March 2012 Reading

One quarter of the year complete!  Already!

March was another not-so-great reading month.   That is, if I only count the books I completed:

• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie.  Fun read; I had my kids read it too; then we watched the movie.  Enjoyable for all. 
   
• True Grit by William Portis.  I'd been thinking about watching this movie with the family; then saw a piece about what a wonderful book it is.  I'd say it's a pretty good book.  There are some great lines by the narrator (Mattie Ross, an old lady telling the story of her life as a 14-year-old girl out to avenge her father's death) which I wish I'd written down. 
  

• Setting the Records Straight!  by Lee Binz (TheHomeScholar).  This is a wonderful, helpful, calming book for the homeschool mom who is nervous about high school.  Credit, transcripts, course descriptions beautifully explained.  

Now for the rest.

I started several books that I didn't finish, for various reasons.  I picked up (at the library) A Ship for the King and A Game of Thrones to preview for my son.  But, I gave up because neither of them are genres that interest me, and who has time for that?  The kid is on his own.  Gillespie and I, and Bellfield Hall: Or, The Deductions of Miss Dido Kent were recommended to me didn't hold my interest.  

As part of the Hillsdale College Constitution 101 course (free, no credit), I've been reading The Federalist Papers and other documents related to, well, the US Constitution.  

Right now I'm in the middle of A Train in Winter which is a stunning book on women in the French resistance in World War II.  I'd have finished it if I hadn't been distracted by the books I couldn't carry on with.   I'm also reading The Joy of Calvinism which is a bit of a stretch for me; I'm going slowly, asking my resident theologian a lot of questions, and generally trying not to just rush through the book so I can say I finished it even if I have no idea what it says. 

And once again I'm up-to-date on my Bible reading, though I will admit the last day of March was pretty heavy. 

I've been told it's bad form not to include links for every book, but the unlinked books are easily found on Amazon.com.  Linked books will send you to a non-Amazon source. Yes, there are other places to buy books! 

What are you reading?

February reading

When I fell into this current blogging slump I figured I'd at least keep up my monthly reading posts.  Imagine my surprise to discover I'd never posted anything for February.  I think I've set a new p.r. for blog-forgetting.  But I see what happened:  I updated the 2012 reading page, and left it at that.

I'm still not happy with my reading.  I know I could read more; it's not a matter of not having enough time, but rather not making time for good reading.   Just this week I've added more walking into my day, so unless I move to audio books (which is not a great option for me as I can't concentrate well when I'm walking), there will be less time available for reading. 

There is also the problem of scattered reading.  I have so many books out from the library right now, and I've started several.  That is not an efficient way to read.  I need to pick one, and either finish it or reject it outright.  I don't have any trouble rejecting a book quickly; I don't slog through 100 pages or 1/4 of the book or whatever bars people set for rejection.  If it's not a book I need to read for some purpose, why torture myself? There are plenty of enjoyable books to read.  Sometimes they are hard to find, though.  

But, here are my February books.

• The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer. Comments here.

• Things that Cannot be Shaken: Holding Fast to Your Faith in a Relativistic World by J. Scott Olphint and Rod Mays.  Still thinking about this one; I liked it but can't point to anything in particular that was good.  Deserves a re-read. 

• The Little Russian by Susan Sherman.  An interesting though not compelling look at the life of a Jewish woman in "Little Russia" spanning the years before and after World War I.  It would have been better if I'd been able to muster any sympathy for the main character.  

• Heroes of the City of Man by Peter Leithart.  I read only the portion pertaining to The Iliad.  It is a masterpiece.  I had my kids read it when we finished our read-aloud of the epic and they found it challenging but not difficult to read, and agreed that it enhanced their understanding of the story.  I've had several of Leithart's books for years but have not really used them.  I think I got them during a big buying spree at Exodus Books one day.  We will be using Ascent to Love when we read Dante next year.  I wish he had a book on Lord of the Rings, which we'll studying soon.

• I kept up with my daily Bible reading!  That is not always so easy for me, particularly when I have other good books going.

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

Beautiful World War II story of love and family.  Not a romance, though the love story is the centerpiece and it is compelling.   Wonderful characters, beautiful scenes of Paris, brutal scenes of war.  While I was reading it I felt it was a bit long, but when I finished I couldn't think of what might be left out.

Andras is a young Hungarian Jew, on his way to Paris and architecture school when he is given a package to deliver to an acquaintance in Paris.  And a mysterious letter, to slip into a mailbox.  The connections he makes through those items change his life.  Dramatic?  The Invisible Bridge is much better than that.  

January reading

Once again I began January with a vow to  improve my reading life.  I managed to (slightly) exceed my goal of one nonfiction book and one novel for the month of January.  Yes, it's a pretty low bar, but since I am accountable to no one but myself in this, I decided to help myself be successful.  Here's what I read/am reading:

• The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden; illustrated by Barbara Cooney.  A beautiful picture book.  Cheating?  This is a favorite Christmas read-aloud that we didn't get to till January 1. 

