If only there were more hours in the day to read! I did
check several books off my list this year, but every time I drive past a
library, I feel the pull of shelves full of unread books.
I started the year by jumping on the bandwagon and reading
all three Hunger Games books. Like
everyone else, I was completely sucked into the story and couldn’t stop
thinking about the characters. (Peeta is one of my favorite literary characters
ever. If you just saw the movie and didn’t read the book, you’ll have no idea
why.) Like George Lucas and J.K. Rowling before her, Suzanne Collins created
more than a series of books. She created a new civilization, and I fell in face
first. Still, part of me wishes I had stopped after the first book; the others
weren’t nearly so satisfying.
Back to Rowling, my big kids and I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, leaving
us with just one book left. Regardless of what happens to Harry, I’m afraid
I’ll be drenching the final pages in tears as this special time shared with
Braden and Addison comes to an end.
My only other fiction book of the year was The Last Disciple by Sigmund Brouwer and
Hank Hanegraaff. First-century persecution of Christians—including the phrase
“human torch”—has never been so real to me.
In the Garden of
Beasts by Erik Larson has been on my list for a couple years, and I finally
picked it up, thinking I was getting fiction. Turns out, it’s a real story and
reads more like a history book than a thriller. Still, I read it quickly and
found that it answered some of my questions about why the world stood by and
watched as Hitler rose to power.
Also in the secular non-fiction category were The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman and
The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana
West. I read both of these too late (Flat
predicted that some day we’d be able to take pictures on our cell phones), but
they were still interesting. The latter, however, felt a little like watching
72 consecutive hours of Fox News. I agreed with it more or less, but the
ceaseless political drumming got a bit old.
I edited one autobiography this year and read another. The
paid one was the story of a woman who escaped the Liberian civil war with her
husband and a toddler strapped to her back. If you don’t know anything about
the history of Liberia, google it. We all should have at least a 10-minute
education on the subject, starting with why their flag looks so much like ours.
The other autobiography, A Heart for
Freedom, is the story of Chai Ling’s role in the 1989 Chinese student
uprising. I know next to nothing about Chinese history, so this one was
helpful, too.
Two friends, one from a long time ago and one I’m blessed to
know today, released great books this year. Margot Starbuck was my RA in
college, and I always thought she was a mixture of quirky and profound. That’s
also how I would describe her book, Small
Things with Great Love: Adventures in
Loving Your Neighbor, written for people with kids, laundry, jobs, and
mortgages who still want to change the world. It’s also very funny, and I loved
it. Also in the “loved” category is my friend Becky Grosenbach’s book Flying Cheese: Stories from an Ordinary
Life. Becky could write about, well, cheese, and make it meaningful. Don’t
let the subtitle fool you; she may appear ordinary on the surface, but she’s a
gem, both as a writer and a person. You can get a copy at http://www.beckygrosenbach.com/
Finally, I made some progress in my goal to read all of C.S.
Lewis’s published works. The Great
Divorce, while not my favorite, is a good reminder that Lewis was not just
a great thinker but also the master of metaphor. He is certainly one of the most
creative storytellers who ever lived. I’m still relishing the brilliance of the
Screwtape Letters, a couple
paragraphs at a time. The Problem of Pain
and A Grief Observed, written 20
years apart and separated by the most significant event in Lewis’s life—his
marriage and the subsequent death of his wife, Helen—are best read together.
Lewis wrote as a casual observer of pain
in 1940; in 1961, he’s in the trenches. He sees the difference himself: “Of course it is different when the thing
happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. . . . If
I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I
should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. It has been an
imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labeled Illness, Pain, Death,
and Loneliness. I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it
would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t” (A Grief Observed). His return journey to faith after Helen’s death
is perhaps Lewis at his best, or at least his most real.
I plan to read more Lewis classics in 2013, along with
Rachel Held Evans’s book, A Year of
Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof,
Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master, Unbroken by Laura
Hillenbrand, and The Googlization of Everything (And Why We
Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan. Braden is interested in The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so we may read that one together. And if hours start magically appearing
in the day, I would love to read Les
Miserables this year after seeing the film a few days ago. There’s nothing
I love more than an awe-inspiring story.
