Read all the things. Learn all the things. Talk about all the things.

A Reunion in Time by Russell F. Moran My rating: 2 of 5 stars I was still reveling in Where the Wind Knows when I started this book. Ah, time travel! And then I remembered, when it is done well, it's great. And when it's not, it's just annoying. This was annoying. It started well. Surprising. The protagonist is attacked by a man in a black robe. As per his FBI training, he respond quickly. Definitively. It turns out the attacker in a robe is a priest. And the protagonist has moved from the present time to the past, just a few days before 911. He is in his high school, in his high school body. In the present, he is 37 years old, and in 2001, he is 17. He narrates with sarcasm, authority, curiosity. With profanity. The priests don't seem to mind. And at least one believes him--or at least seems to. His parents believe him. And here the story breaks down. It moves quickly and neatly and mostly people believe him. The protagonist is joine...

What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon My rating: 5 of 5 stars I'm not really sure why, but I do love a good time travel novel. Maybe it's because I'm always wondering what it might be like to live in a different time, a different place. (How much of who I am is based on me and how much is based on the time I grew up in?) This book draw me in quickly. Anne Gallagher is a novelist whose Irish grandfather raised her, taught her Gaelic, told her the stories her learned in childhood, influenced her more than anyone else. He instructed her to take his ashes and spread them in Ireland after he died. She rents a boat and finds herself in 1921, spending time with her grandfather, who was orphaned in the Rising, a rebellion against the English. She looks like her great grandmother, and everyone assumes she is his mother. And she is falling in love with her great-grandfather's best friend. Harmon tells the story through the eyes of her protagonist, ...

Time After Time by Lisa Grunwald My rating: 4 of 5 stars I started this book when I got to Baltimore. A little here. A little there. After a bit, I couldn't put it down. A railroad engineer going to work at Grand Central Station in New York runs into an enigmatic woman one morning. She is endearing. She seems confused. She seems like she is from another time. And he can't quite forget her. A year later, exactly a year later, he sees her again. This time he has breakfast with her. He learns her address and her name. And then he loses her. A little research reveals she died in a terminal accident several years before. What has he just encountered? And so begins the story of Joe and Nora. And World War 2. Of loves and losses and hopes and disappointments. Of moving forward when staying put seems safer. This isn't just their love story. It's a story of America. And pursuing adventure. I did not buy this book on sale, bu it was definitely ...

On The Eve of War: Three American Sisters Share Their Travels Through Europe July to August 1939 by Arthur Johnson My rating: 1 of 5 stars I have never given a book a single star, but that's it for this one. To be fair, this is a published journal of a woman who is not a writer, who visits Europe with her sisters the summer before World War II begins, and writes a journal of what she sees. She has great observations with lots of details, but nothing happens. Nothing. And so readers have all these details but they have no purpose. They don't DO anything. I kept reading to see if there was something that mattered, but nothing mattered. And that's the detail. Disappointing. I'm sure this is very cool for family. I hope I didn't pay anything for this book. View all my reviews

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig My rating: 4 of 5 stars Next year I turn 60 years old. (Gasp!) I used to think that was so old, but now I'm not sure so sure. I have several friends who were born the same year as I was and even more who were born a few years before and a few years after. We grew up listening to the same music. We know the words and sing along. We remember the same events in history. We had similar experiences. I love having friends whose experiences are different, but there is something deeply satisfying about playing cards late into the evening, singing, reminiscing on old television shows or our memories of Disneyland. We share similar ailments too and if I complain about weight gain or menopause or the inability to see in dim light, my friends will understand. And that's the thing. We are aging. No one lives forever, and at some point, a few of us will be left. Our memories will seem irrelevant or ancient history, depending o...

Today I woke up, and the first thing I thought about was the book I was reading. It totally consumed me. I started thinking about what I needed to do first, before I resumed reading. At least, I thought, I needed to go to the gym, eat breakfast, and then do some Scripture reading and some writing. I prayed before getting up, and then I started my day. I went to the gym. I made breakfast. And then I started reading the book. If I could just finish the book, my mind would be free to concentrate on other things. Two hours later, the book was done. I needed to get ready for work. Willard asserts, "what simply occupies our mind very largely governs what we do. It sets the emotional tone out of which our actions flow, and it projects the possible courses of action available to us" (324). And so I was thinking about What the Wind Knows   and whether Anne would stay in the past or return to the present. What happened to Thomas? How did Eoin decide to go to the United Stat...

