Review: the voice of psalms

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

The voice of psalms is a paperback retelling of the Biblical book of Psalms by the Ecclesia Bible Society, published by Thomas Nelson. It's part of a larger project called “the voice”. Like many Bibles, it includes some commentary and some daily reading plans but that is pretty much where the similarities end.

The first thing that struck me was that here is a very beautiful book. The text is laid out like poetry, with a single column per page, and the pages themselves have a lovely background design giving a feeling of sacred art that the plain-white, onion-skin pages of a standard Bible never really conveyed to me.

Additions to the text have been inserted in italics rather than footnotes, and I found myself in two minds about this. The translator in me understands the need to expand on a phrase because the English equivalent doesn't convey the subtler nuances of the original. At the same time I find the voice in the back of my head going “aha, italics: an optional extra” very distracting! However, having finished reading a whole passage I could then look back and see what the italics had really added, for instance in the 23^rd Psalm a sense of present danger, which isn't so tangible in the more traditional versions, with or without footnotes. Of course, I'm not a Hebrew scholar, so I can't really tell how accurate that sense is either!

I did appreciate that the translators didn't feel the need to modernise the language all the way into slang, which was something I found very off-putting with the Message version of the Psalms even though I was in my early twenties then.

All in all I like the book, but I wonder if the format – especially the italics - will be too hard to get used to, so I won't ditch my NIV just yet. I wouldn't buy it as a first Bible for a new believer, but it's good as a fresh look at a too-familiar text, as long as you're looking for a narrative rather than a constitution-type document to be taken literally.

Just two more things (which I didn't put in my amazon review): some of you may remember I was looking for a program of advent readings last autumn. Well the voice of psalms has one with readings from Psalms and other books! And also a Lent program! Pretty cool huh.

And secondly, they also do various other books, but the one that attracted me most is called the voice from on high, which contains excerpts from 19 Bible books referring to Jesus as the Liberating King. That one sounds really cool and I think would work well in this format, not to mention that Brian McLaren, one of my favourite authors, is involved, so I'll get it and keep you posted. :-)

Weather - a book review

We started studying the weather by reading a book on the subject from a series of which I am inordinately fond: Usborne Beginners. As the name suggests, the series is aimed at beginning readers, ages 4 and up. Nonetheless, it has been my first port of call when looking for a new factual book for Froglet ever since he got given one about aeroplanes when he was around two. He loved it - still does - and I learned a few things too. I think we now own about ten of the books from this series, covering various topics. The explanations are simple but not overly so, the illustrations are a nice combination of drawings and photos, and there are always interesting snippets that a small child can relate to (e.g. the air above the clouds is 6 times colder than the inside of a freezer).

This particular book, succinctly entitled Weather, didn't disappoint us. It discusses pretty much everything you might expect a younger child to understand (avoiding hot and cold fronts and air pressure but covering tornado formation, clouds and the water cycle) and makes it interesting. No mention of rainbows though, now I come to think of it. Perhaps most children already know about those?

As in all this series, the end of the book provides a brief vocab list with accompanying pictures. I was rather pleased when we got there and Froglet pointed to a picture of a hurricane tearing the roof off a house and said "That's a twelve" (meaning a force twelve wind). He obviously retained something.

I don't think this book will be a perennial favourite like Firefighters or Planes, but that's more down to Froglet's areas of interest, and it's not going to sit on the shelf unread for the next year either. We give it 9/10.