Book 25: Jesus: A meditation on His Stories and His Relationships with Women by Andrew Greeley (2007)

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The title of this book may be generic, but the subtitle gives away what this book is all about. Basically, the author takes passages about Jesus and analyze them in accordance to his personal belief. He’s Catholic. And like many other Catholics, he seems to share my aversion to Bible-thumping Evangelists and Mel Gibson. I find myself agreeing to most of his opinions anyway. Perhaps instead of completely letting go of my Catholic upbringing the other day, I have subconsciously suppressed it within the depths of my soul – where it still remains and waits for the perfect moment to eventually triumph over me. You know what they say: Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

This book reminds me of two things:
1. My childish (i.e., selfish, twisted, pure evil) thoughts regarding some of the parables.
2. The average person’s lack of knowledge and understanding of something – and his/her/its enthusiasm to spout off with authority regardless. A lot of people on WordPress are like that.

Book 24: Flocabulary by Blake Harrison and Alexander Rappaport (2006)

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In theory, this book is an excellent idea. In practice, it is horrible. None of the songs make much sense; things happen without a single uniting idea behind them. It teaches redundancy and it keeps saying the same thing using different words (what?). On at least one page they mistake “you’re” for “your.” Terrible. The exercises also seem pointless. They give you multiple-choice questions, and four of the five choices are words that you don’t see in the song those questions are based on. That makes it pretty easy to get the right answer without knowing your vocabulary as long as you’ve skimmed through the list before you do the exercise.

I would still recommend this book simply because it’s amusing and the songs will help some people increase their vocabulary.