Friday Five: Books!

Today's Friday Five for RevGalBlogPals:
I hope some of you received books for Christmas presents; I did and have been reading ever since. Then I discovered a new author from those recommendations that pop up on Amazon.com. Instead of buying those books, I've been checking them out at the library, which will not help Amazon's future recommendations for me at all.

So tell us what you're reading, what you would and would not recommend--five books or authors! And if you don't want to do that freestyle, here are some questions:

1. What books have you recently read? Tell us your opinion of them.
As mentioned recently, I have been voraciously reading mysteries by Charles Todd. These were the books that were mentioned as recommendations on Amazon.com. I was very pleased to find them at my public library. These are about Ian Rutledge, a Scotland Yard inspector who suffers from shell-shock from WWI, while trying to do his job investigating murder cases.

2. What books are awaiting your available time to be read?
One that I started to read months ago and then put aside is The Contagion of Jesus: Doing Theology As If It Mattered by Sebastian Moore. While I spent a week at Lebh Shomea last week, I looked at two of Moore's older books and found them to be just as enlightening as they were when I first read them years ago: The Inner Loneliness and The Fire and the Rose Are One, both of which are out of print (and are outrageously expensive if found). Now I have to find that first book in my house somewhere!

Other books that I received for Christmas and will read sometime soon are:
Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech
My cousin Margaret gave me these two: You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation and Truth and Beauty: A Friendship.

3. Have any books been recently recommended?
When I had my hair cut today, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell was highly recommended. Today Sherry wrote a review of The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When it Gets God wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It) by Thom Stark on both of her blogs. I value both of these friends and their literary opinions and so will be looking for these books.

4. What genre of books are your favorite, along with some titles you like best?
Mysteries are always my favorite fun books, so that I even have a sub-category of posts about them. WWI era mysteries in England are Maisie Dobbs mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear and Ian Rutledge mysteries by Charles Todd. I like Daniel Silva mysteries but have read them all to date. In the past, I liked books by Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, and Elizabeth George, among others.

I like books on theology, especially mysticism.

5. What have you read lately that you have a strong urge to recommend? (or to condemn?)
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which was a Christmas gift that was surprisingly interesting. It is not morbid at all and is a historical writing about cancer, with stories interspersed. The author is an oncologist and an excellent writer. It is amazing to see how human knowledge and consciousness grew over the centuries. Since my husband and two daughters were/are trained as chemists, I liked learning that the first chemists concentrated on making dyes, rather than relying on the limited vegetable dyes most people used.