Hello, and Welcome to the Reading with Wisdom Blog!
Have you ever wondered if there are any good books out there?
Have your kids ever brought home a book, and it looked like it might be fine, but you just weren’t sure?
Hopefully, this website will be a useful ally in encouraging good reading for your children.
A lot of books you can pick up and immediately see that they are no good. But, for the rest of the books out there, there is no way to tell if they are good or bad. You can’t tell from the cover, or from the summary inside the cover. They will tell you why they think it is worth reading, but they won’t tell you what unpleasant surprises your child may find in there. I have tried to meet that need with this website.
I don’t review the classics that everyone recommends — to be honest, my kids didn’t really read those too much. And I don’t waste time with books that are clearly not acceptable (at least by my standards). But, there are a lot of books that look fine. Or they look like they might be okay but I am not sure.
This review is for those books. It is all about finding worthwhile stories hidden among the many worthless books that crowd the library bookshelves. And it is also about finding out if there are hidden traps inside a book — disagreeable surprises that you would never know about just by looking at the cover or description.
Hopefully, this website will be the source of much enjoyable reading for your children. It will also give you peace of mind knowing that your children will not be ambushed by inappropriate material.
Of course, your standards will not be the same as mine. Everyone has different standards. I have tried to point out a wide range of potential issues so that you can at least make your own decision as to whether or not a book is acceptable.
On this blog, and on the newsletter, I will just give summary descriptions of the book itself. This is just to alert you to what books you may find worth reading.
If you wish to obtain a full review of the story, you will need to follow the link at the right to the Review section of the website and login. Due to today’s sensibilities, and how quick people are to take offense if a person criticizes ungodly behavior, I have chosen to not make my full reviews searchable on the open internet. However, login is free and it just requires a name and e-mail (the same as the newsletter). I will not sell your name and e-mail.
Please feel free to recommend this site to others. I hope that it will be useful for many people.
Gunnar Armstrong
Elkton, Maryland
August 4, 2016