Prayer | Richard Foster

This is my favourite book on a favourite topic: prayer. Foster’s main aim in this instructional book is not a how-to so much as go-and! He wants us to experience a deeper connection with God, to spend time with Him and find our way in the world through an intimate and personal connection with God, which can only be achieved through prayer.

In these 21 chapters Foster shows us 21 different ways of conversing with God.

 It is incredible to see and learn of these ways which like roads, can lead to a single destination but through varying landscapes. I read this book every couple of years, for the last ten years or so and have given it away to many. People of all denominations and creeds can benefit from reading this book and will group in their spiritual life regardless of where they are at in their Spiritual journey.

Foster is the author of many books and I regard him highly and his works inspirational.

Daniel | Henning Mankell

What a remarkable story. It's the sort of novel that takes your breath away because of its intensity and depth of perception into someone's life and suffering. Mankell is a Swedish author who has written the Wallander crime novels which are now portrayed in a tv series so this is a bit of a departure from his usual stories but a very powerful one none the less.

Daniel is the story of a Swedish collector who is in the Kalahari desert when he comes across an orphaned black child whom he adopts and renames Daniel. He takes him back to Sweden where he tries to make a living out of showing his collection of insects and his black son. It's set in the 1800's at a time when many people had never seen a black human being and it causes a huge sensation.

The first part of the book is narrated by the collector, and the second part by Daniel. I think Mankell has captured Daniel's voice beautifully and there is such agony and longing in his childish desire to find his way back to the desert. He is only about 9 or 10 years old and he tries to understand the Swedish culture he lives in but his an interior dialogue is with his parents and the desert he wants to go back to. He tries to learn to walk on water, then decides a ship will have to carry him back and makes a few attempts to run away to a sea port. He grows more and more desperate and eventually the novel comes to a close with the only possible outcome to his desires.

It's a beautiful story told very well and I enjoyed reading this novel, hoping against hope that Daniel would find his way home.

Percival's Planet | Michael Byers

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The hunt for Planet X in the 1920's and 30's in Flagstaff, Arizona was not something I knew much about. Having read Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" I became intrigued with some of the personalities involved so I read this book. It is a fictionalised account but has all the main characters from real life who were involved with the exhausting search for a planet they thought made mathematical sense but couldn't quite see.
What I really loved about both books is the crazy characters who make up the scientific community involved. Hard to believe they were real. Byers is very good at characterisation and in his book he depicts the search from a few different perspectives. People start in various walks of life in different cities of the USA and end up in Flagstaff.
Clyde Tombaugh is a farm boy from Kansas who aspires to bigger things and starts making telescope lenses in the barn. He knows he can get off the farm and a chance letter he writes to Lowell Observatory hits the mark and he is employed in the search for Planet X. Felix DuPre a wealthy man with not much to do and too much money decides to head out west to find dinosaurs. He ends up living close to the Observatory and becomes embroiled in the lives of the hunters.
Mary and Hollis Hempstead are brother and sister who through encounters and misadventures also end up at Lowell Observatory. Mary is slowly going insane and Hollis is trying to reinvent himself as an artist. And they all have a part to play in the search, and discovery of Pluto.
Not only is it an interesting story, it is beautifully told. Highly recommended.

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