I really enjoy reading. Unfortunately, with that comes a confession of a really bad habit I have. Once I start a book, if it’s a good one, I can’t put it down. I read to the exclusion of everything else, everything! My sweetie is always telling me “You know you can put it down and come back to it later”. But I can’t, especially once I get really into the book and things start happening in the story. (I’ve been known to read until the wee hours of the morning…until 3 or 4, and then have to drag myself up in the morning at 6 to get going.) I just HAVE to find out what’s going to happen next. Obsessive, I know.
These are a few of my favorite books from the past year.
The Shack: by William Paul Young (Photo and Summary from Google)
Mackenzie Allen Phillips’ youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant, “The Shack” wrestles with the timeless question, “Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?” The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him.
Even though this book addresses unimaginable pain, losing a child in an especially violent manner, the story itself is a good one. It is well told, thought provoking, and doesn’t “beat around the bush”. I enjoyed the imagery of heaven, different from my point of view, but beautiful none-the-less.
