Category Archives: Reading

Current Reading Material

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Borrowing the idea from Georgiana and sharing my reading shelf today.

reading-shelf.jpg

I read in a way that would have made me crazy ten years ago. And, you can see for yourself, I am woefully short on fiction. As in, none. I think this explains why my mind more naturally gravitates to blogging than to fiction-writing these days. It’s the stuff I’m spending all my print-time with.

Non-fiction.

You see, as “gifted” and articulate and meaningful as any of this content may be, I have not yet found any of it so magical that it is hard to set down or pick up in any given chunk. Yes, it benefits from continuity, but I benefit (more ?) from training my brain to make sense of the new bits, whatever order they come in.

It frequently causes me to see things in a new way because of the new context, and that is exciting to me.

My reading shelf currently consists of books that I have started, and have read enough of to know I want to keep reading. Probably to finish.

I’ve been feeling more of a desire to add to my toolbox, and time interacting with my children. That has started:

The desire to build my interactive life with God has started:

  • Devotional Classics (one of my top ten on my 100-things about me list)
  • Intercessory Prayer (Fascinating first couple of chapters! I’m so glad I was driving with Jay as I read them. *Had* to talk about what I was reading.)
  • Mark for Everyone (A book the men have been using in Sunday school– The women just rejoined for the first time in a year) A commentary that is only the *starting* place for discussion in class. I am very impressed by the amount of thought and planning Nate is putting into the class. He is doing a fabulous job leading.

Mark‘s taken over Nehemiah for now. At least until I’ve caught-up in the book to where the men are. It’s good reading. Aptly titled, For Everyone.

Then there’s just the stuff that’s just for my own absorption and personal edification:

  • The Angel and the Ants (The only thing on this table I’ve actually finished, but I’m wanting to revisit several parts).
  • Orthodoxy (a lower priority, but intriguing enough to keep me going)
  • Life Management (ETA: swapped this out for the one on the bottom)
  • The Read-Aloud Handbook (from 1995. He sites stats in here that really make me want the current edition. Can’t it be better by now?! But what has changed in ten years? I have to say I don’t know one way or the other.) This is on my personal list because I’m trying to train myself that this sort of thing is about me and my habits.
  • Becoming a Writer (Written in 1934, this is one of those serendipitous finds I’ve absolutely loved.) In contrast to another book I have, this one very plainly says if you find yourself unable to do the {two main recommended/suggested} exercises, or that they are too hard, you are probably not a writer. Give up quietly and go enjoy your life.

I love that. A practical litmus test.

So, there, the third reading list I’ve mentioned on this blog. Not that I ever finished the first two– my needs and priorities shifted. I can’t help that. I probably write them more as my own milestones or because of what they reveal about me at this point in time.

I’m not the sort of person who will stick with a book when it has lost its usefulness. After all (to coin another paraphrase):

Books were created for man, not man for books.

ETA:

book-cover.jpgThis will replace Life Management on my shelf.

I mention this for two reasons (neither of which that you need to care):

    • It’s an intriguing book I hadn’t heard of before I saw it on the “used” shelf, which may be the case for others.
    • I’m making a real effort this list to read quality, useful stuff, and limiting myself to what will fit on my narrow shelf-top, so if I wanted to add this one, I had to ditch another. There was only one I was currently waffling on, so there ya go.

      Seven Happy Years

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      Friends
      Elizabeth Jennings

      I fear it’s very wrong of me
      And yet I must admit
      When someone offers friendship
      I want the whole of it.
      I don’t want everybody else
      To share my friends with me.
      At least, I want one special one,
      Who, indisputably
      Likes me much more than all the rest,
      Who’s always on my side.
      Who never cares what others say,
      Who lets me come and hide
      Within his shadow, in his house —
      It doesn’t matter where —
      Who lets me simply be myself,
      Who’s always always there.

      I have been so thankful for the refining journey God is taking me on through marriage. Over and over I’m reminded we were created for fellowship (with one another, as well as with God) and marriage is the lovely way He provides for that basic need to be met.

