Welcome to the last RAW for the year.  Thank you for joining me over the past year and I hope I've been able to challenge you to Read More and Think More about various topics.  As the year draws to a close and we look forward to 2017 I''d like to  wish you all a joyous Christmas and a happy New Year. Here's praying that you remember the reason for the season. Pull up a comfy chair and enjoy reading this holiday weekend with your favourite festive beverage.

I read this book on the heals of  Crazy Busy  and I found that it helped clarify a lot of the ideas and issues which  Crazy Busy  raised for me.  While  Crazy Busy  was a meander through the thoughts and struggles of the author on busyness and intergrating that into the Christian life, it didn't really have any hard and fast conclusions, whereas  Do More Better  was different. Video version of this review? Click here.

Welcome to the weekend, Here are some hand-picked articles to enjoy this weekend over your favourite beverage.

Sturgeon's Revelation: In Defence Of Science Fiction TL:DR? Want a short concise article about this? Try  Sturgeon's Revelation: In Defence Of Science Fiction . I've loved science fiction (SciFi) for as long as I can remember. The stories of spacemen flying around in space ships and fighting off B.E.M's* with ray-guns fired up my imagination more than anything else. But apart from my family only two other people really encouraged me to read science fiction and Fantasy, my Year Six teacher who encouraged my imagination and my Year Seven English teacher who pointed me in the direction of some great classics. Everyone else either dimissed the genre or openly mocked it. I'd hear taunts from peers like: " At least sports-ting is something real, McTavish, not like your Buck Rogers stuff!, that's for people who can't handle the real world."  Or from Teachers I'd hear, " Science fiction is not real literature, this is why we're...

What is Sturgeon's Law Sturgeon's Revelation first appeared in the March 1958 issue of Venture (a science fiction magazine) and is a defence of Science Fiction (or SciFi). It is Sturgeon's Law that is in the most common usage which says " ninety percent of everything is crap ". Although I believe  the word he used was ' crud '. I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of  Science Fiction  is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as crud it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crud. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crud is ultimately uninformative, because  Science Fiction  conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms. Theodore St...

Welcome to the weekend! Did you know Space Opera was Science Fictions not-quite-respectable little cousin? I didn't, I'm guessing it's because not many people liked talking to me about SciFi so wan't up with all the gossip.  So to increase your intelligence I've also added some advice from Robert Frost.  Anyway sit back with your favourite beverage and enjoy reading this weekend.

[Christian devotion] When my two oldest son’s were five and three years old I gave them a cardboard box and an old radio to pull apart, I never expected that I would end up in trouble from them for withholding critical information about the inner workings of the time machine they were building . It wasn’t working and they were very unimpressed when I wouldn’t provide the technical knowledge they required. How could I tell them that robots from the future would come back in time and try to kill us if I allowed them to create one? Because the way things are going I know one of the boys will be creating a killer robot soon, no point in giving it a Time Machine as well.

Welcome to the weekend. This edition of R.A.W is built around lists: 5 books with inspiring storytelling, 17 Science Fiction Books that Forever Changed The Genre, 10 Best Books of 2016, several fictitious dishes etc. Why not sit back with 2-3 cups of coffee and enjoy reading.