I was kindly gifted a copy of “The Magpie Society” by Penguin Random House SA. Oh my word, this looked so exciting and so I was so chuffed when one came in the book mail for me! So grateful and thankful to Penguin!
Published: December 2020 Pages: 329 Pace: Medium Genre: Young Adult, Mystery, Thriller, Fiction
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
One For Sorrow is the first book in The Magpie Society series. The cover is so beautiful and I loved the chapter headings and the magpie theme throughout.
I flew through this book. It started off a bit slow as the scene was being set and we were getting to know the characters. But it did pick up in variety and intensity! I enjoyed the setting of this book most of all. Nothing like an old school full of secret passages and rooms and rumours of secret societies and many years of history to set the mood and tone for a book!
The 2 main characters were initially frustrating and annoying cold with one another. And I couldn’t understand why they would be like that without even giving each other a chance.
The whole thing with this book is that a girl named Lola died but the police have decided that it was just an accident. However, there are a few people who aren’t so sure that it was an accident and endeavour to prove that it was murder.
The things I enjoyed in this book: the characters and the way their friendships formed throughout the book. I loved the setting and exploring the school with the characters and I even enjoyed the characters on the periphery, despite their tiny roles in the overall story.
I was really invested in this story and even though some of the information came to light too soon and way too easily for my liking, I didn’t mind because we were finding out more and more and getting close to discovering WHO DID IT. And then poof, the book is done! I was so disappointed that the killer wasn’t revealed in this book that I felt quite deflated after the last page. So I do wish they hadn’t chosen to leave the reveal for the next book. I thought they could rather have had a whole other topic for the next book and just solved this mystery for us in this book.
But besides that disappointment, I was entertained. I couldn’t put it down and kept wanting to know what would happen next and loved being in this setting with the students of Illumen Hall.
I think I probably will read the next book in the series, which thankfully comes out this year (2021).
I read this as part of a Leadership Academy program that I’m part of and this was my opinion and review of the book.
Published: March 2019 Pages: 224 Genre: Business, Leadership, Non-Fiction
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
“Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.” ―Booker T. Washington
When we look around, we see a whole lot of mediocrity and people doing only what they need to and no more, and often with an attitude to match. It’s rare to find people who are genuinely excited about and invested in their work and who have a greater vision and purpose for why they do their jobs. But I believe people just don’t realise that by doing the common, mundane things with excellence, work and effort becomes more meaningful and more rewarding.
Excellence Wins is a book that takes a look at Horst Schulze’s life as a hotelier and how he managed to instil a culture of absolute excellence into every hotel that he took over and ran. It’s a book filled with easy to ready content but incredibly practical and useful ideas for improving the level of excellence in any organisation. What the book sets out to show is that it isn’t an impossible task to achieve an impressive level of organisational excellence but that it does take strategy, focus, empowering systems and lots of repetition. Horst Schulze mentions, “The people you serve want 3 main things: first, they want a product or service with no defects. Second, they want timeliness. Finally, they want the person with whom they’re dealing to be nice to them.” It seems easy enough but it takes a plan and intentionality to achieve.
I devoured this book in one sitting. From the easy writing style to the captivating stories of fancy hotels and staff teams working so well together to staff members being enabled to practically solve guests’ problems without a massive process or bottleneck in order to get it done timeously and excellently. It showed me that staff members can take initiative, get creative which in turn make them feel really empowered and trusted when they do things to fix a mess that a guest is experiencing.
Chapter 2 talks about how it takes the whole organisation having the customer service mindset to make the end user have the best experience. It was something I had already given thought to but seeing it written the way he explained it, I really appreciated the importance of people at every level in the organisation grasping the customer service mindset and how it contributed to the experience at the consumer level. I think if companies and organisations were able to grasp this reality and get all the staff on board, it would revolutionise customer service generally. I love where Horst says, “An organisation can never please every human being every time but it doesn’t hurt to try.” I think many people get discouraged by dissatisfied or unhappy clients but I believe that it takes a positive attitude and a ton of resilience to maintain a level of excellent customer service despite people.
Something that struck me in this book was how Horst created a Canon which held their 24 rules or motivations for staff and how he had that printed into booklets and given to every staff member throughout all of his hotels. And not only that but every single morning or shift changeover, they would highlight one of them in a pre-shift huddle and discuss it. This only served to embed the values into the hearts and minds of the staff as well as ensuring the same standard of service throughout all the hotels he owned and managed. I often get frustrated with repetition, especially if I feel like it is unnecessary but this just opened my eyes to the fact that repetition can go a long way in terms of embedding culture.
As leaders, what I learnt from this book is that it’s important to set what you believe it should look like and then be the biggest believer and supporter and executor of the culture you want to see perpetuated. It starts from the top. And then in the pursuit of excellence which could really be a never-ending rabbit hole, it’s important to remember where Horst says, “Elegance without warmth is arrogance.” The reality is that people can see motives and intentions. People can see through façade and so it’s important to be authentic and genuinely caring towards people in our endeavour towards excellence, in order for it to be received well and appreciated.
