I have finished reading a couple of books recently and naturally have started new ones.

In the fiction department, I have finished Patrick Smith's A Land Remembered. The story was marvelous and it was with a certain amount of sadness that I turned the last page. The characters seemed to really come alive through the skill of Smith's pen and creativity which caused me to find myself really reasonating with several of the characters. Old Florida jumps off the pages with his vivid descriptions and I got a real sense of what the land looked like in the time of its natural beauty. I truly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who has ever wanted to know more about a Florida that didn't involve Disney World.
Since CPE is ending tomorrow (officially - I still have a double shift on-call this weekend) and I will be heading home for a few days, I needed a longish book to take with me so I don't need to take more than one. Also, since the last two books have been rather serious, I wanted something a little more fun, so I chose off my shelf the second volume of Michael Moorcock's dark fantasy Eternal Champion series, Von Bek.

For non-fiction, I finished (a while ago) Dr. Sherwin Nuland's reflections of life's final moments entitled How We Die. In it, he highlights by chapter the seven or eight ways that death is most likely to finally claim us. Written from a medical perspective but with an eye out for the layman, it is comprehensible and informative at the same time it is philosophically and pastorally reflective. For my next non-fiction choice, I have borrowed from a friend John Eldredge's The Sacred Romance. I haevn't gotten very far into it yet, but it seems easy to read and pretty good so far. A lot of it is language that sounds like CPE, reinforcing my learning from this summer. Anyway, I look forward to getting further along in it.

-R