• A Praying Life by Paul Miller.  Comments here.   The link is to Westminster Bookstore which is where I acquired this book.  I buy as many books as I can from them, and I'd like other folks to do the same.  They have very good prices, fast and cheap shipping, and wonderful employees. (And yes, I do receive a bit of compensation if you visit their site from here.)

• Animal Farm by George Orwell.  I read this along with my son as part of his schoolwork.  I must say I love having older kids to read and talk about great books with.  The picture book days were fun, sure, but these days are so much better. 
  

• The Iliad by Homer (tr. Fagles). Reading aloud to my kids as part of their schoolwork.  Still going; it's lengthy and I can only read aloud so much in a day!  Should be finished next week.  The link is to Exodus Books, which is where I acquired this.  It is my favorite homeschool store, located in Oregon, and I miss it so.  But at least I can order online. 
  

• The School of Night by Louis Bayard.  Fiction, for me!  This was sort of a historical thriller.  It was good, not great; suspenseful, funny (not laugh-out-loud funny).  Very blurry line between historical fact and fiction; I had to look up the time and method of Walter Raleigh's death to be sure I hadn't been wrong about it all these years.  Some forehead-slapping moments when something was revealed that I should have seen coming.  

What you don't see here are all the books I started and couldn't finish.  I don't have enough time to read all the good books I want to, so I will reject a bad one pretty quickly.

I'm fairly happy with the amount of reading, but of course I would like to do more.  After a few months of reaching or exceeding my initial goal, I hope to increase the amount of nonfiction and set specific goals for types of book (biography, history, science...)  But for now... at least I'm reading.

Any recommendations?

A Praying Life by Paul Miller

Prayer. Public or private, either way, prayer is something that should be so easy and yet can be so difficult, even intimidating.  There are so many books on prayer!  Some promise to teach us to pray in a specific amount of time. Some promise to revolutionize our prayer life (whatever that means).

I have often been intimidated by public prayer; when I have to pray aloud in a group I feel like a little kid among a bunch of grownups; everyone else is so eloquent and I am... not.  Even my private prayer often sounds like a task list for God.  Please do this and this and this.  Even when my request are good and right and not selfish (I'm not asking for a new car, though I may ask that my old car continue to work), it seems so hollow.

And there's the distraction!  My brain can go from earnest prayer to my daily to-do list to some random pop song without even slowing down.  Most mornings I take our dog for a walk and try to pray as we go, but it's hard to have a conversation, even with God, that's interrupted constantly... Lord, I do praise you as our soverei-- Max, leave it!... uh... thank you for... Sit!  OK, let's go... uh... ugh, I forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer... Lord, please help... Max, leave it!... Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'...

But I determined to "fix" my prayer life and looked for some books.  A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World looked promising, and it seemed providential that we already own it.    It didn't promise to revolutionize anything in my life, so I started in.  This is a book about private, not public, prayer. 

The author endeared himself to me right away by talking about distractions.  I am not sure that I agree completely that being distracted is OK, though I do agree that it is normal and that our distractions may lead us to pray about something we hadn't been thinking about when we started.  Of course God sees our hearts, and hears the prayers we never manage to articulate perfectly, or even at all.   He reminds us to pray like children.  As I said, I am often intimidated by the prayers of others and even feel that my private prayers should "sound good."  My husband had to remind me that there's a difference between personal prayer, or even public prayer in, say, a Bible study setting, and prayer from the pulpit, which is somewhat prepared ahead of time.  But no matter:  we don't have to be eloquent with God.

This is not a book of method, though there is a section in which the author shares some of his own.  It is about cultivating a life of prayer in which we allow our prayers to shape our actions and our desires.  Prayer is often a long-term proposition.  Mr. Miller uses many stories of his family, including life with a disabled adult child, to illustrate this:  some of his prayers for his daughter took 20 years to be answered in a way he could see.  But of course God had been answering them all along.

A Praying Life didn't make me jump up and say "Oh! This is what I've been doing wrong!"  It did help me see that I am not doing everything wrong, though certainly there are some things I could change.  It's an encouraging, useful book, probably one to reread from time to time.

Read the table of contents and forward to the book here.

Why don't I finish more books?

Today I discarded the third or fourth novel I've started this month.  I can't finish it.  I can't finish most novels I start. I want desperately to read a good story but can't find something that works for me. Why not?  There are a few reasons:

1.  Foul language. Contemporary fiction has so much foul language. Are we trying to be real?  I don't talk that way.  I know people who do, and I find them dull and annoying, and prefer not to spend time with them.  Same for fictional characters.