Sigh. It has been a long time since I have written in this blog. The trip to Baltimore. Endless walking and exploring for a few days, followed by endless study and networking, followed by collapse and immediate return to doing, doing, doing. Thursday we leave for Palm Springs, and I keep saying, I need routine. I need rest. I need quiet. And I do. I am trying to figure out how to include that into my days, along with exercise, work, writing, people I love, people I want to meet. How do I live life, meet responsibilities, and take care of myself? My mind has been occupied by all the things, and when it is occupied by all the things, I don't get very much done, so that's counterproductive. I think my friend Lisa W. would say that I need to take a Sabbath, need to schedule days off. And I do. Her husband, who is my pastor, talked about living through the highs and lows of life. He cited something some research from somewhere about how life is rarely static, that somethi...

I'm currently wondering if I really want to take the time to reflect on the end of this chapter. I am leaving for a 10-day trip to Baltimore, and I still need to do laundry and pack. And clean the house. And the trip and the Writing Center Institute are making me anxious. Isn't it enough to just finish reading?  Apparently not. I will forget everything, including my thoughts on this. And anyway, my thoughts become much more clear when I write things down. That's why I annotate books that matter--and even some books that don't actually matter. And blogging, journaling while reading, forces me to think more deeply. And hopefully not forget everything. In the last two sections of this chapter, Willard answers two questions: The first is how does someone become a disciple, and the second is how does pass on the path to discipleship.  He continues to contrast being a Christian and being a disciple and doesn't really answer the question of whether or not some...

A few observations before I get started: First, Willard's book is long. That's okay. I have criticized books that don't go in depth on topics, that don't justify their conclusions with evidence and analysis. Willard is not guilty of that critique. He says a lot of things, and I want to think about them. Learn from them.  Talk about them, absorb parts. If I weren't blogging about things, I supposed I would finish the book more quickly. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't get as much out of it, and I hope I am getting something out of this. I do want to learn. (Blah, blah, the title of the blog, the inspiration for my life.) I suppose I am making excuses for why it takes me so long to get through a single chapter of this book, which I will not be taking to Baltimore with me because it is so big and heavy. I may not finish this book until the end of June or beginning of July. (More excuses.)(It's rather odd that I feel compelled to rationalize my acti...

Reading and reflecting prompts me to ask God, what should I do? How should I live? What does this mean for me today, right now? That was the attitude I had when I went to church yesterday morning. All during church, I watched as people came into the room. There are so many people I don't know. I've been in this church for a year, but this church doesn't really feel like family, not like the Tierrasanta campus did when there was only one campus, and not like Santee did. Yes, there are people I know, and yes, there are people I do consider family, but that's not quite the same. I am not blaming the church. Instead, I am asking how I can change this. My assumption is that my church should feel like family, and given that it used to be, given that this was so life-giving in the past, I want it to be that way again. Certainly, I had some emotional/spiritual/psychological healing to do when I came to the church, but I think that's mostly done now. I began to pr...

When I was a teenager, people who talked about discipleship focused on memorizing Scripture and understanding church doctrines. I did that, and honestly, I knew something was wrong. I was committed to serving in church, attending services, and following the rules, but I didn't love God, and I certainly wasn't interested in reading the Bible. I did it when I had to, but the idea of daily devotions or Bible reading times put me to sleep, literally. I almost quit attending church. Life was busy, and I just didn't see why it mattered all that much, and that's when I got scared. I believed Scripture cognitively, and I was afraid to walk away from that belief system. I talked Duane into attending a small non-traditional church near our home, one that met on Saturday night, one that didn't sing hymns, one where the pastor talked like a regular person, acknowledging his humanity and his need for God. Something inside me shifted, and my faith became less cognitive and...

The Bar Harbor Retirement Home for Famous Writers by Terri-Lynne DeFino My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is another book I might never have picked up if it were not free/cheap. That seems to be the story of my reading life. Sometimes that works out well, and sometimes less well. I have so many books on my Kindle shelf that I may never finish them. I suppose that is also okay. Imagine a retirement home in a restored mansion, filled with writers, writers in the last stages of their lives. They had devoted their lives to writing, and as a result, their family relationships were shot. No one from outside every visits them. They are tired, emotionally, physically, and psychologically, and in the last stages of their lives, they have no more stories in them. They form relationships with Cecibel, a mysterious orderly, who becomes their muse, and they start writing again, a shared story. This book is their story, the story they write, the story of their lives, a...

