Merry Christmas!

I've been terribly remiss in keeping up on this blog over the past month and hope that you have had a wonderful Christmas with loved ones! Thanks for stopping by this tiny corner of the Internet and for blessing me with your presence. I am honoured and pray that you will have an encouraging start to the new year!

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Christian as a Genre

I've always found it interesting that Christianity as its own genre can be used across music, film, books, and virtually most forms of artistic or creative expression. While most secular items tend to be labelled by their style, works produced by Christians tend to get labelled by the faith of the one producing it. I remember seeing an article years ago about how the Grammys put Christian artists under the genre of Gospel and Contemporary Christian who would then be further separated out by their musical style, such as Gospel, Bluegrass, Rock, Pop, Country, etc. I can't recall the specifics of the article, but I believe that the author of the article thought it was both a little unfair that artists would be lumped together in a giant pool despite varying styles or backgrounds, and that it was also a label that didn't really tell audiences what they would be getting, other than Christian content. I wish I could remember a bit more, but as I read it in passing, the only thou...

Review: The Darkness Deepens - The Day Draws Near #2

If you've read The End Begins , the first book in the The Day Draws Near series (previously The Seven Trilogy) by Sara Davison, The Darkness Deepens takes you further as this sequel further delves into Jesse and Meryn's story. I wouldn't say that this book is a standalone book as it builds upon the previous one, but I would say that reading the first book will certainly whet your appetite for this one as you find out what's next. I am grateful to the publisher, Mountain Brook Ink , for providing me with a complimentary copy of this book. All opinions are my own. Book Synopsis Their secrets protect them... but secrets are hard to keep. No one in the army can find out that Captain Jesse Christensen has become a believer. He and bookstore owner Meryn O'Reilly are forced to meet in secret, facing imprisonment-or worse-if they are found together. As their relationship deepens, so does Lieutenant Gallagher's hatred for the Christians in their city, putting all be...

Male and Female Authors

I recently saw some interesting charts regarding The Christy Award winners on LibraryThing that stopped me in my tracks and had me wondering all sorts of things. First, I love that this type of data is being tracked as it's fascinating to see trends over time. Second, this is something that I never even noticed, but now that I'm aware, I can't help but think back over the past two decades of Christian books that I've read. What are these charts? They're the genders of the winners from 2000 until the present year, broken down by a 1-year view and a 5-year view. I should state that blue is female and red is male in this case. It didn't hit me until seeing this that I used to read a lot more male Christian fiction writers, whether it was Randy Alcorn , Ted Dekker , Frank Perretti , Randy Singer , Travis Thrasher , or others. I feel like in the early aughts, I read a lot more suspense and thriller than I realized, and likely general fiction as well. I di...