2.  Gratuitous casual sex.  Sick of it.  Nonmarital, extramarital (are those unbelievably old-fashioned words now?), straight, gay, I don't want to read it.  Related: stories in which infidelity (used to be called adultery) is treated as normal and has no negative consequences. 

3.  Stories in which all men are doofuses and all women are smart and capable.  Sick. Of. It.

4.  Overly sentimental stories.  Actually my first word for this category was "sappy." I know I will offend someone when I say that Christian romance fiction has got to be the biggest brain-musher I've encountered since I memorized Goodnight Moon.   Seriously.

5. Stories with too much conflict.  So much modern fiction is bleak.  "Family tragedy fiction," as I call it, piles on one horrid event after another.  A little bit of dysfunction is real; total dysfunction is depressing.

What makes you quit a novel?

And, what novels have you finished and enjoyed lately?

The dangers of Goodreads

A long time ago I signed up for Goodreads, because it looked like something I should sign up for, and then promptly forgot about it.  Actually, I think I played around with it a little, plugged in a book or two, and then forgot about it.  I remembered my account again, many months later, when a friend asked me if I could be found there.  Oops, I could,  so I logged in and friended her.  Then another friend popped in, so I had two friends at Goodreads, and started getting email with their updates.  In turn, I started adding a few more books so I wouldn't bore my two friends when they ran into me there.

Now, I have a small but growing list of books in my to-read file.  And a large pile of library books on my living room floor.  (Sometimes I forget to put the books in the to-read file and go straight to the library website to request them.)  

I didn't lack for reading material before Goodreads, but I surely have no excuses now!  One list leads to another and there is always something intriguing, isn't there? 

Of course having access to more good books doesn't mean reading more, does it?

How would I find you on Goodreads?

2011 Reading year and 2012 goals

After a few months of neglect, I updated my 2011 Reading page.  In the beginning of the year, I was disgusted with my pathetic reading life and resolved to repair it.

I read  26 books last year.  Ten were read-alouds for our homeschooling, most of the rest were novels I read for pleasure.   I didn't count books I started but didn't finish. There are a lot of those!   26 books is better than zero books, it's true.  But it's not quite what I had in mind.

So, in a few hours it'll be a new year. The new year brings a new beginning.  I'm not making any commitments, but I'd like to continue to work on my reading life. 

This year I'm going to be reading the Bible all the way through.  I have tried to do this a few times but have only succeeded once.  I don't believe it is a necessary thing to do, but I want to do it this year.  I'm trying this plan found on Desiring God.

Besides reading aloud to my kids - in January we'll be doing The Iliad and some Greek plays together, among other things - I want to read one novel and one nonfiction book each month.  That will be 24 books just for my own pleasure and edification, better than the 16 I got in this year.

It's a start.  

How is your reading life going?
 

Twice Born by Margaret Mazzantini

Earlier this year I started playing around on Goodreads. I wrote some comments on a book and then by internet magic moved then over here. And here it sat in draft form for a long, long time. I'm doing some housekeeping so thought I may as well publish it, finally!

Twice Born by Margaret Mazzantini

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story of a marriage, of a war, of love.  But not a love story by any conventional definition of the term.  Gemma and Diego are a mismatched Italian couple who meet in Sarajevo and are drawn back to that city even as the siege is beginning.

The story moves fluidly through time:  the present as Gemma takes her son Pietro to Sarajevo to see the city of his birth, and the past as the full story unfolds.

Most than once I almost gave up on the book, as I sensed events unfolding that I didn't want to read. Have you ever felt that a character you liked was going to disappoint you? I didn't want to experience that, and I felt it was coming.  As is my usual practice when I feel like abandoning a book, I read the last few pages to see if I had figured out what was going to happen.  I hadn't, and had to go back and finish.

The characters, particularly Diego, are complex.  I am still trying to figure out how I feel about him. The scenes of war are heartbreaking.  The ending is satisfying but as with most good stories, I want to know more.

There are some other issues that I would love to talk about but would involve spoilers.  There is a lot to this book beyond the plot. If you can handle a story with some very dark moments and pictures of humanity, this is a worthwhile book.

A book to add to your family Christmas reading

Yesterday we pulled out our box of Christmas books and CDs.  We have a nice collection of Christmas picture books that we treasure.  But they are picture books, written for children, and my children really aren't anymore.

I'm sure Eleanor and I will read The Story of Holly and Ivy together, and everyone will look through the old favorites.  Maybe we'll find some that aren't so beloved anymore and give them away; at least I hope so, as we are always trying to reduce our number of books.

But, still, I wanted a Christmas book that would appeal to these older children.  And so I found  Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus, a selection of Christmas writings, edited by Nancy Guthrie.

