ever told, which never gets old.

The list of bad actors on Wall Street that caused the 2008 market crash and then made a profit are identified in The Big Short by Michael Lewis. The tragedy is how few went to jail. The book is a testament to financial reform at a time when nobody is demanding reform. Lewis uses characters to explain obscure terms, such as Credit Default Swaps and Subprime mortgage bonds, which were festering in the market while rating companies gave triple-A ratings to mortgage bonds and other instruments that were headed for financial failure. As an investor myself, it is hard to understand how otherwise intelligent people were so blind to what they were doing.

I wish I could say that Ken Follett does not disappoint with Circle of Days, but it simply is not his best work. Follett is one of my favorite authors, and I am glad to have read Circle, but it does not compare with many of his great novels. When I finished the book, I had to ask whether this is about an ancient culture that created Stonehenge or a clever comment on the nature of humans and our modern world.

The delightful part of the book was Follett’s explanation of how and why Stonehenge was created on the “Great Plain” by a primitive culture of farmers, herdsmen, flint miners, wood dwellers, and priestesses, who cooperated to make something bigger than themselves after years of drought and intertribal warfare.

Sources of the River is about David Thompson (1770-1857), a Canadian explorer, surveyor, fur trader, and cartographer, who mapped the Columbia River and most of the northwest territory. He mapped 1.5 million square miles of wilderness, yet he died in Montreal in near obscurity and poverty. A hundred years later, Canada issued a postage stamp in his honor. The book by Jack Nisbet was a worthy book club selection.

DISCLOSURE: Amy Muia is a friend, and likely makes it impossible to provide a completely objective review of A Desert Between Two Seas. The fact that it is the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction speaks for itself. Desert is not a travelogue about Baja California, Mexico. Yet the harsh 19th-century setting mirrors the desert in the hearts of the two main characters, who are surrounded by ruined Catholic missions that brought little light to an exploited native people. The book is identified as “a novel in stories” because each chapter is a story unto itself, but Amy managed to link the stories together like pearls on a necklace.

Amy is a fluent Spanish speaker and conducted extensive research. She spent time riding mules in the dust of Baja, collecting stories and absorbing the details of how a forbidding landscape shaped the lives of people in the desert. The book is an excellent read about fascinating and tragic characters who search for a better future in a land that clings to the past.

Robert Langdon, Dante Alighieri, Botticelli, Florence, Venice, secret codes, murder, Italian police, and a young blond doctor, all within 72 hours! If you like fast-moving thrillers, this book may be for you. There is a pattern to Dan Brown’s books, but this one throws us a curve, more than once, which kept it interesting. I started to grow weary as the last 50 pages (2 hours of listening) seemed somewhat unnecessary.

Also Coming Soon . . .

Frank Herbert has sold more science fiction books than any author in history. The White Plague is not his best-selling work, but it is an interesting read because it is about something hard to imagine when it was published in 1984: a worldwide pandemic starting in Ireland. If you have never read Herbert, start with Dune, an epic work of science fiction. I became a fan when I was a student at CWU, where I met the author and had him sign my copy of Dune. The story of meeting Frank Herbert is a bit embarrassing, and you can read it here.

The Beartown Trilogy by Fredrik Backman: Beartown was a book club selection, and Us Against You is the second in the series. I have yet to read the 3rd book, The Winners. Backman also wrote A Man Called Ove, which I reviewed here.

Captain James Cook was given special immunity by the United States during the Revolutionary War but not by modern critics who are eager to point out his transgressions. The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides is a fascinating and insightful account of Cook’s 3rd and final voyage of exploration to find the fabled Northwest Passage. A secondary purpose was to return Omai, a French Polynesian man, to his homeland. HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery sailed from England in July 1776, just months after the Declaration of Independence. Cook knew little about the American Revolution, but the Colonies realized he was on a voyage of discovery, so he was given immunity.

The author was aware of controversies surrounding the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which promoted and justified European exploration in the name of God and Country for many centuries. Sides carefully points out that James Cook was not a conqueror, privateer, or pirate but a British Royal Navy Officer who was an expert navigator and cartographer with a preternatural ability to find dry land. Cook was also aware that what he “found” by exploration had already been discovered by the local natives. He often ascribed native language names on his charts to areas in the many locations his ships traveled. Cook was mindful of the “eternal and everlasting curse” of VD that his crew brought to innocent women and did what he could to stop the scourge. Ultimately, Cook concluded that a usable Northwest Passage between the Pacific and Atlantic did not exist. The Wide Wide Sea is a great read.

