In this 1930 classic book, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, the story is told as a stream of consciousness by the characters, who are family and friends of Addie Brunden. Addie’s family is attempting to return her body to Jefferson where she was born, but the bridge is out and they have no food or money for the trip. This leads to a series of unfortunate mishaps, arson, rape and eventually a new beginning for the family.

Addie’s husband, Anse, is portrayed as a lazy man that has relied on others to take care of him and who first asked Addie to marry him because he could not take care of himself. And she who accepted because she thought no one else would have her.

Five Children and Growing Pains

The woman’s five children, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, the only daughter, and Vardaman, each with their own brand of pain, caused by growing up in a household with a cold father and cheating mother, now have to do more than any child should ever be asked to do. Cash, being a skilled carpenter, works on his mother’s coffin for days, right outside her window so she can hear it being made and therefore won’t worry.

Faulkner’s tale pulls the reader into the story so that they may feel the mud on the side of the rivers edge and smell the rot of the decaying body, as this poor family attempts to return their mother to her hometown for burial. It reaches down into the darkest part of the human mind and attempts to give the reader an understanding of why people do the things they do and how they close their mind to it afterwards. How people can do cruel things to the ones that they love the deepest when they can no longer hold back their selfish desires and the same people can risk their own lives to show their love and pain.

This book was eventually made into a movie, known as “Camera Three.”

Ted Dekker has been writing some of the most compelling Christian fiction since C.S. Lewis (well, maybe since Frank Peretti, depending on your personal taste) for quite a while now.

“Skin” is Dekker’s first book to make the New York Times bestseller’s list. It’s certainly his most secular book, but still chalk full of spiritual themes.

The book takes place in the small town Summerville which has been the target of a serial killer that identifies himself as “Red.” It comes down to a few people to save the town from the killer: Wendy, an emotionally damaged woman that escaped from an abusive cult; Colt, a local cop; brother and sister Nicole and Carey; and Jerry, a professional video game player that only cares about himself.

They find that stopping is Red is harder than they anticipated, though, because Red doesn’t quite seem human; his reflexes and speed don’t seem human, and they’re at a loss trying to figure out how to stop him. What’s even worse, Red seems to merely be play a game with them, while they are struggling just to stay alive.

Dekker’s somewhat well-known for crafting twist endings that will leave one breathless. Not as well-known as M. Night Shyamalan, maybe, but he definitely packs his books full of twists and turns. And, unlike Shyamalan, who seems to craft some his movies seemingly with the aim of fooling people at the end, Dekker appears rather to want to tell an amazing story that just happens to leave you gasping for breath at the end.

That being said, I think that the twist at the end of this book blows every other Dekker ending out of the water. Skin is a great addition to the growing library by this talented Christian fiction author.

A fascinating entry from a book written from the perspective of Germans living during the Third Reich. It makes you wonder: Are we slowly, but surely, being coaxed in the U.S. into feeling “It’s not me, so why should I care?”

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html