Recently I have read authors citing Dallas Willard. Most specifically, I read a book by John Ortberg, a book that promised a great deal but mostly didn't deliver, except when referencing Willard. As a result, I went to my bookshelf and pulled out this book, which has sat there for years, unread. It's a big book, and I don't know why I bought it, but it was time. Willard is speaking about the greatness of God, who we are in Christ, and what our role is in the Kingdom of God. As I read, I hear echoes of N.T. Wright, April Yamasaki, Ted Dekker, Scot McKnight, and Barry Jones. Reading without talking about what I read, particularly when there are so many connections to other authors whose words I value, is challenging. How can I synthesize unless I reflect? How can I remember? How can I grow? That is the reason for this blog. Btw, I remembered why I don't blog. It takes a crazy amount of time to say the things I want to say the way I want to say them. I don...

In Spiritual but Not Religious , N.T. Wright claims that when we take God out of the mix, we replace him with other things which we worship, and as we worship those things, they control us.  I don't have the book with me--I do so like documentation--but that's the gist of it.  Enter  Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our Religion and What to Do About It by David Zahl, which reviews some of our replacement gods. His descriptions are good, but I wish there were more on why this matters, the impact it has on our lives, and what do to about it. This lacks the depth of Wright, which I miss.  Zahl doesn't really focus on how these elements (work, sex, parenting, technology, etc.) are a form of idolatry, which I think is a miss, but he does hit on the religiosity of these things in our lives. (Hence, the title, which is pretty clever.) Today I'm reading about how work has become a religion. Seriously. During ...

The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren My rating: 3 of 5 stars For a long time, I was reading books about the two World Wars. I think reading about how people struggled and yet overcame injustice helped me feel better about today's international problems. And then I accidentally came across some other genres. (Accidental means the book was free or super cheap.) So much fun. I chose this book for my flight back from Colorado Springs on Monday. Meh. Romance. Predictable. Cute. Everyone gets food poisoning at a wedding except for the bride's twin sister and the groom's brother, who pretty much hate each other. The bride tells her sister to go on the honeymoon, and the groom tells the brother to go, and so they both go. And, you can guess where it goes from there. There are a few twists I didn't see coming, but those twists don't ultimately change where the book is headed. Overall, it was a sweet airplane read. View all ...

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride My rating: 4 of 5 stars I've been planning to read this book for a really long time, since I read a review about a black man who learns his mother was raised as an Orthodox Jew. I didn't know who James McBride was at the time, and so his reputation didn't draw me in. What intrigues me more is the idea of identity. Who are we, and how does our past, even the past we don't know about, shape us? And race, this thing that permeates our society, how does it shape us? I think I've been interested in history and culture since I started reading all the books on Hawaiian history when I was in second grade and living in Honolulu. (What an exotic history, I thought, and I began to seek out other books on culture.) More recently, I am learning that my view of race and culture is shaped by my own color, which I ignored for so long. I was raised in a white-normat...

Matchmaking for Beginners by Maddie Dawson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Fun and quirky love story I was looking forward to finishing James McBride's autobiographical The Color of Water on the plane and realized that I forgot the Kindle at home, but the plane was about to take off and there was no time to download anything. This was the only book on my tablet that I hadn't read, and it didn't take long to hook me. I smiled and laughed and hoped and fell in love with two narrators: Blix is an aging misfit Southerner who relocates to Brooklyn in middle age, and Marnie, the young woman who engaged to marry Blix's nephew. A little romance. A little magic. A few hopes, a few disappointments, a lot of love. I'll return to serious reading about race in America tomorrow. View all my reviews

My husband Duane is not a reader.  Okay, that's not fair. He's kind of a reader, as in he is almost always reading something. But this is relatively recent. Maybe the last ten years or so. (When you're married more than 40 years, a decade is relatively recent.) And he's not an obsessive reader, like I am, and so I suppose that's another reason why I don't classify him as a reader. (I tend to define things rather rigidly.) At any rate, last week he asked if he needed to read the introduction to a book he had already started.  I teach writing, and since all writing responds to something, implicit or explicit, I also teach reading strategies, and my answer to his question was yes.  He wanted to know why, and so I explained that the introductions to books set up what the book will do, why the book is needed, and why it matters. Introductions give context for the book that help readers navigate what comes after, and when readers skip the introdu...