Hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Specials
by Scott Westerfield – This is the third book in the Uglies trilogy even though a fourth book was written later just to confuse things.

From Amazon – This final installment in the series is a warning of the dangers of overconsumption and conformity. Set some time in the future, after a human-made bacteria destroyed the modern world, the trilogy tells of new cities established and tightly controlled through brainwashing and a series of operations leading to a compliant society. Tally Youngblood, the 16-year-old protagonist, learns in the first two books that free will and truth are more important than a false sense of security. In Specials, she has become an elite fighting machine, fully enhanced with nanotechnology and super-fast reflexes, and made to work as a Special Circumstances agent for the nameless city that she fled.

I got bored with this one. I don’t think the world that was created held up through three books.

Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics–and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway
by Francis Schaeffer – I’ve read his autobiography before about growing up with missionary parents in Switzerland and then how he worked with his father to establish the political power of Christians in America.

From Amazon – “Mom was a much nicer person than her God. There are many biblical regulations about everything from beard-trimming to menstruating. Mom worked diligently to recast her personal-hygiene-obsessed God in the best light.”

Alternating between laugh-out-loud scenes from his childhood and acidic ruminations on the present state of an America he and his famous fundamentalist parents helped create, bestselling author Frank Schaeffer asks what the Glenn Becks and the Rush Limbaughs and the paranoid fantasies of the “right-wing echo chamber” are really all about.

Here’s a hint: sex.

The unforgettable central character in Sex, Mom, and God is the author’s far-from-prudish evangelical mother, Edith, who sweetly but bizarrely provides startling juxtapositions of the religious and the sensual thoughout Schaeffer’s childhood. She was, says Frank Schaeffer, “the greatest illustration of the Divine beauty of Paradox I’ve encountered … a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her own judgmental rules in favor of creativity.”

This book was very funny when it talked about his upbringing. His mother taught a generation of women wanting to be missionary wives that the most important thing to pack was a see-through black nightgown. It bogs down some when it starts talking about politics but it is great whenever it goes back to the story of his mother.

The Sixth Man by David Baldacci –

Edgar Roy-an alleged serial killer held in a secure, fortress-like Federal Supermax facility-is awaiting trial. He faces almost certain conviction. Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are called in by Roy’s attorney, Sean’s old friend and mentor Ted Bergin, to help work the case. But their investigation is derailed before it begins-en route to their first meeting with Bergin, Sean and Michelle find him murdered.

It is now up to them to ask the questions no one seems to want answered: Is Roy a killer? Who murdered Bergin?

I like this series. This book has a surprising twist at the end.

Where Am I Reading – Fantasy Island, Switzerland, Maine