I've heard the movie was awful, so I stayed away from it, but Correlli's Mandolin was an awesome novel. It's the story of life on a small Greek island shortly before, during and after WWII. It occurred to me that I've never really read before an account of how the war affected some particular community in Europe. Don't be intimidated by the subject though. Much of the book is light hearted. The portrayal of the Greek communist resistance alone is worth the price of the book, especially for me as I picked it up off the free rack outside my favorite used bookstore (it was slightly water damaged and had pen marks on the cover, but quite readable).

The Hauerwas book (see left), like most of his stuff, made me want to quote about eight percent of it here on my site. Unfortunately this would pretty well violate the copyright, and even though he claims to adhere to "Christian non-violence", I would want to find out what happens when push comes to shove, so to speak. His article "Sinsick", on the relatedness of sickness and sin was particularly provocative. He asks rhetorically why we are more concerned about the quality of our doctors than about the quality of our pastors. His answer: "We are atheists." We don't really believe that our church will affect the outcome of our souls, but we sure do believe that our doctors will affect our bodies.

Briefly, the Stephen Bury novel (ghostwritten apparently by Neal Stephenson) is a sci-fi political thriller, which is outside my normal scope of interest, but is just full of great writing and interesting ideas, characters and thoughts on the country we live in. If you've liked any of Stephenson's other stuff, you should like this. If you haven't read Stephenson you probably have a book shaped hole in your heart where his novels should fit nicely.