      I used to be offended (almost) at the insistence that marriage is hard work. It sounded too much like complaining, and complaining seemed nearly blasphemous, or, at least, to be begging for trouble (Oh, you think that’s hard, huh?).

      My image has shifted slightly since then. Now it’s more like comparing marriage to a garden. A garden takes work to prepare and maintain, but that’s no shame; that’s what distinguishes it from the wilderness.

      I have become a different (and better) person because of Jay, and that’s in God’s plan. For every believer our ultimate goal is to become more Christ-like, and knowing our good God, he is going to assist that process in the way most effective for each of us.

      The sentiment in that poem is reflective of my (basically) selfish nature. It wasn’t until I was married, though, that God let me know a part of it was okay. He designed us this way, and uses it (as he does so many things) to reveal another aspect of himself.

      This reminder of God’s jealous nature for his people (including me!) should be very sobering, and even encouraging (if that’s the right word). It shows me a different type– or maybe it’s just a different side– of the love that died for me.

      Let Them be Warriors

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      I have often felt sorry for modern boys and young men. They have so few chances to kinesthetically apply their problem-solving skills.

      So few opportunities to be a hero.

      Watching Honey I Shrunk the Kids a few years ago was the first time I really thought about this.

      The greasy teenage boy changed from lazy and purposeless into a confident leader. I had to wonder how many of the high school guys I knew could have been marvelous rather than eye-rolling if they’d had the opportunity.

      It’s started a new point of interest in my folktale collecting:

      I’d really like to find some über-manly tales of knights and princes. The type that dominate the scene, according to the authors compiling books of women-centered folktales.

      I guess I haven’t been paying enough attention up till now, because most of the stories I find don’t raise men nearly to the level women reach in their corresponding tales (trickster tales being the exception).

      Even Cinderella, Snow White and The Sleeping Beauty— castigated as being about passive women– are still just about the women. I’ve noted before that in these stories the man is merely the accessory. A part of the packaged fantasy played out in the fairy tale.

      Granted, I’m familiar with a lot of tales where a youngest son or some poor young man who is all alone is kind to the right person, finds the right friends, follows the advice of the wise man (or woman), and gets the girl, the gold or the kingdom, but they only rarely feel heroic.

      Bryan Davis, the author of the Dragons in our Midst series (and another) wrote a fabulous article about the heart of heroism in boys and girls, and how naturally it plays out in line with the roles God ordained: Champion and encourager. Protector and helpmeet.

      Read it. It gave me goosebumps (if that’s any additional recommendation).

      So far in my brief search I have found two noteworthy books that I expect to buy by the time Elisha is a pre-schooler:

      The title story from Lady of the Linden Tree is another good example of what I’m looking for, and is among the half-dozen or so of Picard’s tales I’d love to see in picture book format.

      The Black Falcon, changed from its original incarnation in the Decameron, becomes a tale of sacrifice, about loving a person over a possession. The other is about a fierce battle, with honor, faithfulness, and the happy ending.

      I’m keeping my eyes open for more like these, because as nice as it is to see the triumph of “the little guy,” I think it’s good, too, to have heroes that are larger than life.

      My girls love their picture books with the pages of beautiful ladies and journeys that they can see themselves on. I want to give my son the same opportunity to identify with men of honor and bravery.

      Yes, I hope to teach my son gentleness, but I also want to equip him with stories and images he can admire; those showing the proper use of strength and power.

      Know any Good Books?

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      I know I have more readers than comment, so here’s a question for everyone:

      Can you give me any titles of books where a character has a disability of some kind, but the book is not about that disability?

      Just now I can only think of two:

      • Jip: His Story
        • Has a “madman” caged at the poor farm the title character lives on.
      • The Westing Game
        • One of the 16 major characters, Chris, has a musculoskeletal something that confines him to a wheelchair and limits his ability to communicate. I really liked how the author let us into his (very perceptive) mind.
        • Another of the 16 was the mother of a girl described as “mongoloid” because of the time it was written. I don’t think anyone would get away with publishing that now.