This is a nice little book with twenty-two short readings by authors such as Martin Luther, John Piper, Tim Keller, Charles Spurgeon... and many more, obviously.  Some are excerpts from sermons, others come from books.  I've read about a quarter of them so far.  Some have resonated with me more than others. I don't think the book is perfect.  I've shared a few of them with my kids and we'll get to more in the days ahead, though surely not all of them. Not all will be interesting to them at their ages.  I can keep some to myself for a while. 

It's a nice addition to our Christmas book box.  

As always, I'd love to know about other good Christmas books for teens. 

How's that reading going?

In January I set out to expand my reading life.  I love books and reading but had found myself with no time to read, and apparently nothing to read even if I had the time.  We're about 3/4 of the way through the year; how's it going?

Not so very well.

You can click on "2011 Reading" on the left to see my pathetic little list of books.  It won't take you very long to scan it.   What that doesn't show is the many, many books I started but didn't finish.  It also doesn't show my Bible reading and most of my Bible study materials, which are mostly not books but online.  But I haven't whipped my way through the Bible this year either.

So why am I not reading more?  There are a few reasons.

First, I simply don't arrange my day so that I can read.  I don't have a consistent time set aside to read for myself.   Other things fill my days (good and bad things); I am busy.  But, if I tried harder I could find 30 minutes a day to read.

Second, and maybe my real problem, is book dissatisfaction.  I've been going through The Three Musketeers for a long while now.  It's not that huge of a book.  It's fun, but it's not compelling.   I don't long to get a chance to read it during the day.   I have tried to read other books while I'm still working on it.  I go to the library and pick up books I've read glowing reviews of, or scan the shelves and bring home books with interesting blurbs.  There's always something wrong.

(Has anyone else noticed how many books are being written in the first person?  I must be picking up too much women's fiction.)

Last week we did a fun readaloud:  Captain Blood.  Some of us have been sickly for a while and our homeschool reading isn't going too well.  Herodotus requires a level of concentration that we just don't have right now.  We needed something with movement!  I scanned the shelves and saw this swashbuckler novel.  I don't even know why I bought this, or when. But I'm glad it was here; it was such fun.  Great story, lots of action, and because of when it was written (1922), rich with unfamiliar words.   Yesterday we watched the Errol Flynn/Olivia deHavilland film.  Also great fun.

So, my search for good books, and the time to read them, continues.  Maybe the last quarter of 2011 will make up for the first three.

Give a girl a challenge...

About two weeks ago my girl received a challenge.  

We were at the library and she was checking out a huge number of books.  Well, probably 10, maybe 15.  Not so huge. The man in line behind her looked at her stack and asked:

Are you really going to read all those books in 3 weeks?

She smiled nicely and said yes.  She turned to me and rolled her eyes.  The librarian gave her a wink. 

In the car, she grumbled a little.  It was hard to read the man's voice (given that we didn't know him); was there a slightly sarcastic or condescending edge to it, or was he just being friendly?   We opted for friendly.  We try never to assume malice when clumsiness will do as an explanation for behavior.

Of course she read them all.  It wasn't even that hard.  She's on the upper edge of the juvenile section so she can chew through those books pretty handily.  We face the "young adult" section with trepidation.  YA authors are vying to be seen as the most cutting-edge and we are not cutting-edge people.   Anne of Green Gables is about our speed right now.   We're skipping the teen paranormal romance.  

We returned them within about two weeks.  She's unlikely to ever encounter that man again, and it wouldn't matter if she did.  But she won't forget him for a while, that man who doubted her.


Do you remember lovely summers spent buried in books?  I do.  

City of Tranquil Light

It can be hard to find novels that show Christianity in a positive light these days.  I don't count the "Christian fiction" genre, as I've rarely found anything worth reading there.  But mainstream fiction usually portrays Christians in a negative way, if it portrays them at all.   And Christian missionaries? Don't get me started.

City of Tranquil Light is a beautiful novel that tells the story of a missionary couple in China in a very respectful, loving way.  These missionaries are not crazy men and women with hero complexes (think The Poisonwood Bible), but rather ordinary people who want to serve God, and find that China is the place they are sent to do just that.

Will is a young man in 1906 when he meets Edward, who is home from the mission field and looking for workers.  He asks Will to consider joining him.  Will has not felt the urge to leave home, and doesn't feel particularly gifted for missions work, yet one night, Will gets up, unable to sleep, leaves his bedroom, and sits down at the kitchen table.

As I sat there, I suddenly knew I would go to China.  The realization was as simple and definite as the plunk of a small stone in the deep well of my soul, and despite the fact that it would mean leaving what I loved most in the world, I felt not the sadness and dread I had expected but a sense of freedom and release.  The tightness in me loosened like a cut cord, and I was joyful.

Will narrates the story of his life in China:  his meeting with Katherine, Edward's sister-in-law who also joins him, their courtship and marriage while on the mission field, the trials and hardships of their life together.