Horst Schulze touches on so many important aspects of leadership and culture creation which I can’t dive into in detail in this review, but it includes things like valuing staff and empowering them, helping to set them up as best as possible to achieve excellence; bridging the gap between leadership and labour; the importance of vision, teaching staff to handle situations with the right etiquette and as they encounter them rather than passing the buck; the importance of language and how it can also contribute to or break down an image; how amazing it is to create a work environment and culture of belonging and much more. It was so insightful and helpful.
I would encourage anyone who wants some practical tools on how to form and maintain a culture of excellence to read this book. Because creating culture is a time-consuming process, it is one of those books that one could come back to again and again for next steps for creating an incredible culture even in the face of unhappy customers or a busy environment.
Excellence Wins has opened my eyes with regards to how easy becoming a person of excellence could be. It doesn’t have to mean an entire lifestyle change. All it requires is caring about others and an intentionality to serve people the absolute best way I know how in each moment. I also want to become someone who doesn’t pass the buck but takes responsibility in the moment to solve a problem and come up with a solution as far as I am equipped to do so, especially where it concerns our congregation and teams. When I am really busy on Sundays, I sometimes struggle to stop and look a person in the eye, really hear the problem and fix it right away. But that is not serving people well and I want to get better at that. People come first after all – as Ps. Trevor Hudson taught us: each person is God’s image-bearer.
I was kindly gifted a copy of “The Boy I Am” by Penguin Random House South Africa. I knew this book sounded really interesting and I was so happy when a copy came in some amazing book mail 🥳 I’m convinced that Penguin publish some of the best books out there!!
Published: January 2021 Pages: 384 Pace: Fast Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction, Dystopia
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Before I even get started with my review, I just need you guys to know that I couldn’t help but sniff the book every few pages. This book has my absolute favourite book smell and it just made me fall more in love with it haha. The cover is also really beautiful. I love it.
So, I believe this book is highly underrated. I don’t think enough people know about it so that they can enjoy something that is unique and poignant. Well not unique as in never heard of before. It’s based on what currently happens in our world but with the gender roles reversed. It’s set in a dystopian world where everyone lives in these towers that are sealed off from the outside world post war. And things in the tower are quite interesting. Women run the show, with a Chancellor on the top floor in ultimate power and boys are kept in the lower levels where they must earn their way into the upper levels of the tower. They are only there to serve the women and if they can’t manage to be hired before their 17th birthdays, they go and work in the mines underground. Everything seems to be running pretty slick in the tower, until it is not. Yet ever since the death of his best friend at the hands of the all-powerful Chancellor, Jude has been desperate to escape the path set out for him. Finding himself entangled in a plot to assassinate the Chancellor, he finally has a chance to avenge his friend and win his freedom. But at what price?
The blurb doesn’t even give away how awesome this book is. As soon as I was a few chapters in, I knew I was going to love it. It was intense, well written and gripping. When you can’t wait to get back to reading so that you can see what happens next, you know it’s got a good grip on you.
This book has so many intriguing elements from the way the boys live versus how the women live, to how the relationships are between the boys themselves and how they can be bought for the sake of serving women in these private rooms. There is obviously the Outside which is great mystery factory. There’s rebels like in any good dystopian! There’s those in power but are abusing their power and those that want to tear it down. There’s murder and friendship and adventure and chaos and love (although a weird kind because of the circumstances). But it’s got everything to keep one flipping the pages. I also enjoyed the ending.
Goodreads describes this book like this: A speculative YA thriller, tackling themes of traditional gender roles and power dynamics, for fans of Malorie Blackman, Louise O’Neill and THE POWER.
This book is a commentary on whether a world where things were reversed (women in power and powerful instead of men) would be a better world and as this book so rightly depicts, anyone with power can be corrupted and they usually are and end up doing questionable things just because they can. So it’s by no means a lighthearted read but I loved it.
I highly recommend it and hope more people get to enjoy this thrilling and exciting read!!
Disclaimer – This is a long review! 😅 Sorry about that. Proceed at your own risk.
Published: November 2014 Pages: 336 Genre: Christian
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Prayer seems to one of the facets of our Christian faith that many people feel guilty about and wish they could get better at. I guess in some ways it’s kind of daunting talking to the God of the Universe. But in other ways, it’s the fact that He knows what we need before we even ask. So why pray? If He knows everything anyway, what does it matter whether a person sits and tells God the things He already knows, or not? And even when prayer has been an important part of a person’s life, everybody seems to go through stages of struggling to pray. Prayer is a massive topic but also deeply personal. We can always learn more and get better when it comes to the subject of prayer. That was my hope when picking up this particular read.
In this book entitled “Prayer”, Timothy Keller looks at the subject of prayer through the lens of history, philosophy, apologetics, science, and of course, the Bible. We then learn from some of the great Christians that have gone before us, namely Jonathan Edwards, Martin Luther and John Calvin. It’s a book filled with thoughtfully explored aspects of prayer from the gospel message to our understanding of God and our relationship to Him all the way to very practical methods and ways of praying that will be meaningful and in line with the will of God.
