Abi's Processing The Blue Parakeet

At the risk of being labled a Scot McKnight groupie, I will begin yet another series of posts about one of his books...but this one is different! Scot's newest book, The Blue Parakeet, due out from Zondervan in November, is the first one I've received as a pre-release review copy.

A couple of months ago, in a brilliant marketing move, Scot announced that Zondervan's would send a free copy of the book to bloggers who would read it and then blog about it. The response quickly outstripped the number of copies offered...and Zondervans even added more books to the pot! I got in late that day, time zones being what they are, and figured I'd missed out, but I send an e-mail to the address indicated stating that I would love to be involved in this.

Lo and behold...I got a response asking whether I was still interested! I quickly replied that I was, and provided my mailing address, as requested.

And my review copy arrived this past Monday!

Now, one of the things that I decided I would NOT do is this: read other blogger's reviews before I read the book myself. This is always a good thing for me, because I like to read things fresh and get my own perspective before being influenced by another's. I learned this from my classes on Biblical Tools for Exegesis and Analysis (fondly shortened to "Tools") -- where we were challenged to read the text, try to get as much context from the text as possible, do our word studies, and ponder our interpretation before reading from handbooks and commentaries.

I wish more people would do their own thinking first, using the thinking of others to sharpen their own instead of just adopting it outright! Sigh....

The other thing I must mention is that I will be doing this as a series--much like the series I did on Scot's The Jesus Creed for Lent, leading up to his next book, 40 Days Living the Jesus Creed, which I read during Scot's Preparing for Pentecost series, which was where I blogged most of my comments about that book.

I have begun to read Scot's little blue bird book...and have decided that, again, I will blog it as I go. And I have to say that this one looks to be fabulous! For me, reading Scot McKnight is the plainer, American version of reading C.S. Lewis: he says the things that I think in straight forward language. He is asking the same questions I'm asking. And his process of getting to the answers is so familiar....

I'm just a page or two from finishing the first chapter, so stay tuned for that first post. Maybe my series will function as a lead-up to the release of the book. Wouldn't that be fun! I promise not to give the whole thing away...although I wouldn't worry too much about that. I'll be talking more about what the book prompted in my thinking than "reviewing" the book in a normal way. I don't seem to do anything in a normal way....

...they don't call me AbiSomeone for nothing, eh?

More with Abi and The Blue Parakeet soon....