Katherine tells the story too, in the form of journal entries.  It's a nice device, to present two voices in different ways.

Another of my complaints about current fiction is the bleakness of it. There is so much dysfunction and ugliness in novels.  This is the rare book that that has ugliness in it, but it's not overwhelmed by it.  There is disease and death, attacks by bandits, war.  It's sad in parts, but not bleak.  It's beautiful and satisfying. 

There are a couple of episodes that seem a little fantastical or contrived, but they were minor brow-wrinklers for me, in this otherwise lovely book.

This work of fiction is based on the lives of the author's grandparents.  Bo Caldwell also wrote The Distant Land of My Father, another book which I loved.  That book was published in 2002; City of Tranquil Light in 2010.  At this rate, I have a long wait for her next book.  I hope it won't be too long. 

Sad and happy at the same time

Today I've spent a good amount of time going through books.  We have more books than we can fit in our house; much of our collection is stored in boxes in our dungeon (crawlspace).  They are all inventoried so if we need something we can find it, but it's still not convenient to have 50% (or more) of the family books packed away.

Many of those books are really not needed anymore, but we all have a hard time getting rid of old books. A couple of years ago I went through a period when I refused to get rid of any good books at all. I was afraid that everything decent is doomed to go out of print.  I have calmed down a bit since then, but I still plan to hang on to the best of the bunch.  But, we still have books that, while good, are not classics that must be preserved.  I am getting better at letting go.  The kids, not so much.  (I leave the seminarian out of this.  He never gets rid of anything.)

From time to time I will get out boxes of books from early in our homeschooling days and ask if there are any we can give away. The answer is almost always no. 

Today was different.  The kids were ready to get rid of some books!  Most of our medieval history was wiped out - at least those books for the 10 and under set.  Books on knights and castles - all going.  It's sad in a way. Those were well-loved books. But they aren't going to be re-read by my kids.  And they aren't such classics that we need to hang on to them for the next generation.   They were good books, but not great books.

It's kind of funny to see a boy saying "I don't even remember that book" about one he said he adored and could not bear to part with just a year ago.  But, that's what growing up will do for a guy.

We are keeping plenty of books.  There will be good storybooks for the grandchildren.  But we don't need to keep it all.  

It's a little sad, but it's nice to move some things out of the house.  I feel a little less burdened with every bag that goes to the library, or to a friend.  If we move, we'll have that many fewer boxes to load onto a truck.

And, it's nice to see my kids growing up. They have plenty of books ahead of them.

Two books

A couple of weeks ago I started reading two books.  I'd heard so many good things about both, and started them at the same time.

One was fiction that read like a memoir. It was beautiful and sad.  The other was a true memoir that seemed more like the story of every dysfunctional family you've ever heard of, rolled into one.

I gave up on The Glass Castle after a while.  It was riveting, but in the way an accident scene is riveting.  You feel like you shouldn't look, but you can't help it. It consisted of episode after episode of abusive parent stories. I don't mean to trivialize the author's experience.  I don't wonder, as others have, if it was really true. She had a horrid life. But I couldn't keep reading it.  People have told me that the book is really worthwhile as the author shows how she and her siblings overcame their early lives.  But I just couldn't get that far.

I'm glad I started reading The Distant Land of My Father at the same time.  This is a beautiful family story, though there is much dysfunction in it.  It also has rich historical detail that I find so appealing in a novel.

Anna is born in Shanghai in the early 1930s.  Her parents are American; her father, the child of missionaries, was also born there.  Her mother, Eve, moved from California when she married Joe.  Joe is a businessman who loves his family, but he loves business and Shangai more.  Eventually Eve takes Anna to California to escape the war.  Joe is supposed to follow them after finishing up some business, but... he doesn't come for a long time.  And when he comes, he doesn't stay.  He can't give up Shanghai.

The story moves effortlessly between Anna's life after leaving Shanghai and her father's story as he stays behind.   He is imprisoned twice - by the Japanese, and later by the Communists.

This is ultimately a very satisfying story of love and forgiveness.  Maybe all good stories are about love and forgiveness.

Here is a passage I found particularly sweet. Anna describes her feelings after her mother dies.  It perfectly describes the way I felt after my own mother's death: 

With her death, a part of my life just disappeared.  Many times a day, I picked up the phone and put it down again, remembering too late.  Over and over, I thought to tell her something, or ask her something, or see if she'd like to do something, and over and over, I reminded myself that she was gone - a fact that never made any sense - and the dull ache inside me would start up again.

I am looking forward to Bo Caldwell's next novel, City of Tranquil Light. 

Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands

Are you a counselor?   I don't mean a certified professional who gets paid to solve people's problems.  I mean, are you a regular person living in the world, who has people in your life who need help with problems?  Yes, of course you are.  We all are. So you should read Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands.

