First published in 1929, the book of sonnet sequences by Houston Peterson contains nearly 1000 sonnets by some of the best writers in the form. The Rossetti's, Millay, Shakespeare, Browning, Donne, etc. as well as some of the more obscure and little read poets. It is an excellent reference book on the form.

Amongst numerous hermeneutics Books in stores, this one is quite different from others.

Using the multidisciplinary approach, it starts with the historical perspective and canonical approach in the first two chapters. Each chapter also spends a good length for a detail and scholarly illustration of both approaches. The subsequent chapter discusses the theological perspective of Bible reading. In tackling the misconception that theology is unrelated to Bible reading, or even causes bad influence to Christian lives, Packer argues why these are not truth and illustrates how theology nurtures our Bible reading and rescues us from being lost when in the "forest" of the Bible.

The book then discusses Bible reading from a wider context, the sociological, postmodernism perpectives and finally back to context of the reader, the prespective of spirituality: a discussion on the act of Bible reading from a comprehensive context.

The book is an exellent one and the authors offer many sound points, especially the last three chapters. The authors successfully relates Bible reading in the culture of our modern/postmodern world and point out the blindspot of our culture and provide a new perspective using the good "old" truth of the Bible. For example, in the chapter of "postmodern truth", the writer first pointed out the blindspots of both modernism and postmodernism. The former treats the world as an engine, using the same way to extract what we want from the world thus becoming the "metanarrative" of others. The latter is too pessimistic that knowledge is only a construction and there is no truth. Using the fact that human being is only part of the creation, knowledge is not a human construct but a response to our world. As the creation, truth is comprehensible, although not ultimate, but still enough for us to communicate with the world. Moreover, our fallen human nature results that human being uses knowledge to the good as well as the bad. While the postmodernism holds the idea that knowledge only serves a purpose to obtain power to suspress/control others, we cannot ignore the other side of the truth as previously mentioned.

In view of readibility, I would give a relatively lower score. Probably, this is caused by the apporach it used. Although multidisciplinary approach gives many different perspectives on Bible reading, written from the hand of the scholars, it also demands the readers equipped with multidisciplinary basic background knowledge. For instance, the basic knowledge of postmodernism, existentialism, Marxism and so forth. In addition, a good basic theological knowledge is important to understand the points made by the readers or else it is very difficult to follow the points made by the author.