The “Neapolitan Novels,” written in Italian by a pseudonymous author who grew up in Naples, said that once books are written, they do not need authors. Read more here about these books.

The Demon of Unrest is the story of events leading up to the Civil War, including Abraham Lincoln’s election. Erik Larson compares pre-civil war South Carolina (SC) to Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, as she retired from the world, stopped her clocks, and wore her wedding dress forever. It was a state filled with pretentious, self-aggrandizing slavers fed lies by local media about Northerners, the free states, and Lincoln’s campaign. Southerners saw themselves as morally superior and more masculine than the Yankees. As SC seceded from the Union, the Illinois lawyer demonstrated restraint and wisdom as he tried to hold the Union together until the moment SC fired the first shots at Fort Sumter.

In this time (2025) of unrest, our nation’s leaders are turning against allies and neighbors who have been at peace with us for generations. My friends who support this turn-around say that we should not care what other countries think about America, and the suggestion that such opinions matter is evidence of disloyalty. Larson finds an outside voice that should have been listened to by both sides of the conflict, British Journalist William Howard Russell, who lived in America in the 1860s and was reporting for The Times in London. His wise observations about America during the build-up to our Civil War add substance and insight to Larson’s work.

40: A Collection of Modern-Day Parables by John Cleveland is a book that should be read slowly. I read one or two parables and would then think about the message for the remainder of the day. Jesus taught in parables for a number of reasons (Matthew 13:10-14), including the fact that stories stay with us for generations, i.e., The Good Samaritan or The Prodigal Son. We have the advantage of over 2000 years of study, analysis, scholarship, and preaching to consider the parables taught by Jesus. Some of Cleveland’s parables deserve more thought and reflection, while others are straightforward. By the time I reached number 40, I did not want the book to end. The last parable may have been his best.

Greer Hendricks’s The Sublet: A Short Story, an Amazon Original by this bestselling author, is available on Kindle and Audible. In this engaging, plot-driven story, a ghostwriter sublets a Manhattan apartment from the aspiring author, and her life is never the same. It is a fun read and could have been a full-length thriller. But as a short story, it was a nice change of pace.

Precipice: A Novel by Robert Harris is a historical fiction novel set in 1914, as WWI was about to change the world. The central characters are Herbert H. Asquith and Venetia Stanley, two British aristocratic figures involved in an affair that could have been ignored had Prime Minister Asquith not been in the habit of littering the English countryside with classified and top-secret telegrams and dispatches. The documents end up in Scotland Yard, where we meet a young police officer who has to track down the security leak in the British government.

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio is best read in small doses without expectation of substance or flavor. I found it tedious and pointless. There is no character development in the endless parade of husbands (speed dating comes to mind) that descend from the protagonist’s attic. The “wife” becomes a Black Widow after having sex with some of the husbands and swapping them for another. One star!

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot is a revered classic and delightful read. It is a tale of poetic justice, decades in the making. Silas suffers a double loss. The truth hidden is still the truth, though known only to the victim, the villain, and God. The author (Mary Ann Evans) has a gift for creating a story and gives her reader insight and involvement in the characters’ lives. Try this wonderful sentence: “A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.”  A great read by a great writer. There is “gold” in those pages.

Mad Honey is a love story, a courtroom drama, and beekeeping instructions. The hero is a criminal defense lawyer surprised mid-trial with evidence from a pathologist that upends the defense strategy.  The underlying moral of the novel is that bad fathers produce dysfunctional children. I had much to learn about the lives of queen bees, drones, and transgender people. I highly recommend the Audible version.

Twist is about the perils of fixing undersea fiber-optic cables off the coast of Africa. Colum McCann suggests that the cables are the new colonialism, and writes sparingly about the process of finding the breaks in the depths of the ocean and making repairs. He leads us on a moderately interesting journey about the head engineer who controls the ship of repairmen and how his life is broken, much like the cables.

Frieda McFadden has written a series of books for Amazon in the Kindle format called the “Alibis Collection.” Death Row is a psychological thriller, a genre that is not usually part of my reading pattern. I would consider it a page-turner except for the fact that I read it on my iPad. The book was a free offer from Amazon, is only 72 pages long, and is an excellent introduction to a talented author. McFadden, a physician, has written several best-selling books and received numerous awards. I look forward to reading more of her work.

In The Road to Wisdom, Francis S. Collins offers a compelling explanation of how faith and science are combined in the pursuit of wisdom. The base of that road is truth, and the source of truth is found in Jesus. Collins graduated from Yale with a PhD in physical chemistry, then changed fields and went to the UNC School of Medicine and became a medical doctor.

