Recent (and not so recent) reads
Current and Completed
- John Eldredge, Resilient: Restoring Your Weary Soul In These Turbulent Times
My family is reading this book together now. It’s about how to recover after the Covid years, and it’s prompting some great discussions.
For me personally, it’s been a blast of oxygen for my soul, which I hadn’t even realized was suffocating. Don’t get me wrong… I struggled during the Covid crisis — the fear, the danger, the deaths, the isolation of my mother in a nursing home, the loneliness and isolation of the lockdowns, the mandates, the supply chain problems, the businesses shuttered, the creep of what Rod Dreher calls “soft totalitarianism.” But once the lockdowns ended and the masks could be dropped to reveal faces again, it seemed like we all hit the ground running. I remember marveling at how quickly people shed their masks. All told, it reinforced the sense that it was not so much something we all endured together, but something that was done to us, imposed from without. We didn’t so much heal, as from a wound; we shook it off like a sweatshirt.
This book helps me realize that it actually was a great trauma, one that went much deeper than a sweatshirt, and it has damaged people. It gives me permission to acknowledge that, and to take some time focusing on how to heal inside — as opposed to just entering the fray and marching again.
- Shannon Messenger, Stellarlune
This is Book 9 in a series my youngest daughter loved in middle school and high school. I read the first book at her request, sort of as an assignment, and I ended up really enjoying the whole series.
It’s been a long time since the last book was released, so I had lost the thread of the story. Instead of doing my homework and refreshing my memory, I plowed through, waiting for the context to trigger memory of all the necessary plot details. Bad strategy. I still had gaps.
The book was also a bit slow to get underway. It seemed to consist mostly of people having conversations until much too far into the book. It did pick up eventually though, and I enjoyed my entry into the fictional world of beautiful elves, teen angst, awesome desserts, and in general a fictional civilization of advanced, intelligent beings with a strong political structure and highly developed culture who still make serious mistakes governing. In other words… a parallel universe.
- James Herriot, All Things Bright and Beautiful; All Creatures Great and Small; All Things Wise and Wonderful; The Lord God Made Them All; Every Living Thing
Somehow, I missed these books for many years. I blame my mental block about animal stories, which always seem to include excruciatingly sad parts.
In the case of James Herriot’s stories, there are of course some sad moments, along with many difficult challenges. But they are not by any means the dominant impression we’re left with. Humor, compassion, plenty of scientific and historical detail, and first-rate writing combine to make these tales of a Yorkshire veterinarian absolute gems.
Sheepishly, I confess that discovered these literary treasures through the television series, to which I’m now addicted and own on DVD.
In Process
- Michael O. Tennell, The Prydain Companion
This is an encyclopedia for Lloyd Alexander geeks. We read these stories together as my daughters were growing up, and I revisited them recently and was struck by Alexander’s spare, well-paced writing, his gift for rendering emotionally complex characters and their development with compassion, and his occasional passages of brilliant, poetic originality. I’m thinking of the episode in which Flewdurr Flam surrenders his honesty-loving harp to the flames to ensure that his friends will survive a bitterly cold night, and the harp sings magically all through the night.
This book is a compendium of characters, plot details and geographies, connections to Welsh mythology and folklore. It will take me a long time to read it all, but I feel fortunate to have it.
- Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
I’m not sure I’ll ever finish this. It’s torture to read… a chronicle of the methods and resume of the political left. It’s superbly written and researched, but so depressing I find it hard to sustain.
- Rod Dreher, Live Not By Lies — Reread.
