Even though goals and resolutions (or whatever word you choose to call your motivators of growth and change) can be reset at any time during the year, I particularly love planning my reading goals following the calendar year, with January 1 and December 31 as helpful bookends to contain and track my reading for a year.
Read MoreMy Top 10 Books of 2013
Last Wednesday, I posted a full list of the books I read during 2013, but here are my top 10 favorite books for the year, in no particular order. (One of my favorite traditions for the new year!) Since I’ve included links to reviews I previously wrote for most of these books, I’ll not go into great depth in giving a synopsis. Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes (Shauna Niequist) (Review here) What do you get when you combine memoir, cookbook, and devotional? Something like Bread & Wine. It wasn’t so much Shauna Niequist’s life experiences that got me thinking, but the underlying thoughts around community and food that helped get the ball rolling in expanding and growing my thinking in these areas. Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Ross Douthat) (review here) Douthat’s examination of American Christianity is an important and timely critique. I also recommend reading this in conjunction with Stephen J. Nichol’s Jesus Made in America (my review of that book, here). Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood (L.R. Knost) (Review here) Communication is essential in any relationship, including the child-parent relationship. Unfortunately, it’s easy to think our children are not “communicating” during their first years or to read our own projections into their communication in later years. Often, we simply accept cultural views of child development and dismiss the crucial communications as “parenting annoyances” rather than seeing their behavior as communication with us. While I found each of Knost’s books helpful, I really enjoyed the scope of this book, particularly in covering communication with our children through each stage of growing up. (Similar to this book was How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk (Adele Faber, Elaine Mazlish), another I really benefited from.) Twelve Years a Slave (Solomon Northup, Louis Gossett Jr.) (Review here) This biography of Solomon Northup was recently made into a movie, though I’ve not yet seen it. The book, through the lens of Northup’s own life, is a powerful and telling story of the suffering that many endured during this important era of American history. Kidnapped from a life of relative freedom, Solomon Northup, a free black, was sold into Southern slavery where he was enslaved for twelve years. C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Alister E. McGrath) Although I also read Devin Brown’s A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis this past…
Read More2013 in Books: Books Completed
This year, I finished out the year with seventy books, assuming I remembered to track them all. (I’m not counting smaller children’s books.) My goal was originally one hundred, but given the life circumstances that filled our last twelve months, I’m still thankful to have accomplished this number. I didn’t have a baby, but actually, that usually gives me a tiny bit more reading time during rough pregnancies and postpartum–I had a baby last year. Which means I have a toddler this year! We can just let that be the rest of the story. 😉 (Along with remodeling, buying and selling houses, traveling and living overseas, job transitions for myself and my husband, and…yes, back to my amazing toddler!)
Read MoreReading 2013: What to Expect When No One’s Expecting
Well before publication, I had heard snippets of Jonathan Last’s recent book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, but still wasn’t sure what to expect going into the book, particularly as I saw it being promoted from groups with a very clear reputation on other matters. Was he a right wing conspiracy theorist? An adherent of mass, militant fecundity? Did he just like clever plays on words and base the book on his wordsmith skills? Sometimes, when reading such books and I’m unfamiliar with the author, I find it’s best not to form an opinion until after I’ve read the book. Thankfully, although I’ve seen this book referenced by those who teach militant fecundity, I found that Vast was neither conspiracy theorist nor fundamentalist extremist. (While the book gives a few glimpses of Last’s personal beliefs, most of the time readers are left in the dark on this matter. His few smatterings of colorful language and eclectic ideologies make it hard to fit him into any one box.) Instead, Last provides readers with facts and research to create the picture of what he sees will be the fallout of our current demographic decline. Superimposed upon these facts are his assumptions as to why we’ve reached this point and how we can change, many of which I did agree with, and many of which I think further consideration would lead me to disagree with. And of course, there are a lot of stories and anecdotes to create another layer, too. Last’s book addresses the myth of Western overpopulation that was popularized by Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, in which the author presented the horrid devastation of a future overpopulated Earth, predicting that global scale famines would decimate millions by the 1970s and 1980s. Of course, time has told us that Ehrlich’s theories were not quite as plausible or as urgent as he originally presented them. And yet, while disproved, the belief of an impending overpopulation crisis still looms large. (And such comments linger in just about every online comment section for articles and news regarding parenting or children!) On the contrary, Last does believe that the situations is dire, yet entirely opposite of Ehrlich’s prediction: future demise will come from our failure to reproduce at a healthy rate of replacement. There are literally millions of subsets of ideas that could be linked to this phenomenon and to…
Read MoreReading 2013: The In-Between
The In-Between: Embracing the Tension Between Now and the Next Big Thing by Jeff Goins is a fantastic book that happens to pack a lot of spectacular wisdom onto the rather brief number of pages in between (pun intended) the front and back cover. Most of us spend our lives waiting for “the next big thing,” waiting to pursue our dreams, passions, and callings until just a few more of our ideals slide into place. We always see ourselves as pursuing “our life’s work” in the future, so in the present we instead choose to chase shadow ideals or simply pace through such seasons with anxiety and impatience. Even for many of us who, to others, seem to have arrived at our next big dream, it still feels like we’re waiting for the next big thing. Sometimes we fear contentment with the present because we conflate it with complacency. And I think that’s what this book is addressing for change–realizing the necessary tension that exists between now and next. While we spend our time waiting for the next spectacular moment, in our rush to get there we race past the beautiful moments that add up to a spectacular lifetime. This is a great inspirational yet practical book about making more of everyday life, and making every day count. Table of Contents:
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