What’s on my nightstand – April ‘09

The end of April already?  I guess it is, and that means it’s time to find out what’s on the “to-read” list for this month.

Looking at the photo you can see that some things never change.  I’m still doing my chronological read through the Bible and Streams in the Desert.  I have dropped the C.S. Lewis book only because I’d prefer to read him book by book rather than in disembodied short clips.  I’m also still enjoying The Intellectual Devotional: American History.

I hope you will notice the total lack of textbooks!  Yes, world, I’m finished!  

In place of those textbooks you see a stack of exciting just-because-I-want-to-read-them books starting with The Great Gatsby which I’m reading for the Classics Bookclub at 5 Minutes for Books.  I’ll have that review up next Tuesday.

I also have Angels & Demons to re-read before the movie comes out next month.  I enjoyed this one so much more than The Da Vinci Code, and that movie was really not good, but I have high hopes for this one.  I do love Tom Hanks.  If you haven’t read Angels & Demons, I highly recommend the illustrated edition.  It makes the story much easier to follow.

I have Olympic skater Scott Hamilton’s The Great Eight to read and review for Thomas Nelson.  I’ve always admired him and can’t wait to read this one.

Tuck, the last in Stephen Lawhead’s King Raven Trilogy, is one of those books that I’m at a cross between wanting to put it off and shutting myself in a room and reading the entire book in one setting. I loved the first two in this series and want to know how it ends but don’t want it to be over.

In honor of Opening Month of the 2009 baseball season, the last book is Buck O’Neil’s autobiography, I Was Right On Time.  Buck O’Neil was a player and coach in the Negro Leagues and is one of those people whom I would simply love to have known.  If you’ve ever seen Ken Burns’ Baseball series, you’ve seen and heard him. The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America is one of my all-time favorite books.

For the second month in a row, I completed my stack that I posted in March.  You can read my reviews of the second King Raven book here and of last month’s Classics Bookclub selection here. The other books were textbooks, and while I considered them some of the best we used during the entire program, I didn’t think that a review would interest many people.

One book that was not on my list last month but that I read last week was The Shack.  That review is here.

To see what a whole host of others are reading and add your list to the mix, click on over to the carnival at 5 Minutes for Books.

Encourage one another,