Lucky Dog
by Mark Barrowcliffe
RATING: 7 out of 10 

I finally finished a book.

It’s been a long time since I finished a fun book. I’ve been reading a lot of church books lately and needed a break. Lucky Dog by Mark Barrowcliffe is a book I’ve had on my shelf for several months and one I’ve been looking forward to reading.

The book focuses on a British real estate agent named Dave Barker who happens upon a dog that starts to talk to him. At first glance, a talking dog seems like a bizarre way of telling a story. To be honest, there were times where the plot certainly unravelled a bit, but the one thing that was always right was Reg the Dog.

Reg provides great nuggets of wisdom throughout the book with an intelligent and witty, albeit decidedly dog-like countenance. Consider his stance on neckties:

“Every time you put it on you end up going somewhere you don’t want to. That’s what I call a leash.”

Lucky Dog suffers at the hands of its main character, unfortunately, who makes one bad decision after another. It is those bad decisions that ultimately put the book in a bad place for me - a place where Reg the Dog was absent for large stretches of the book.

Still, Lucky Dog is intriguing to someone like me because Barker fills his off-hours by playing poker. When the dog enters his life, he suddenly has a leg up on the competition, an animal instinct (if you will) for his opponents weaknesses, confidences, and nervous tics. Reg the Dog gives Dave access to almost subconscious tells he can sniff out.

Along the way, Dave manages to get himself involved in a variety of quandaries, from shady business dealings and fraud to girlfriend troubles and problems with some mobsters.

Barrowcliffe’s characters aren’t terribly interesting, save Reg the Dog, who made me wonder just what my own dog might say to me if he could talk. It’s sometimes fun to imagine. But the humans (or the ‘hellooos’ as Reg calls them) are just kind of droll.

Still, the story is fun. Despite having a talking dog as the main character, it’s a very grown-up story about figuring out what kind of person you want to be.

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The Phoenix Affirmations
by Eric Elnes
Rating: 9 out of 10

It’s now been almost 2 weeks since Alli and I got back from the Congregational Life Workshop for our church. One of the wonderful things (of many) that was a part of the workshop was that we used The Phoenix Affirmations as a conversation starter for our early morning Living Room Group discussions.

The book is a really fascinating collection of “the new tenets” of Christianity that have been gathered ecumenically from across the country and were ceremoniously walked across the United States to Washington D.C. and “nailed to the doors of all the major religions” Martin-Luther-style.

As a strong believer in a living God, I think these affirmations are a wonderful step toward bringing Christianity back towards its original purpose.

This book is a very easy read, one that certainly will challenge the faith of some, but ultimately is a step in a great direction.

The affirmations are as follows:

1. Being sincerely Christian without denying the legitimacy of other religions.
2. Listening for God’s Word, which comes through praying, studying the Bible, and attending to God’s activity in the world.
3. Celebrating the sanctity of God’s Creation, including Nature, the sacred and the secular, the Christian and non-Christian, etc.
4. Worshipping in a way that is sincere, artful, and biblical.
5. Treating all people as creations made in God’s image, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, economic class, nationality, religion, physical or mental ability, etc., just as Jesus did.
6. Standing up for the poor, for the margianalized, for the oppressed, seeking justice and peace for all.
7. Preserving religious freedom and maintaining the separation of church and state.
8. Humbly acknowledging our own shortcomings while sincerely trying to see and bring out the best in others, even if they consider us their enemy.
9. Basing our lives on the faith that Christ restores all things and that all of us are loved beyond our wildest dreams.
10. Recognizing the sanctity of both our minds and our hearts and that both science and faith, doubt and belief, serve the pursuit for truth.
11. Realizing the benefits of prayer, worship, recreation, and healthiness in addition to work.
12. Acting on the faith that we born with a purpose, a vocation that serves to strengthen God’s Kingdom and extend God’s love.

