Books, Books Books September 17th

Trying to catch up, yet again..... so many books. Here's a list in (sort of) reverse order.  Apologies for the rough notes, cribbed from B&N, Amazon or Wikipedia.

• Death of a Dentist - MC Beaton 
  

  A blinding toothache sends Hamish Macbeth 120 miles out of Lochdubh to the dentist Frederick Gilchrist, only to find him dead. Since everyone is pleased the dentist is deceased (patients, several harassed women, and even his wife) Macbeth faces one of the more biting challenges of his career.
  

• Looking for the King 
  

  It is 1940, and American Tom McCord, a 23-year-old aspiring doctoral candidate, is in England researching the historical evidence for the legendary King Arthur. There he meets perky and intuitive Laura Hartman, a fellow American staying with her aunt in Oxford, and the two of them team up for an even more ambitious and dangerous quest. Aided by the Inklings-that illustrious circle of scholars and writers made famous by its two most prolific members, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien-Tom and Laura begin to suspect that the fabled Spear of Destiny, the lance that pierced the side of Christ on the cross, is hidden somewhere in England.
  

• Conservatize Me 
  

  It has been said that everyone in America is firmly planted in red or blue, permanently conservative or irreversibly liberal. But are we all really that locked in to the left or the right? A lifelong liberal, John Moe was determined to find out. So he reset his radio dials from NPR to Rush Limbaugh, joined some of today's most influential conservative thinkers for a series of "conversion sessions," made pilgrimages to the Ronald Reagan and Richard M. Nixon museums, and spent the Fourth of July in the most Bush-friendly county in the country, in an attempt to discover if there was actually a conservative trapped inside him yearning to be set free.
  

• Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible
  

  Picked up a Kindle version of this - nicely cross-linked and including the complete text of the KJV. Wikipedia describes it: Matthew Henry's well-known six-volume Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (or Complete Commentary), provides an exhaustive verse by verse study of the Bible. covering the whole of the Old Testament, and the Gospels and Acts in the New Testament. After the author's death, the work was finished (Romans through Revelation) by thirteen other nonconformist ministers, partly based upon notes taken by Henry's hearers, and edited by George Burder and John Hughes in 1811.
  

• The Hunger Games  - 
• Catching Fire
• Mockingbird 
  
  Finally read through all this (very good) series. I agree with my daughter that the third volume seemed a bit rushed. Still, it is a good trilogy - I found it somehow haunting during the Olympics.
  
  
  
• Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China's Other Billion by Michael Levy



In September of 2005, the Peace Corps sent Michael Levy to teach English in the heart of China's heartland. His hosts in the city of Guiyang found additional uses for him: resident expert on Judaism, romantic adviser, and provincial basketball star, to name a few. His account of overcoming vast cultural differences to befriend his students and fellow teachers is by turns poignant and laugh-out-loud funny.