I love the subtitle:  "People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change."

I've had this book for a long time and had started it more than once. For some reason it took me a few tries to get into it and finish it.  I can only assume my timing was bad because this is a wonderful book.   The author, Paul David Tripp, is associated with the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation and has written other titles for the "Resources for Changing Lives" book series.

Dr. Tripp teaches the process - what we need to do - for counseling: Love,  Know, Speak, Do.  

If we are going to help people, we need to love them.  Yes, we need to love all these pesky, annoying people in our lives.  That includes the the young mother who doesn't seem to be able to discipline her children, the friend who is always complaining, the woman who worries that she's never doing enough. Sometimes they are hard to love, but they are made in God's image, so... we make the decision to love them.

We have to know them and know their problems - their real problems, not necessarily the troubles that they present to us - if we are going to help them.  We don't assume we know without asking a lot of questions and getting true understanding of what's really going on.

Then we have to speak up.  Kindly, in love. We don't avoid confrontation.  Sometimes this kind of speaking is hard.   But,

... I am afraid we have replaced love in our relationships with being "nice."  Being nice and acting out of love are not the same thing.  Our culture puts a high premium on being tolerant and polite.  We seek to avoid uncomfortable moments, so we see, but do not speak.  We go so far as to convince ourselves that we are not speaking because we love the other person, when in reality we fail to speak because we lack love.

Then, as if the speaking wasn't hard enough, there's more: we need to do what we can to help. This is the hardest part to accomplish and the hardest to summarize.

The final aspect of our model, do, teaches us how to apply truths we have learned, personal insights we have gained, and commitments we have made, to our daily lives.  Here we teach people to be dissatisfied with the gap between their confessional and functional theology.  We lead them to live out their identity as children of God, claiming the rights and privileges of the gospel.  Do trains people in the decisions, actions, relationships, and skills of Christ-centered, biblically informed living.  

This is not just theory.  There are many practical examples that helped me see exactly how to go about this process.  It's designed to equip, not just educate.

And it's not just for people planning to become professional counselors, though it is on the curriculum.  It's for people like me who seem to be placed in counseling sessions all the time.   People like you, too.

Click the link for more information or to read the first chapter of the book. If you read it, I'd love to know what you think of it.

A book to read when you think your life is hard.

Last Friday my dryer died.  Right in the middle of a load.   The seminarian is pretty handy but he couldn't fix it.  He found the instruction manual and did all the trouble-shooting stuff but nothing worked.  He said that it seemed the dryer, which came with the house we moved into 4 years ago, must be about 20 years old.  So it was dead.

I was without a dryer for 4 days.  Can you imagine?  Dirty laundry piling up. The prospect of going to the laundromat.  Ugh!  What a terrible thing to happen.

During those four days that I wasn't doing laundry, I had a little extra time for reading.  I started a new novel, and I read about a man preparing to venture into the streets of Sarajevo during the siege to find water for his family:

He sits at the table and inspects each of the six plastic containers he'll take with him.  He checks for any obvious cracks that may have developed since they were last emptied, makes sure each one has the correct lid.  He has two backup containers he can substitute if he finds any faults.  Deciding how much water you can carry has become something of an art in this city.  Carry too little and you'll have to repeat the task more often. Each time you expose yourself to the dangers of the streets you run the risk of injury or death.  But carry too much and you lose the ability to run, duck, dive, anything it takes to get out of danger's way. 

During his trek to get the water, he faces the possibility of being cut down by a sniper's bullet or killed in a mortar attack.  The trip to get water takes hours.   And he has to do it every few days.

We decided to take a chance on Craigslist - something we'd never done before - and found a dryer the next morning.  It was in place and humming away a mere 4 days after the old dryer died.

Wednesday was piano lesson day.  Our teacher lives just over the city line in Philadelphia.  It's not the suburbs anymore, and the streets were a mess.  She has only street parking and there was a lot of snow on the ground.  People shovel out their own parking spaces and mark them with chairs or construction cones to keep interlopers away.  The streets are narrow because of all the snow piled up.  The plows push it to the sides of the road, but they don't remove it.  I couldn't park, so I had to let Eleanor out of the car in front of the teacher's apartment and watch her stumble through the snow-covered walk up to the door, ring the bell, and wait for the teacher to let her in, all while hoping no one would need to get past me on the street.  Then I went to find a place to park till her lesson was over.

While I waited for her in the Walmart parking lot, I read some more.

The trains don't run anymore. The streets are full of debris, boxcars and concrete piled at intersections in an attempt to foil the snipers on the hills.  To go outside is to accept the possibility that you will be killed.

Sometimes our lives are inconvenient and we mistakenly think they are hard.  That's one of the reasons I read books like The Cellist of Sarajevo. They remind me that my life is so very easy, always.