These affirmations match up very well to the latest counsel to our church and provided for some great discussions with a diverse group of people. If you are a believer, I’d suggest this book. It’s a great theological study. At times, the book can be repetitive and it is certainly challenging in sections, but ultimately, it’s a great read.

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Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
by Anthony Bourdain
RATING: 8 out of 10

Anthony Bourdain is chef-cool for a lot of reasons. He gets mad respect in the community of chefdom, although many may only recognize him from his excursions on the Travel Channel. The truth is, back in the day, he was a chef at Brassiere Les Halles in New York City, the culmination of a food career that is so degenerate and depraved that it would make some sailors blush.

This middle-class-to-well-off lad “with the French name” has held every job in the kitchen, from dishwasher to line cook all the way up to executive chef and now, “Chef-at-large” (whatever that means). Along the way, mistakes were made, mostly due to excessive cocaine and heroin use, but Bourdain somehow managed to come out alive.

Kitchen Confidential is - at its core - the autobiography of one fantastically interesting character. However, along the way, Bourdain manages to skewer, slice, dice and whatever-other-cooking-euphemism-you-prefer the restaurant business, exposing what has been his experience up to 2000 (when the book was originally published). He pulls no punches (divulging the secret to never order fish on Monday and doesn’t like Emeril all that much) and writes lovingly of the debauched behavior of kitchen staffers (sex, drugs, etc.).

People like Anthony Bourdain are truly amazing. Here is a guy who is well-respected as a chef (although he would admit he can’t hang with the Eric Riperts and the Tom Colicchio) yet manages to tell a story that not only totally compelling, but also brilliantly written. You can hear the sounds (usually curse words in Spanish) in Bourdain’s ears, smells the aromas of his kitchen; it’s written so well that you can almost taste the food.

There was a time in my life where I wanted to be a chef. I think it’s one of the most amazing crafts and that great chefs are truly artists of the highest kind because they have the ability to touch every single one of your senses. After reading Kitchen Confidential, I don’t. What a life these guys lead…

I really liked the book a lot. If you like Bourdain or you watch Top Chef (my favorite reality show) or a lot of Food Network programming, I suggest you pick up the book.

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Playing for Pizza
by John Grisham
RATING: 7 out of 10

Remember back in the day when the world clamored over when the next Grisham book would come out and how great it would be? I remember reading A Time to Kill and The Firm years ago and devouring them as I marveled at Grisham’s ability to make legal proceedings accessible and to make lawyers seem a little less…um…lawyer-y. For about 6 years during the late 80’s and early 90’s, he dominated the book world. His books now come a little less often, but are still putting plenty of coin in his pockets.

Grisham has written 16 legal fiction books and 4 non-legal fiction books (as well as a single legal non-fiction book). Playing for Pizza falls into that second non-legal fiction category and focuses on an American football player who has managed one of the single biggest failures registered in the history of the NFL (think Lin Elliott).

Rick Dockery is a typical anti-hero…lazy, physically gifted, a real schmoozer. But he’s also tainted goods. No one in the NFL will sign him so he flies the coop off to Parma, Italy where they play real American football (not that silly stuff we call soccer). Apparently, Italy has a league that allows 3 American players per team (Grisham apparently discovered American football while researching another book in Italy) and the competition is probably equal to that of large-high-school football.

The title of the book comes from the way that most of the players in the league get paid…with pizza and beer. Most of the Italian players are athletic guys who just enjoy the game. Oh, to have players that enjoy the game…

Anyway, you can imagine what happens. But predictability is not the biggest sin of this book…the story itself is interesting and Grisham’s descriptions of the food and the cities of Italy made me miss it very much. The story is light on character development and it just made too many leaps where there were opportunities for great storytelling. The book reads more like a screenplay and, frankly, it will probably be better as a movie. Actors will (hopefully) be able to capture the nuance and subtlety of the characters’ feelings, which was one of the major omissions from the book.

Still, it’s a quick, enjoyable read; it just leaves you wanting a little more. It certainly could have been longer, only clocking in at less than 250 pages, giving Grisham more room to develop the characters, but like I said, it’s something that actors will be able to overcome in a movie (as long as they are decent).