Collins was the director of the National Institutes of Health under three presidents: Obama, Trump, and Biden. He was also the director of the National Center for Human Genome Research and oversaw the Human Genome Project, about which he said, “It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” Now that he has mapped the human genome, Collins is mapping the divide between people in our contemporary political and cultural climate, and offering wise solutions. The book is a must-read.

Russell Moore, the author of Losing Our Religion, was a solid conservative Southern Baptist preacher and theologian; yet his story is defined by his criticism of Donald Trump. Moore is most recently on staff at a nondenominational church in Nashville and Editor in Chief for Christianity Today. Moore argues that American evangelical Christianity has lost it way and church congregations are torn apart by Donald Trump.

Moore sees evangelicals walking away from evangelical churches not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what it is teaching. Thus, Christianity has declined into political tribalism and culture warfare. He is particularly critical of Christian Nationalism, saying that it is to Christianity what the Nation of Islam is to the Muslim faith. He says evangelicals have to turn away from tribalism and embrace truth and that truth is Jesus Christ. That is why the book is An Alter Call for Evangelical America.

Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969, was hailed as a great anti-war, nonlinear science fiction novel about the bombing of Dresden, Germany, during WWII. It put Kurt Vonnegut and Dresden on the map. I wasn’t ready to read it in 1969, perhaps because it was still unclear in my mind about my convictions concerning Vietnam and the anti-war efforts on campus. My focus was on recovering from my own Army experiences and my return to YVC. Reading the book over 55 years later, I can see why it was celebrated; however, I was not thrilled by Vonnegut’s writing style or Bill Pilgrim’s time travel to the fictional planet of Tralfamadore.

Beth Moore is an NYT best-selling author, speaker, and founder of Living Proof Ministries, devoted to women and knowing the transformative love of Jesus Christ through the study of the Bible. I recognized Beth Moore’s name but had never heard her speak or read her many books and lecture materials. Reading her 2023 memoir All My Knotted-Up Life was a profound and thoughtful introduction to a woman who has opened her life in ways most people could never accomplish. Moore says, “I wrote the book to untie knots kept clenched in sweaty fists all my life.” She broke a long relationship with the Southern Baptist Church, much of which had to do with the denomination’s support for Donald Trump after the release of the Access Hollywood tapes. The knots in her life go back to childhood and secrets she kept for decades. The book portrays pain, survival, and the power of God’s healing in her life. The book and Beth Moore have become one of my favorites.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt is a magical realism novel. The remarkably bright creature is Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living in a Puget Sound aquarium. It was another Skagit Valley Book Club selection that I would not have read on my own but nonetheless enjoyed. Tova Sullivan is an older woman working nights at the aquarium who has experienced tragedy and forms a bond with Marcellus as she goes about her cleaning work. Life becomes complicated, and Marcellus, a bit of a thief and hoarder, finds ways to communicate with humans before his anticipated death. Each character’s backstory is remarkable and makes the book unique.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann was the subject of a 60 Minutes episode because the 18th-century story of sailing into anarchy, murder, imperialism, starvation, and return to England has so much to explore. A British ship, the Wager, left England in 1740 on a secret mission during a war against Spain. The ship sailed around South America and ended up on an island off the coast of Patagonia, stranded for months, facing starvation in a barren wilderness. If the crew had died on that island, there would be no story worth of a documentary, but the crew does return to England, where a court martial was conducted on charges of mutiny, reason, and murder. The Wager is a true story with all the elements of a double thriller during the voyage and the ensuing Admiralty court martial when the crew is rescued and returned home.

Horse: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks is historical fiction based on a real racehorse named Lexington, born in Kentucky in 1850 and became a record-breaking thoroughbred. An enslaved Black groom forms a bond with the foal that continues as the horse races into racetrack history. That history is largely forgotten until a painting of Lexington is found in New York City in 1954, reopening a powerful story about sport, racism, animal medicine, and art. Brooks winds together a complex plot of multiple timelines and characters that is often heartbreaking. If you read Horse, you will learn why Geraldine Brook is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith is a PBS Great American Read Top 100 pick, published in 1943, and has very little to do with a tree. It is all about the characters who grab your heart, even if 1912 Williamsburg does not. The protagonist is 11-year-old Francie Nolan, who you, as the reader, want to protect and guide as she struggles to help her brother Neeley in a family of first-generation immigrants plagued by poverty and alcohol. New York City was a difficult place for a little girl with so much to offer to the world and to us.