Mark's Notebook

Books I'm Reading Now

Since starting to spend more time on the computer, I've been reading less. But I've started some new books (and finished a few) over the last month:

• What on Earth Are We Doing?: Finding Our Place As Christians in the World, by John Fischer.

  I always like to be reading a book by John Fischer. His kind of Christianity, inherited from the late Ray Stedman of Peninsula Bible Church, is the most genuine. This book is about being Christian instruments of healing in a decaying society, instead of remaining isolated from the very society that needs us so much and where Jesus sent us to save individuals.

• Azusa Street Till Now: Eyewitness Accounts of the Move of God, by Clara Davis.

  An ultimately disappointing book about the history of the 20th-century American Pentecostal movement, with a tip of the hat to the Charismatic movement of the 1950's and 1960's.

• The Power of a Praying Husband, by Stormie Omartian.

  I read this book about a year ago with the object of understanding my wife better. Now I've read it again with the object of actually praying.

• Protestantism in America: A Narrative History, by Jerald C. Brauer.

  I always like to be reading a history book, and this one is a good follow-up to the last one I read, American Faith. Its outlook is more evangelical than American Faith, but its conclusions are much the same: that the 17th-century movements that have had the most effect on American society were the Quaker and Baptist; and that the influence of the middle colonies, where religious freedom was paramount, far outweighed the influence of Puritan New England and the Methodist South.

• Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, by Mark Allan Powell.

  An exhaustive encyclopedia of all CCM acts, including 1970's icons like Love Song and Marsha Stevens, and their 1960's precursors like Ralph Carmichael.

• The Billboard Guide to Contemporary Christian Music, by Barry Alfonso.

  Not nearly as exhaustive as Powell's book, and quite disappointing. One would have expected a Billboard volume to have more breadth.

• Mostly Harmless, by Douglas Adams.

  Mostly boring. Inferior to the previous installments in his "trilogy".

• Constructing Accessible Web Sites, by Jim Thatcher et al.

  Just a little something I grabbed to read while fixing up my crashed computer. I've finished about 25% of it, and it's pretty pedantic so far, and not very useful. But the remainder of the book promises to be more practical.

• Danny Goodman's Javascript Handbook, by Danny Goodman.

  A quick read, covers lots of interesting topics.

• Essential CSS and DHTML for Web Professionals (2nd Edition), by Dan Livingston.

  Another quick read. Really just a quick introduction to CSS, then an examination of menus with a little animation.

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Last updated Tuesday 13 May 2008