        The interaction of everyone with Chris was very revealing of character, but wasn’t the point of he story. That was bigger than just one person.

      These are the types of stories I’m looking for: Disability is a part of who they are, but it doesn’t drive the whole story (like, say, What’s Wrong With Timmy?)

      If you have any ideas, please leave a comment and point me in that direction.

      Thanks!

      Fewer Doubts = Less (self) Censoring?

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      Jacques Barzun in A Writer’s Discipline:

      [We] transfer a part of our intellectual and emotional insides into an independent and self-sustaining outside [when we write]. It follows that if we have any doubts about the strength, truth, or beauty of our insides, the doubt acts as an automatic censor which quietly forbids the act of exhibition.

      A Poem for Storytellers

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      (Or at least for this one.)

      Creed
      Adrian Plass (from the City of Gold soundtrack)

      I cannot say my creed in words.
      How should I spell
      despair, excitement, joy and grief?
      amazement, anger, certainty and
      unbelief?

      What was the grammar of those sleepless nights?
      Who the subject? What the object? –
      of a friend who will not come,
      or does not come,
      and then
      creates his own eccentric special dawn:
      A blinding light that does not blind.

      Why do I find you in the secret,
      wordless places where I hide
      from your eternal light?
      I hate you.
      I love you.
      I miss you.
      I wish that you would go
      and yet I know that long ago
      you made a fairy tale for me

      About the day when you would take your sword
      and battle through the thicket of the things I have become.

      Your kiss to life…my Sleeping Beauty
      waiting for her Prince to come.

      Then I will wake
      and look into your eyes
      and understand.
      And for the first time
      I will not be dumb
      and I shall
      say my creed
      in words.

      I should explain that these line breaks are nearly arbitrary. I’ve never seen a written version from the author– only listened to the recording. So there are a few words I sometimes wonder about too.

      But I think it gets the overall message across.

      Remembering and Missing

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      I am exactly one year out from the intense-est two weeks of my life. The two weeks I watched my grandmother (and mother) in the hospital before my grandmother died.

      (If observing someone process all that is actually of interest, you may visit the archives to read the end of July last year.)

      It was a surreal, intense, time, as I was adjusting both to the arrival of my third child and to the idea of losing an important fixture in my life.

      ~

      When my second baby was born, two weeks after my grandfather died, my grandma spent several mornings a week at my house. She helped me in my goal of allowing my 17 1/2-month-old to continue being a baby.

      It was something Grandma felt she denied her own 17 1/2-month-old when her next baby arrived.

      She came, and held babies, and swept carpets (my vacuum was too heavy for her), until that amazing day when my baby-baby was 3 months old and I realized I had managed both the children and the house alone. Managed them competently and well.

      During those same adjusting weeks with #3, I was calling around for babysitters to watch my girls a couple mornings a week so I could spell my mom, who was now living at the hospital with Grandma.

      ~

      We always had someone beside her bed, to take care of the myriad of little things a person needs, but someone like Grandma would go without before she called a nurse in for help.

      I borrowed a rolling infant bed from the birthing wing, so I’d have a place to lay my miraculously sleeping baby for the hours I was with Grandma.

      And Grandma and I would talk. About everything that was on her mind or mine.  Talk like we’d done for months before we’d even thought of hospitals.

      Only with my husband have I had a deeper communion of thought
      with another human being.

      Let me not to the marriage of true minds
      Admit impediments. Love is not love
      Which alters when it alteration finds,
      Or bends with the remover to remove:

      O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
      That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
      It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
      Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

      Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
      Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
      Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
      But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

      If this be error and upon me proved,
      I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

      Sonnet 116
      Shakespeare

      Growing through 2 Peter 1:5-8

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      This actually came up in Sunday School several weeks ago, but I was thinking of it again and wanted to share it.

      In 2 Peter chapter 1, the author reminds us that God’s “divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness,” then goes on to list a progression:

      Make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness, godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.

      As the mother of young children who’ve made a confession of faith, I suddenly saw this differently than I had before.

