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Book Reviews

Twenty Five Books That Influenced My Life

Last year I read 25 Books Every Christian Should Read and it made me wonder what 25 books I would recommend if I were on the editorial board that put such a book together. I started jotting down a few that came to mind and the list just kept growing.

But then it dawned on me that a lot of the books that influenced me most deeply were not specifically about faith, theology or Christianity. So my list grew even larger as I thought of great books of literature, history, mystery and non-fiction.

Out of all that came an idea. …

Book Reviews,

Final Reading List

It’s official: I read 119 books in 2011. Roughly 10 books a month. Definitely a record for me. No way I’ll approach that in 2012. Perhaps ever.

If you are interested, here is the complete list of books that I read this year. It consists of about 25 books on theology or faith, about the same number of history books, over a dozen business books, about a dozen novels or mysteries, another 25 that I’ll loosely call “contemporary affairs”, about ten biographies, a handful about cars, and one about jaguars.

And if you missed it, here are my favorites …

Book Reviews,

Favorite Books of 2011

Here it is … my long awaited “favorite books” post!

The “Would you shut up about this book? It’s all you talk about anymore!” category: Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff. D’Aun didn’t have to read this book because it’s all I talked about for weeks. This book has it all: remote tribes in the South Pacific, plane crashes, brave American soldiers, crazy aeronautical stunts … the list goes on. It reads like an Indiana Jones adventure combined with a World War II action movie, all set on a Survivor island. Really hard to imagine that it’s all true, …

Book Reviews,

Books, books, and more books

Well, I didn’t start the year with an aim to accomplish this, but I’ve read over 100 books this year. People ask me how I find the time to do it. Truth is that I don’t know. It just sorta happens.

Even when I was a kid I read a lot. My mom instilled that passion in me by buying me as many books as I wanted. Her only rule: I had to finish them. In college I was known for skipping classes and making up for it by reading the assigned text books and everything else about the topic. …

Book Reviews,

Simply Jesus, by N.T. Wright

Later this week I’ll be attending an event at the Newbigin House in San Francisco with N.T. Wright as the keynote speaker. I’ve read previous books by Wright, and enjoyed them, so I picked up his latest release Simply Jesus.

The book title is accurate but somehow deceptive. N.T. Wright attempts to toss aside a lot of the current debate about Jesus — whether he was real, whether he was truly God, whether he really did do miracles, etc. — and instead “simply look at Jesus” without all the baggage that popular debates have created. Thus the book title.…

Book Reviews,

Go Like Hell!

How could I resist a book titled Go Like Hell? Actually, the full title of this book by A.J. Baime is Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Irresistible for a guy who keeps a blog called junkyard wisdom, right?

And what a great book it is! Okay, so it’s not for everybody. If you don’t love cars, don’t bother with it (there are more ideas below to choose from). But if you do love cars, and if you are old enough to remember the crazy Le Mans races of …

Book Reviews, Junkyard Management,

How I Sold Car Parts to Steve Jobs (okay, so probably not, but still…)

Walter Isaacson is one of my favorite biographers. His books about Einstein, Kissinger, and Benjamin Franklin are fantastic. So last summer when I heard that he would be writing a book titled Steve Jobs, I immediately put it into my Amazon cart.

Little did I realize that Jobs would be gone by the time the book was released. A sad loss for his family, for Apple, and for those of us who love the unique Silicon Valley area and culture. Jobs changed the world with his innovation and passion. He brought together great design and great technology as nobody …