Across the Page

The fourth Tuesday of the month brings the What’s On Your Nightstand carnival. (Click on the button to read about it.) I’ve come to look forward to this motivation to reflect on my reading trends in recent weeks.

The books I’m reading right now, by Dallas Willard and A.W. Tozer, are in my sidebar. I’m enjoying and profiting from both. They’re forcing me to slow down and reflect more, which is a good thing; maybe it signals a change from the hasty cramming that has come to characterize my reading life. I hope so.

It’s not that I’m that fast of a reader. It’s that when I have a spare moment, pretty much the only thing I want to do is read. I’ve developed an almost compulsive attitude: gotta have a book, gotta be carrying around with me a doorway into the world of imagination and speculative thought. It’s the reading experience I crave, and I’m not sure how much I am altered for the better by what I read. I’d kind of like to be a connoisseur-of-fine-wine reader, rather than a hiding-in-the-closet-gobbling-down-chocolates reader. (Sigh.)

Here’s what I’ve read since the last carnival, with blurbs from/links to my reviews:

1. Rabbit Hill (Robert Lawson): “The central happening in this tale is the arrival of new folks at an abandoned farm, and the speculation of all the animals about what they will be like… For an animal tale that doesn’t make you cry, you can’t do better than this.” The rest of my review is here.
2. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini): “Everyone else has read The Kite Runner already. I haven’t, perhaps because I suspected that it would break my heart. I was right. But it was worth it.” The rest of my review is here.
3. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone (J.K. Rowling): “With a young reader in the family, it seemed like a good idea to familiarize myself with this popular series. As of this morning, I’m about a hundred pages in, and I’m going to close it and move on to something else. It’s not really grabbing me.” The rest of my review is here.
4. 84, Charing Cross Road (Helene Hanff): “An epistolary novel ( is it a novel?) that tells the tale of a 20-year correspondence between an American writer and an antiquarian bookseller, 84, Charing Cross Road maintains a near-perfect balance between personalities in the quiet development of a friendship.” Full review here.
5. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston): “Though it took me two tries, I found it to be a unique and powerful book about a black woman in the South becoming her own person.” Full review here.
6. From God to Us: How We Got Our Bible (Geisler and Nix): “It represents careful scholarship and exact statement. The quality of reasoning and evidence is excellent. But it’s so academic in tone that, more to my shame than the book’s, I found it very difficult to get through.” Full review here.
7. The Book of Three (Lloyd Alexander): “In a nutshell, it traces the adventures of an assistant pig-keeper, Taran of Caer Dallben, who sets out on a quest to recover his escaped oracular pig and ends up head-to-head with the forces of evil that threaten the kingdom.” Full review here.
8. The Portent (George MacDonald): “Dream, imagination, fate, love — all these are wrapped up in this novel that MacDonald called, apologetically, ‘a Romance. I am well aware that, with many readers, this epithet will be enough to ensure condemnation. But there ought to be a place for any story, which, although founded in the marvellous, is true to human nature and to itself.’” Full review here.
9. The Diary of an Old Soul (George MacDonald): “Diary of an Old Soul contains a 7-line poem for each day of the year… Each of these poems is a microscope trained on some current of thought or feeling. In their quietness they illuminate, and accord a gentleness to, the moments of insight that add up to the diary of a soul.” Full review here.

It looks like more reading than it really is. Two of the books were read-alouds with my kids, one was so short I read it in an evening, and one was tried and abandoned.

You can view other folks’ posts, or (better yet) link up with the carnival yourself, here.

Tags: what's on your nightstand?