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Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret to a Man’s Soul
by John Eldredge
RATING: 6 out of 10

I’ve been “reading” this book for quite a long time. I started it sometime in January and it took until June for me to finish. This was not necessarily the fault of the book (although it could be improved), but more the fault of it not being what I wanted to read.

Normally, I would have given up, but I really wanted to actually get through the book because I love the concept behind it - it delves into exactly what the title says. It talks about the spiritual aspect of how men need to be men…we’re built to be wild and passionate people and the world has emasculated us in a way that keeps us from reaching our full potential.

It sounds a little new-agey, but Eldredge has some excellent points in the book. Unfortunately, he struggles to string them together into coherent chapters. The ideas are there, but the book really needs some editing. (Mr. Eldredge, you can email me shane at this domain dot com if you need an editor.)

Over time, I felt like the book was repeating its key concepts instead of focusing them into specific sections. And while I wanted to really like it, I just couldn’t get over the organization of the book.

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Textpattern Solutions: PHP-Based Content Management Made Easy
by Kevin Potts, Robert Sable, Nathan Smith, Cody Lindley, and Mary Fredborg

OK, so I’ve totally already blogged about this, but it is definitely worth mentioning again, especially considering that now I’ve actually read the book. (Now, maybe Kevin will send me a copy of his new one…)

I imagine that most of my readers know this, but for those of you that don’t - I am a web designer. My actual title at my real job is Marketing Specialist, but I have a pretty heavy interactive background and have been working for the last few years to really improve my XHTML and CSS ninja-ry.

While this blog uses Wordpress, I have previously used Google’s Blogger and done hand-coding for various web projects. Content management was always a concept that was kind of foreign to me. I understood the concept, but I really didn’t have a lot of idea of how it would ever be applicable to the projects I worked on - mostly small sites with less than 10 pages of static content.

As I’ve gotten older and wiser, I am becoming more aware of the need for products like Textpattern, an open-source CMS that is much more flexible and powerful than typical blogging platforms like Wordpress and Moveable Type. In fact, I’ve found the perfect project to test my theory.

For several years, I’ve felt that our church’s website has been lacking in functionality. I’ve wanted to re-do it, but I’m not exactly wanting to take all of the responsibility for content creation. So, to me, it seemed like this would be a perfect time to test out Textpattern. As I’ve read through Textpattern Solutions, I’ve found that it is going to do exactly what I want it to do.

The biggest benefit that Textpattern has over other CMS products in my opinion is the ease with which there is customization. Textpattern’s tag system is built on PHP, but you don’t need to know PHP. In fact, it is more similar to XHTML in structure, which makes it really appealing to someone like me who fears PHP somewhat. (It’s all the questions marks…they just seem scary.

Anyway, so I am planning on setting off on the process of building my church a new website this weekend. Textpattern Solutions has been an invaluable resource in my planning and I will lean on it heavily while I work on the site. It will be a long process, but it’s one that I’m not afraid when I have a tool like this - it’s something that I’m looking forward to accomplishing.

And who knows…maybe eventually I will get around to building my own site using Textpattern. We’ll see.

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Textpattern Solutions: PHP-Based Content Management Made Easy (Solutions)
by Kevin Potts, Robert Sable, Nathan Smith, Cody Lindley, and Mary Fredborg

I’ve been meaning to announce this book for a while, but never got around to it. (There was that whole thing where I was in France and Italy for a few weeks.)

Anyway, one of my former co-workers (and a great friend), Kevin Potts - purveyor of graphic design genius at graphicPUSH - has published a book on his CMS of choice, Textpattern. Textpattern is “a flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system… both free and open source.”

While I haven’t had a chance to read it cover-to-cover yet, you can be assured that it is chock full of useful tips, information and other nuggets for everyone from basic to more advanced users of the internets. As I am considering using a deployment of Textpattern for an upcoming overhaul of my corporate website, I am looking forward to exploring this book in much more detail.

