Window Thinking
I wrote this in 2022 and never posted it. While working on my Substack newsletter this week, I dug out this file and am posting it here with no edits to its original form. In late 2020, I read Jesus & John Wayne by historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez. In this work, Du Mez focused in …
I have had a good reading year to the midpoint – 40 books! (43 counting July, so far). A few thoughts in the rearview mirror — Back in January, I read Counting the Cost by Jill Duggar…..I would not normally have picked this up, but I have a weird little sliding doors sort of connection …
I enjoy skimming end of the year reading lists so I skimmed my own list of books that I read in 2023. Because I simply keep a list and no additional notes on books, it is interesting to look at the list and see titles I can’t remember anything about. There are a few titles …
I have a book overdue at the library, but before returning it I decided to dip in a bit to see if I wanted to put it back on my hold list. Yesterday morning I picked it up and started reading, by the end of the day I had read all the way through. So …
How to find joy when life seems awful is my kind of clickbait, though absolutely not in the perjorative sense of the word. Cruising through headlines a couple weeks ago I saw this one from the Washington Post and clicked. In the article author Steven Petrow describes his sister Julie’s “birthday bash/going away party” celebrated …
The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories. – Clint …
I don’t know why or when I started my sort-of-tradition, but Ebenezer Scrooge and his ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future pretty regularly show up on my December reading lists. I’m a big fan of Jim Dale (thanks to his marvelous narration of the Harry Potter series) and I usually listen to Jim Dale …
I first learned of Katharine Hayhoe several years ago when I participated in the Creation Care group at the church we were attending. One of the fellow group members was excited that Hayhoe was coming to Anchorage and we would had opportunity to hear her speak. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend any of her …
Circling back to a book I read last month….In the final pages of The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, author Helene Hanff includes a story that I keep thinking about. The book is an account of Hanff’s trip to London – a place she imagined and interacted with throughout her 20 year pen pal relationship with …
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. (from Wikipedia) Realizing that I tend to like epistolary novels, I’ve been on the lookout for them and recently I found this clever book by Caroline Preston. Preston assembles real newspaper clippings, photos, and other period …
If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much. I have no idea why I have only just got around to reading this delightful book. I love bookstores and epistolary tales and this is a wonderful collection of letters sent back and forth across the …
Richard’s entire body is a costume discarded, the party over….His limbs are petulant children, unreachable through begging, bribery, ultimatums, or sweet talk.He tries to imagine the war beneath his skin; the invaded countries of his neurons and muscles overwhelmed, decimated; the neutral territories of bone, ligament, and tendon rendered useless by the horrific destruction surrounding …
A chicken knows only what it can see. A chicken’s life is full of magic. Lo and behold. A fictional story that read rather like a memoir, this short novel held so many wonderful, accurate descriptions of backyard chickens. And I loved it. Because…..backyard chickens!!! The author used caring for these feathered friends to serve …
When we feel abandoned, alone, and lost, what’s left to us? What do I have, what do you have, what do any of us have left except the overpowering temptation to rail against God and to blame him for the dark night into which he’s led us, to blame him for our misery, to blame …
I wrote a short piece for the members of my congregation in the church newsletter. By accident I learned that the piece was being used in homiletic classes in my seminary in St. Louis. Well, if it was good enough for theologians, it should be good enough for a wider public. Therefore I reused the …
All the long afternoon they sang, and talked, and ate, and Dicey didn’t think about her boats, the ones she was working on or the ones she was dreaming about, except once, when they came to the line in Momma’s old song that said “bring me a boat will carry two.” She could see that …
Our brains are wired differently, and we have to figure out how to make them work. A car accident. A brain injury. And the hard work to recover a life. Or rather, the hard work to learn a new way of being in the world. Revisiting Still Alice started me on a Lisa Genova reading …
Every child of a parent with HD has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the mutated gene. The discovery of this mutation made genetic testing possible for anyone living at risk. The test definitively determines genetic status. A positive test result means the person has the mutation and will develop HD. To date, 90 percent …
Mom, what does it feel like? What does what feel like? Having Alzheimer’s. Can you feel that you have it right now?Well, I know I’m not confused or repeating myself right now, but just a few minutes ago, I couldn’t find ‘cream cheese,’ and I was having a hard time participating in the conversation with you and …
His father had been the kind of man who just – had these children and then disappeared, not even giving them his name, not even marrying Momma. This 6th book in the Tillerman series wasn’t my favorite, but Voigt does a marvelous job filling out the characters of Sammy and James as they go in …
Doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently. This was an interesting enough exploration of what if I had followed that trail through life instead of this one and I read to the end, but I got tired of being dropped into so many different, undeveloped scenarios as the main …
Mom calls before bed and doesn’t sound that tired. She asks me all about Safer’s family. When I tell her Safer doesn’t go to school, she says they sound like really nice bohemians. When I tell her that Safer plans to teach me the secret of truly excellent scrambled eggs, she says they sound like …
There are few things more violent than two cars colliding at high speed. Metal screams and glass sprays and rubber smokes. Within it what chance does a human body have? We are liquid and tissue. As fragile a thing as there is. It’s like how people describe it, and not. It’s slow, and not. The …
When it comes down to it, the only question that matters is this: If nothing in the world ever changes, what type of man are you gonna be? This short YA story pulled me straight into the bright young mind of a prep school, college bound kid who is trying to make sense of his …