There really was a cellist of Sarajevo, Vedran Smailovic, and though the novel is named for him, he is a minor character, a focal point.  During the siege he saw 22 of his neighbors killed by a mortar attack.  In response, he sat at that spot each day for 22 days and played his cello. (You can read about his unhappiness with the book and his role in it here.)

The story - three separate stories, really - follow three other people throughout a day, or several days.  The chapters alternate, each telling a part of the story of one person.  It is not perfectly linear in the telling, but it won't matter once you start reading the book. 

Kenan is the family man who struggles to get water.  Dragan is alone; his family left the city but he has work at a bakery so he stayed behind.  Arrow is a young woman, a soldier and sniper who targets the "men in the hills," the men who make it dangerous to cross a street.  There are other characters whose lives we glimpse as they go about their day.  

It is a beautifully written book, and hard to set aside.  I found myself slipping away from my daily tasks to read one more chapter.  It's a difficult book, though, because it doesn't flinch from the violence.  People die while crossing a street, cut down by snipers.  People don't behave the way we think they should.  The way we are sure we would behave in similar circumstances.   But it will also show you that people can retain their humanity even under the worst conditions imaginable.

Read this when you feel that your life is hard.

Linking up with Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books.

Eat Cake (A book review)

Who needs a fun, light, optimistic book to read?  Eat Cake by Jeanne Ray came to me via a bit of book serendipity - a random comment on someone's Facebook page.  I requested it from the library as soon as I saw the title.  I don't buy much fiction anymore, and surely not a book I am not sure I will like well enough to reread.  Sorry about that, Ms Ray, nothing personal, that's just the way it goes. 

But by page 2 I knew I was hooked when I read this:

Cakes have gotten a bad rap.  People equate virtue with turning down dessert.  There is always one person at the table who holds up her hand when I serve the cake.  No, really, I couldn't, she says, and then gives her flat stomach a conspiratorial little pat.  Everyone who is pressing a fork into that first tender layer looks at the person who declined the plate, and they all think, That person is better than I am. That person has discipline. But that is not a person with discipline, that is a person who has completely lost touch with joy.  A slice of cake never made anybody fat.  You don't eat the whole cake.  You don't eat a cake every day of your life.  You take the cake when it is offered because the cake is delicious.  You have a slice of cake and what it reminds you of is someplace that's safe, uncomplicated, without stress.  A cake is a party, a birthday, a wedding.  A cake is what's served on the happiest days of your life.

Ruth is a suburban housewife who takes great pleasure and comfort in baking wonderful cakes.  Then one day her world turns upside down and she needs to make sense of a new order in her life.   Could that new order include cake?

There is not one bit of unpleasantness in this book.  It is as sweet and light and fluffy as the frosting on one of Ruth's cakes.  It is funny and charming and totally predictable - nothing that happened came as a surprise and nothing happened that I didn't want to happen.  

Get it sometime when you are feeling a little out of sorts and just need something fun and easy and with no sadness whatsoever.

And speaking of sweet, there are some lovely cake recipes in the back.  I think I will have to make the lemon layer cake with lemon cream frosting.  Imagine, lemon curd and whipped cream blended together to fill and frost a cake.  Wow.

A book I tried to avoid, but couldn't.

Half (or more) of the Christian-mommy-blogosphere is talking about One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp, the well-known blogger of A Holy Experience.  Her book, which was released just weeks ago, has been highly anticipated and is already apparently a best-seller.

I'll be blunt and say right off that I didn't want to read the book. See, the author's writing style just doesn't work for me. (And judging by the reviews, I am the only person on the planet who feels this way.)  Where others see "poetic prose," I see odd syntax.  Honestly, it's a little hard for me to read phrases like "my eyes have rolled haughty" or "the radical wonder of it stuns me happy," sentence construction which would earn a red mark on a composition assignment.  Then there are sentences like "I fly  to Paris and learn how to make love to God" which is, grammatically speaking, a perfectly fine sentence, but is way over the top for me. Actually that entire chapter ("the joy of intimacy") is over the top for me.  But enough of that; let's get on to the good stuff.

Anyway, I did buy it.  Last week I was feeling lonely and edgy because the seminarian was going camping for a couple of nights and I was going to be the sole adult in charge at home. I just don't like that. So, I wanted some comforting reading.  I wanted something new.  And I read yet another blog post about it and... went right over to Amazon and placed my order.  It was inexpensive, I got free shipping, and I had it in my hands less than 24 hours after ordering.

And so I started reading, and I found that... it's a good book.  In many places, a very, very good book.

The basic premise is simple, though not easy:  start being grateful for the gifts in your life, and you will see more and more to be grateful for.   You will experience God and your life in a different way. You may find the joy you've been seeking. This idea of hers has been around for a while; you may have seen blog posts with gratitude lists.  Maybe you've posted one yourself.  If not, you can see what that's all about here. I think it is true, that the more we find to be thankful for, the more we will see God, and the good, in our lives.  It's the stopping to see and notice that's so hard to do.