For more information on the book, visit the book’s website.

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Love Monkey: A Novel
By Kyle Smith
RATING: 3 out of 10

I mentioned it before, so it should be no surprise when I say that this is my least favorite book that I’ve read in the past year and a half.

I had high hopes for the book. It was dubbed as the male version of chick lit, and I have read a few chick lit books, specifically the Shopaholic series by Sophie Kinsella. I liked them and I was looking for something else since Nick Hornby’s last couple outings haven’t been all that great and I needed something light to read.

Perhaps it was my adoration for the TV show of the same name starring Tom Cavanaugh (of Ed fame), but I had some high hopes.

Boy was I wrong.

In Love Monkey, we find Tom Farrell, a copywriter at Tabloid, a New York - wait for it - tabloid newspaper. He’s a miserable case, which many of us can relate to…unlucky at work, unlucky in looks, unlucky in love, etc. He spends 80% of the book pining for a girl named Julia, who he meets and woos while she has a boyfriend from back home.

She’s very obviously unhappy in the relationship and he encourages that unhappiness by taking her fancy places and being witty (at least he thinks so). Along the way, she never really shows a lot of interest in him past friendship. He is, afterall, about 10 years older than her, and not very cool, despite his attempts at coolness.

Even despite this unrequited love that he claims overtakes him completely, he manages to date 3 other women at the same time, treating each of them with disdain and meanness…perhaps one of the most clueless men in the history of dating.

The book is based in Manhattan and when 9/11 happens, I was expecting a poignant turn. Not so. The main character really just brags about where he was when it happened and uses the story as a way to get laid, further cementing his place as the most unlikable main character I’ve read about in the last 2 years of reading.

The story comes to an abrupt end and you’re left thinking, “Is that all?” But wait…there’s more. A full 15 pages of information on the author, who like his literary likeness, Tom, can’t seem to stop talking about himself. Could have done without that.

Overall, I pretty much loathed this book. It was poorly written, it mixed metaphors, and the fact that it was turned into a failed (but likable) TV show is confusing, considering that it had absolutely nothing in common with the show except the characters names and the title.

Worst book I’ve read in several years. DO NOT READ THIS BOOK.

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Fletch Reflected
by Gregory McDonald
RATING: 7 out of 10

Over 2 decades, Gregory McDonald wrote 11 novels featuring one of my favorite characters of all time - Irwin M. Fletcher, affectionately known as Fletch. The timeline of the books was actually really interesting, jumping around chronologically and weaving interesting characters in and out of his stories.

The last two books in the series (Son of Fletch, Fletch Reflected) are not considered a part of the Fletch series according to McDonald’s official site. The character of Fletch appears a lot in Son of Fletch (which was the last book I read), but I think that McDonald perhaps intended to create a new series of books around Fletch’s son, Jack, so he introduced him with a hybrid novel that was about half Fletch-driven and half about his son.

Fletch Reflected almost entirely focuses on Jack during the time immediately following the end of Son of Fletch. It is an interesting story in which he starts to investigate the attempted murder of an eccentric scientist who keeps all his family very close, despite their obvious loathe towards him.

It’s a pretty good book, a little better than Son of Fletch, but perhaps I’m just a little burnt on the whole series. It’s been really fun to read the whole series and see the full spectrum of what McDonald envisioned when he created the character of Fletch. It’s amazing that he was able to maintain the character and his attitude from 1974 to 1994. The only similar instances that I can think of are Ian Fleming’s James Bond (12 novels in 13 years, but the franchise has carried through to many more books) and Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt (that’s for you, Jake).

(I’m sure that there are other examples, but those are the only ones I could think of right now.)

I’m a little sad that the series slowed down and ended, but at the same time, I can’t imagine writing about the same character for that long. I don’t think I could recommend the book by itself without the rest of the series. However, it’s still a fun read, so if you like Fletch and haven’t read this book, I would definitely suggest it.

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