A Reading Guide For After The Flood

Lovers of books often complain that we read too slowly and wonder if we will ever take the time and effort to master the The Art of Speed Reading. My difficulty is that sometimes, strike that - often, that I need to acquire the Art of Reading Slowly to integrate what I read. I don't do that nearly enough. My habitual approach is to read a book with my mind and my hand outstretched to the read. I read distractedly often merely to get the basic gist, get through to book, and then add another book to my growing list

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A Response to Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

Lisa Miller's 'Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife' gives us readers an extremely entertaining, educative and vulnerable exploration into the plethora of views regarding heaven. She is a Reformed Jew and editor of sweek's religion section. Miller isn't committed to a firm belief in heaven but definitely manages to elicit our hopes for a meaningful life... and perhaps more.

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A Response to Jack Maggs

LITERARY SCHOLARS HAVE called Jack Maggs a post-colonial re-telling of Dickens' Great Expectations. As I read it, Jack Maggs, by the witty Australian author Peter Carey, is a deconstruction of Charles Dickens himself. The message tears apart the pretensions and presuppositions of the great man, turning the original message of Great Expectations on its head and giving us a more satisfactory resolution than the original. 

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A Response to The Shadow Year

Despite their difficulties the children are creative and imaginative. Together in their basement they invent a cardboard reconstruction of their town. Through a strange combination of mathematics and intuition, Mary, who may be borderline autistic or schizophrenic, directs the structure of the town with its clay characters who represent real-life people. Mary's two brothers discover an uncanny correspondence between the positioning of Mary's figures in her play construction and the precise geographical location of the townspeople as they go about their business. Much of the threesome's fun involves spying on the townsfolk using Mary's vision

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A Response to Transforming Scrooge

There is a distinction between the actual story of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and the interpretation of the story, the Carol "canon" (from the word measurement). The story is there for us unchanged, to be read year after year, but the fit, the measurement of the Carol's meaning, is constantly changing. Joe Cusumano provides a creative and inspiring measurement for Dickens' famous tale, as well as placing the original story in the appendix. While acknowledging the traditional meanings of the story and providing an excellent historical background, Cusumano filters A Christmas Carol through the novel lens of spiritual

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A Review Of Introduction Psalms

The four major types of psalms (community hymns, thanksgiving hymns of individuals, laments of both individual and community), four minor types (royal, creation, wisdom, and enthronement), and poetic idioms (Hebrew acrostic and parallelism) are clearly introduced through representative passages. Helpful as this introduction is, it is the flow and history of an ever-changing relationship to God that rivets the reader to the book. Getting a taste of how traditions unfolded in the original storytelling sessions and how later retellings move beyond the original intentions of the writers toward the needs of

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A Review of The Last Dickens

The Last Dickens was a great improvement upon the Poe Shadow; it was more akin to Matthew Pearl's first novel, The Dante Club. Both of these books are extremely well reed and tied to both the text and the tonality of the era in which they are set.

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A Review of The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Once I got over the Dickensian style, especially the delicate china doll description of his woman protagonist, Rosa Bud, I was hooked. This sadly foreshortened-by-death novel reveals as much in its superb descriptions, including a humanly depicted dish set, that speaks to the reader, as it does in its plot.

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A Review of The Return of the Dancing Master

In the prologue of Henning Mankell's The Return of the Dancing Master, I thought I recognized a character from a recent TV movie called 'The Last Hangman', featuring the life and times of Albert Pierrepoint, played by Timothy Spall. I was wrong about the novel character's exact identity; Mankell's hangman was a fellow called Davenport. As for the connection between the prologue and the rest of The Return of the Dancing Master, my movie association did function as a helpful template in discovering one of Mankell's crucial themes, the need for impartial justice.

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A Review of The Truth of these Strange Times

In Adam Fould's novel The Truth About these Strange Times we meet Howard McNamee, an everyman of the heart. On nearly every page lies the contention that heart is at the centre of our humanity. The questions: what is the heart? how do we judge the heart? and how do we repair it? are eloquently approached.

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