Karl's Reading List

Published by Penguin Audio, 2017. Audiobook narrated by the author. I knew next to nothing about Martin Luther before beginning this book, only that he was famous for starting the Reformation and did so by nailing his 95 Theses to the door of a church. There is a lot more to him than that! The thing that struck me most, while listening to this book, was how little Martin Luther intended to be controversial; as Metaxas argues, Luther wrote the 95 Theses in Latin (the scholarly language) because he intended to have a scholarly debate, not a revolution. It was only when his theses were translated into German and distributed by others that he was forced to defend them in public, thus going further than he intended. As things escalated, and Luther made more and more controversial statements (controversial to the ears of the established church of the day), there came a point where Luther gained a real peace with what was happening, because it was 'obvious that God was in it.' If that...

Published   by Bethany House Publishers: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1991. Book 1 in 'An Emerald Ballad.' Followed by ' Heart of the Lonely Exile. ' This is the first in the series of Christian novels that I remember reading when I was younger. After finishing the Mark of the Lion series, Elise and I were looking for a new series in a similar vein, and decided to give this one a try. All I could remember about the book was that it was very sad, and was set during the Irish Potato Famine.  So... This book is set during the Irish Potato Famine, and it is very sad! We follow the quickly dwindling Kavanagh family as they seek to survive the horror of those times, mostly focussing on the middle child Daniel and his frail yet stubborn mother Nora. The main support they have comes in the form of Morgan Fitzgerald, a revolutionary man who has loved Nora since they were both children, and whom Daniel idolizes. Also gradually gaining prominence as the plot progresses is the character...

Published by Random House New Zealand: Auckland, NZ, 2002. I'm starting to get a taste for non-fiction Alphabet Soup books; who knows what I'll pick for Z! With a little extra time on my hands while Elise and I recover from Covid, I've been able to get through this 10 person biography about prominent New Zealanders - or at very least, people with some connection to New Zealand. I say prominent, but there were a few individuals covered in this work that I had never heard of, and that is coming from a New Zealander with an interest in history. Not a full-on passion I guess. I mean, if I was full-on passionate about history I'm sure I would have heard of these people before, right? What makes this different from a regular biography is that the majority of the chapters were originally written as New Zealand Geographic articles. This results in an unusual feel; each chapter tells us the story of the individual in question (or at least part of it) while also describing the...

Published by Penguin Group (NZ): North Shore, Auckland, NZ, 2010. In 1867 the influential missionary to the Māori people, Henry Williams, died. Williams had been in New Zealand since 1823 and had been responsible (among many other notable events in his life) for translating the Treaty of Waitangi. In the same year that Williams died, Bishop George Augustus Selwyn, the first Bishop of New Zealand, who had himself been in New Zealand since 1843, returned to England to take up a new post. This book tells the history of New Zealand - with a particular focus on the work of the early missionaries - from the first arrival of Europeans in these islands up until that point in 1867. Choosing to end the book with the death of Williams and departure of Selwyn seems fitting, as these two figures had massive influence on the shape of Christianity in the country, as well as influencing the shape of the country - and interactions between Māori and Pākehā. In the modern post-Christian worldview, the ea...

Published by Penguin Books: London, England, 1977 (1951). Translated by Nevill Coghill. First published in Middle English in the 12th Century. Overall, this is not a book I'd recommend. It is interesting in some ways, giving an insight to the different social strata of 12th Century England, as well as discussions about the sorts of things considered socially acceptable(!), but it is also (in some of the stories) very bawdy and in fact rather coarse. I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that old books will have more 'conservative' sensibilities, but although this is somewhat true if you go back to, say, Victorian Literature, going too far back comes out the other side of that era of history and back into the ribald. The structure of The Canterbury Tales is that a group of travellers, making pilgrimage to the grave of St Thomas Beckett in Canterbury, are challenged by their first-night host - who will be travelling with them - to each tell two stories in order to win th...

Published by The Reprint Society: Suffolk, Great Britain, 1953 (1951). Translated from Italian by Una Vincenzo Troubridge. I didn't really know what I was getting into at the start of this book! A friend at church lent it to me (thanks Natalie!) saying she thought I'd enjoy it, so I had a read. I did enjoy it, but its an odd little thing. After a few short introductory stories told from the point of view of the (fictionalised?) author as a child or a young man, we are introduced to the Catholic priest Don Camillo and his 'little world' aka, the village of which he is priest. Don Camillo is an interesting figure. He is quick to anger, he is not above using threats or deception to get his own way, and he is a powerful fighter. He is also often in dialogue with 'the Lord above the altar' - an icon of Jesus who speaks to him as God. The fact that this is indeed the icon rather than merely 'God anywhere' is highlighted in a few stories, where the Lord's v...