      I saw this as a list of spiritual development paralleling stages of natural development.

      The girls have each made a confession of faith, so that is their starting place. In this new context, with the Spirit’s help, they are now learning goodness.

      As a few more years go by their main occupation will become their schooling (adding knowledge). Then, I see this exponentially applying to the adolescent years, they add in increased self-control.

      As a young adult (I want to say especially as a young parent) we add endurance, because I think we never truly learn how much we can be stretched until “child(ren)” happens to us.

      I see godliness as something we all are working toward, but that we see most consistently in, well, in people older than me.

      As a tendency to base the majority of your behaviors off of obedience to a very clear understanding of what God would have us do, I see godliness as something that takes a bit of familiarity with the Word and sensitivity to God’s leading in your life.

      Something, in short, most visible with spiritual maturity.

      And to finish with the brotherly kindness and love, I think this is the natural progression of our interaction with others. Initially (and this is where I’m at in teaching my children right now), we choose to be kind, because it’s the right, God-honoring thing to do.

      Ultimately, we want everything we do to be motivated by love.

      When we are genuinely doing everything out of a pure love, that, I believe is the measure of maturity.

      Poems and Grandpa

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      “Was it unexpected?”

      Funny how that seems to be the first thing people say when they hear someone has died.

      I heard it after each grandparent, and found myself very seriously responding, especially after my grandmother’s death, “Of course it was expected– no one lives forever. But that doesn’t mean we were ready for it.”

      With my grandfather it was the day after his 91st birthday, he had had a lovely day. My 17-month-old had finally smiled at him, and accepted his friendliness. At dinner that night he prayed, thanking God for His great faithfulness and provision in a long and challenging and lovely life.

      When I first learned he had died I was rather shell-shocked. But when I was able to think again I remembered two poems. My mother loved the first, and we used it in the folder at his memorial service.

      To Be of Use
      Marge Piercy

      The people I love best
      jump into work head first
      without dallying in the shallows
      and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
      They seem to become natives of that element,
      the black sleek heads of seals
      bouncing like half-submerged balls.

      I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
      who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
      who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
      who do what has to be done, again and again.

      I want to be with people who submerge
      in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
      and work in a row and pass the bags along,
      who are not parlor generals and field deserters
      but move in a common rhythm
      when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

      The work of the world is as common as mud.
      Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
      But the thing worth doing well done
      has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
      Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
      Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museum
      but you know they were meant to be used.
      The pitcher cries for water to carry
      and a person for work that is real.

      My grandfather was generous and a worker his whole life. This poem encapsulated beautifully the meaning of good work, and what it meant to him, defining, it seemed, his whole view of himself.

      This next poem is harder to peg down, but it expresses so well the emotions of my loss, even when it doesn’t match intellectually or spiritually what I really believe.

      A Dirge Without Music
      Edna St. Vincent Millay

      I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
      So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
      Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
      With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

      Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
      Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
      A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
      A formula, a phrase remains, — but the best is lost.

      The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
      They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
      Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
      More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

      Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
      Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
      Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
      I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

      Poetry has been so useful to me in recent years, providing my tired but hungry mind with satisfying bites of thought already put in order.

      I hope these bites might also offer some encouragement to other readers.

      The Role of a Wife

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      I have often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortune. Those disasters which break down the spirit of a man, and prostrate him in the dust, seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and elevation to their character, that at times it approaches to sublimity.

      There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams, and blazes in the dark hour of adversity. No man knows what the wife of his bosom is–no man knows what a ministering angel she is–until he has gone with her through the fiery trials of this world.

      From a fascinating essay by Washington Irving entitled The Wife.

      Also from that:

      True love will not brook reserve; it feels undervalued and outraged, when even the sorrows of those it loves are concealed from it….

      “Undervalued and outraged.” I might have used the same words myself. Above *many* things I hate to be excluded from the minds of those I love.

      I have an essay of my own, about this role of women/wives, that has been percolating since March.

      This reading has rather awakened the idea again. I’ll have to see if it’s done gestating…