At first, I had to get used to the writing style and the slightly more academic language than what I’ve been used to of late. But I absolutely loved reading this book. It is the perfect mix of academic and conversational, comfort and challenge. I also really enjoyed the variety of angles that Keller brought in on prayer. It was incredible for me to see it all laid out so thoroughly.
The thing that first struck me from this book was how Keller firmly explains, with the use of some of the ideas and convictions of John Calvin, that prayer is a discipline. It’s not something we get to do just when it feels good, or we are in the right mood for it. We have a duty to pray because of who God is and what He did for us. So, our idea of prayer should be strongly linked to our understanding of the gospel message. If it isn’t, then we are probably not doing it right. Keller highlights “Calvin’s fifth rule is the rule of grace. He urges us to not conclude that following any set of rules could make our prayers worthy to be heard. Nothing we formulate or do can qualify us for access to God. Only grace can do that—based not on our performance but on the saving work of Christ.” So as much discipline and work as it requires, it’s also only by faith that we can pray. Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross is the only reason we have any access to God and it’s also the only reason God would listen to our prayers.
Another important reminder was that prayer has to be, as of utmost importance, about knowing God. When we only rattle off our needs lists before God, there is zero acknowledgement of who it is we are praying to and the awe and wonder and worship and adoration that should precede, accompany and end off a time of prayer with God. “Praise and adoration are the necessary preconditions for the proper formulation and motivation of all the other kinds of prayer. This doesn’t mean we can never go immediately to petition or confession, but it means that, in our overall prayer life, praise and adoration must have a prime place.” Only then are our hearts in the right condition, with our view on things right-sized in order to start asking for things from God. What is also important in a time of prayer is that because of who it is we are spending time with, we should be humble and seek to listen to what God wants to tell us rather than just seeking to speak all the time. This ensures that our hearts have a correct posture to really hear the heart and will of God for us.
My absolute favourite part of the book though has to be Chapter 8 where Keller breaks down the Lord’s prayer line by line and explores Edwards, Luther and Calvin’s views on each of the lines as well as adding his own thoughts in. This was particularly insightful after Keller spends some time talking about how the Lord’s prayer has just become so familiar that it has almost lost its punch and meaning for us. The Lord’s prayer as taught to us by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is the perfect template for a rich, fulfilling and God-honouring prayer life. In Chapter 6, Luther uses the Lord’s prayer as a template for how to pray without necessarily repeating the exact words of the Lord’s prayer as it is written in Scripture. He encourages paraphrasing and personalising each of the lines using our own words and needs. The Lord’s prayer is a guide which will engage all the various stages or aspects of prayer (evocation, meditation, word prayer, free prayer and contemplation) and will result in an encounter with God that feels whole and proper. As Luther says, “The Lord’s Prayer must stamp itself on our prayers, shaping them all the way down. There could be no better way to ensure that than Luther’s twice-daily exercise of paraphrasing and personalizing the Lord’s Prayer as introduction to more free-form praise and petition.”
And lastly, our prayer has to be rooted in and flow from the reading of God’s Word. Obviously, Scripture informs our view of the God we are praying to, the Jesus that we follow and the Holy Spirit that is inside of us and so it has to go hand in hand with prayer. Keller says, “Your prayer must be firmly connected to and grounded in your reading of the Word. This wedding of the Bible and prayer anchors your life down in the real God.” The reality of this is that it takes time and discipline to sit down and study a portion of Scripture daily, get the real and intended meaning out of it, ask God what He is trying to teach you from it and then pray about that and anything else that needs prayer in your life and those you are praying for.
This is an incredible book and resource on prayer. Definitely the most inspiring and encouraging one that I have read! I would recommend that anyone who wants to start or strengthen their prayer life read this book. It’s insightful, practical, comforting and challenging. It has made me want to get to know God better and really give God what is due to Him as a disciple and follower and believer more than ever before.
My main takeaways from this book are that the point of prayer is to know God better; a vibrant prayer life requires discipline; prayer is linked to an understanding of the gospel; awe and wonder should accompany company with God; the Lord’s prayer is the perfect template for prayer; the Psalms are a great tool and inspiration for prayer; everyone struggles with prayer at some point and that’s ok, we should just push through. There is so much in this book but for now, these are the main themes I am taking away from this book. I am so encouraged by this quote, “Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle—yet the way to reality. There is nothing more important, or harder, or richer, or more life-altering. There is absolutely nothing so great as prayer.”
Keller says of Paul in the letter to the Ephesians, “When he comes to the end, he just says pray, pray, pray in the Spirit, pray with alertness, pray all kinds of ways, pray all the time. You can’t get more basic than this. Prayer is the way that all the things we believe in and that Christ has won for us actually become our strength. Prayer is the way that truth is worked into your heart to create new instincts, reflexes, and dispositions.” As a closing thought, I love this quote as it perfectly describes what I hope will happen in this next season of my prayer life – that God’s truth is worked into my heart to create new instincts, reflexes and dispositions. I couldn’t imagine anything better than that!
The work I need to do is to put a strategy in place and get much more disciplined about my prayer life. It’s nice to be able to just converse with God at any time about anything but there is so much more that I could be experiencing if I put in the work.
All The Books and I 
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