Reading Update

Book 13 of 2017 was Breathing Room: Letting Go So You Can Fully Live, by Leeana Tankersley.  I enjoyed this book very much.  Here are some tastes:  "The calendar will not serve me in matters of the soul.  I don't need to assess how worthy or unworthy my losses are, how they do or don't stack up to someone else's plight. . . . The most revolutionary thing we can do is choose to see the fullness instead of the lack, no matter where life has us.  We look for the portals.  Not as an escape, but as a reminder of his kingdom come.  As a posture of plenty."

Book 14 was The Irrational Season, by Madeleine L'Engle. I had read a few of the Crosswicks Journals series, but not this one, and I love her ponderings.

Book 15 was Milk and Honey, a book of poetry by Rupi Kaur.  This was much steamier than I was expecting, especially since it was loaned to me by one of my eighth graders.

Book 16 was The Mothers, by Brit Bennett.  This is a novel about Nadia, who is seventeen and loses her mother.  She subsequently gets pregnant and the decision she makes has long-term repercussions, as do her friendships and how they intersect.  The mothers of the title are the women of her church.  A quote: “It was strange, learning the contours of another’s loneliness.  You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.”

Book 17 was The Broken Way: A Daring Path into the Abundant Life, by Ann Voskamp, and Book 21 was Voskamp's earlier book, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.  I'm coming a bit late to the Voskamp party, though I have read her blog off and on.  I found both these books to be full of nuggets of truth and beauty.

Book 18 was Columbine, by Dave Cullen.  This is an in-depth look into the shootings that took place at Columbine High School in 1999.  It's about the attacks and the boys who carried them out, but it's equally about the way the media covered the story, and how wrongly they approached it.  This reads like a novel, and while it's heart-breaking, it is fascinating and well worth reading.

Book 19 was The Language Inside, by Holly Thompson.  I have read this book several times - I teach it to my eighth graders - but this time I read it aloud to my husband.  I wrote a bit about the book in this post and this one.

Book 20 was Stephen King's 11/22/63.  I'm not a big Stephen King fan; in fact, the only book of his I had read before this was On Writing, which I wrote about here.  But this book was so good; I couldn't put it down.  It's a time travel story, and I'd say its main theme is that what we do really does matter.

This post is linked to the April Quick-Lit roundup at Modern Mrs. Darcy.