There is more. She quotes Isaiah:

10 if you pour yourself out for the hungry
   and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
 then shall your light rise in the darkness
   and your gloom be as the noonday.
¹¹And the LORD will guide you continually
   and satisfy your desire in scorched places
   and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
   like a spring of water,
   whose waters do not fail.

Isaiah 58:10-11 (ESV)

Yes, the more we give of ourselves to others, even to the point of emptiness, we will be filled.  Fulfilled.  This is good to read on a night when you're exhausted, and anxious, and feel like you've given away too much.

One review I read (don't ask me where, please) included the comment that Mrs. Voskamp is not "someone who's studied theology in a seminary for years" (paraphrased) as a positive about the book.  I like theology students; I'm married to one. But this is not a theology book and it should not be read like one. It's a very personal book about one's woman's experience with God and loss and gratitude. And change. It's raw and emotional and sometimes painful to read.  Her doctrine and theology may not be a perfect fit for yours. But it's her own story.

So after all I'm glad I read the book.  I'm glad I could separate the message from the style.  I still think it's odd that I felt compelled to buy it after I hadn't wanted to.  It's also interesting that just about every word she wrote about worry applies to me right now.  I'm in a sort of worrisome time of life these days.  So it was good. Comforting and convicting:

If authentic, saving belief is the act of trusting,

then to choose stress is an act of disbelief... atheism. 

Yikes, right?  Hard to read, hard to think about. 

Oh, and I started my own gratitude list.  I'm not likely to blog it; I enjoy reading others' but it's a little too personal for me to share with the world (small as my blogging world may be).  It's been only a few days but I can see the value in it, particularly when I turn something scary or annoying or worrisome into something to be thankful for.  And that, of course, is the point.

That word again

We're reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, a book about a black family in Mississippi during the Great Depression, in our little homeschool this week.  It's been on my list for a while but I finally pulled it out to read for a couple of reasons.  It's on our list for Reading Olympics, a book competition my kids are participating in this year.  (Teams read books and answer questions about them.)   And, it contains the word which must not be spoken, which has been on my mind again lately.  I've complained about the word before on another blog, a long time ago.  It's time again.

Everyone's heard about and expressed an opinion on efforts to remove the word from Huckleberry Finn.  Some might also have heard about the high school that's worried about staging the play "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" which contains the word, because it is so offensive.  August Wilson, the playwright, was half black, and probably used the word for a reason.  It would be ludicrous to remove it from the play.

So rather than hand Roll of Thunder off to my kids, I decided to read it to them. We haven't had a good book going for a while, and I wanted to be able to read the word and talk to them about it.  They already know they must not say the word. But I didn't want them to shy away from the book because of it.  I'm not skipping it or replacing it with "slave" (as proposed for Huck Finn) or the stupid phrase "the n-word."   That's not how the author wrote the dialog, so why would I presume to change it?

Mildred D. Taylor, the author, was hurt by criticisms for using the word.  In a speech accepting an award for her work, she said

,Now, however, there are those who think that perhaps my recounting are too painful, and there are those who seek to remove books such as mine from school reading lists. There are some who say the books should be removed because the "N" word is used. There are some who say such events as described in my books and books by others did not happen. There are those who do not want to remember the past or who do not want their children to know the past and who would whitewash history, and these sentiments are not only from whites.

In Texas recently a Hispanic father went to the school board and asked thatThe Well be removed from school reading lists because the "N" word was used. In Orange County, California a black mother objected to her son reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in a class where he was the only African-American, and the school’s solution to her objection was to seat her son in the hall while the book was being read. In a Northern state, a black church questioned a book like Roll of Thunder being presented in the schools to its children.

I am hurt that any child would ever be hurt by my words. As a parent I understand not wanting a child to hear painful words, but as a parent I do not understand not wanting a child to learn about a history that is part of America, a history about a family representing millions of families that are strong and loving and who remain united and strong, despite the obstacles they face.

In the writing of my most recent work, titled The Land, I have found myself hesitating about using words that would have been spoken in the late 1800s because of my concern about our "politically correct" society. But just as I have had to be honest with myself in the telling of all my stories, I realize I must be true to the feelings of the people about whom I write and true to the stories told. My stories might not be "politically correct," so there will be those who will be offended, but as we all know, racism is offensive.

It is not polite, and it is full of pain.

I recommend Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which is listed for kids ten and up.  I wouldn't give it to a ten-year-old to read on his own.   It is a book read together so you can stop and talk about it, often.

My kids can't comprehend that anyone ever treated black people as they were treated in this book. They flinch when I say the word.  That is a good thing.