Karl's Reading List

Published by Picador/Pan Macmillan: London, 2025. First published by Doubleday/Penguin Random House: New York, 2024. Last year this book was all the rage; a retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but told from the perspective of the runaway slave known as N-Word Jim, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction . And... that's all you need to know about the difference between those two awards! James is a well-told, interesting, thought-provoking read, with quite 'angry' undertones, but not generally crossing the line into sordid or unpleasant. If it had, maybe it would have won the Booker Prize as well. Maybe a little harsh, considering that this year I have also read The Remains of the Day , which is one of my favourite Booker Prize -winning novels. But, having now read five Pulitzer Prize  winners and only having given up on one of those so far ( The Grapes of Wrath ), the percentage of "readable and inter...

Published by Tyndale Momentum/Tyndale Oublishing House: Carol Stream, Illinois, 2013. Over the years I have read a number of biographies of Christians living under persecution. Some, like The Heavenly Man by Brother Yun or The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom are able to describe horrific situations, including torture, which still being uplifting. Others, like Eyes of the Tailless Animals by Lee Soon-ok, lean so far into the unpleasantness of the situation that they become difficult to read, even while still sharing important stories.  Captive in Iran is another story of living under persecution, and it is not a spoiler to say that the authors recount their time in prison in Iran - after all, it's right there in the title! However, whether through God's grace or through trying to avoid offending the readers' sensibilities (or some other reason?) the authors do something I haven't seen before - they make their suffering in prison not really 'as intense' as I wou...

Published by Steele Roberts Ltd: Wellington, Aotearoa NZ, 2008 (2001). This short book is a series of poems in which the author (as the title suggests) attempts to explain poetry to his father, a builder and more 'traditionally manly' Kiwi bloke (at least, the poems suggest this), using the medium of poetry to do so . The poems within are less self-contained poems than you would usually get in a collection, then. Instead, they all seek to explain a concept of poetry in a poetic fashion. We get poems with titles like 'The shape of words', 'The word as a means of communication' or even 'A set of instructions to be used when reading a poem', most of which take their title as a launchpad for a poetic/figurative unpacking of the concept in question. There are biblical allusions, lots of metaphors about building materials, and occasional touches of humour, such as when the poem 'The word as a memory' ends a list of relatively heard-felt connotations of...

Published by Metaphorosis Publishing, 2026. Edited by B Morris Allen. Short story collections are interesting to read cover-to-cover. No matter how good the collection is, there will always be some that grab your attention more than others, particularly if the collection is from a number of authors, rather than one. Trunk is one such collection, and what makes it an even more intriguing beast is that the connective tissue between these stories (other than they fact that they all fall into the fantasy or science-fiction genres) is that, in order to be considered for inclusion, the stories must have been rejected for publication multiple times. Each story ends with a short blurb about the author, followed by the history of rejection for the story that you have just read. Almost by necessity, then, the stories in this collection are a little odd, a little 'out there', a bit different in some way to your 'standard' short story, although most of them did hold my interest to ...

Published by Orbit Books: Australia, 2018 (2017). Book 2 in 'The Licanius Trilogy.' Preceded by ' The Shadow of What Was Lost. ' Followed by 'The Light of All That Falls.' I recently read the first book in this series, and liked it enough that I ended up buying this second book in order to continue reading. I'm glad that I did, as the story picks up immediately after the end of Book 1, meaning that I'm glad that the first story was still fresh in my mind. Middle books in a trilogy often have a lot going against them, particularly when characters from Book 1 have been separated, and remain separated for much of the run time, so that they can be in the needed locations for the epic conclusion of Book 3 - The Two Towers is an example of a middle book that does this, and still does it well. An Echo of Things To Come also has this hurdle to jump, and does it well, but author James Islington has added more challenges for himself by choosing to add in plot-rel...

Published by Collins: London and Glasgow, 1954. First published 1847, originally in French. Book 3 of the 'D'Artagnon Romances.' Preceded by ' Twenty Years After. ' Followed by 'Louise de al Valliere.' This is the third of the D'Artagnon Romances by Alexandre Dumas, the first of which - The Three Musketeers - is by far the most famous, followed by the fifth and last in the series, The Man in the Iron Mask. Each book focuses more or less on the same core of individuals, with D'Artagnon being the most prominent in each entry. In this book he is by far the most important character in the book, despite the fact that some parts of the book do focus heavily on other characters altogether. One of these other characters is Raoul, the son of original Musketeer Aramis, who is also known as 'The Vicomte de Bragelonne.'  'Wait,' you might say, 'that's the title of the novel!' Yes it is! But don't get your hopes up! Raoul is a fai...

Published by Zondervan Publishing House: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1967 (1966). A non-fiction book, Fire on the Mountains tells the story of the spread of Christianity among the Wallamo people of Ethiopia, particularly during, and after World War 2. Western missionaries had been in the Wallamo region leading up to the war (with early parts of the book unpacking this season), but found themselves banned from the country by the occupying Italians, leaving only the small number of partially trained native believers behind, without even a completed bible in their language. The majority of Fire on the Mountains highlights stories of how these native believers spread the gospel, leading to a massive increase in Wallamo people accepting Jesus into their lives. Chapter 12 opens with a native believer telling the returning missionaries: "When you missionaries left, it was difficult to find a Christian in Wallamo country. Now it is difficult to find a man who is not a Christian" (page 10...