Reading

I mean, if everything is already set in stone, why try? I prefer to think that we’re choosing in every moment what happens next. A magical phone in this story serves as the mechanism for a bit of time travel and the exploration of choices and consequences. Honestly I had a little trouble finishing this …

I believe all words have their own music. And along with that music, I believe words contain worlds of words and meanings that are, more often than not, locked beneath the surface. Poetry is what happens when words are opened up, and those worlds within are made visible, and the music behind the words is …

Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and …

His carryall in his hand, Bullet jogged down the driveway….The fields stretched away on either side of him, and he stopped at the end of the driveway to look back at them. He’d new-harrowed the fields, and they were ready now to take the crops he wouldn’t harvest from them. Tough luck, and he had …

Kohtake, though, liked her coffee hot, even in summer. She liked the aroma of it when it was freshly brewed. She couldn’t enjoy iced coffee in the same way. Coffee was far more pleasurable when it was hot. Sitting in a particular chair in a particular cafe, you can travel back in time, but while …

The life of a good man who has died belongs to the people who cared about him, and ought to, and maybe itself is as much comfort as ought to be asked or offered. And surely the talk of reunion in Heaven is thin comfort to people who need each other here as much as …

You have a phenomenal way of seeing into the corners of a story, Mina.– Tamer Shipp Number 5 in the Tillerman series, Come a Stranger is the backstory for Dicey’s friend, Mina. For reasons I haven’t decided yet, it was harder for me to hang on to the threads of this story, but I really …

Fighting racism does not consist of a set of isolated actions that you take; rather these actions must flow from an entire disposition that is oriented toward racial justice. We have to reposition ourselves spiritually, emotionally, culturally, intellectually, and politically to address the myriad ways that racism manifests in the present day. Racial justice is …

They placed their lives on hold for a group of strangers and asked for nothing in return. They affirmed the basic goodness of man at a time when it was easy to doubt such humanity still existed.  Gander, a small town on the Canadian island of Newfoundland, played host to thousands of people who came …

Patterns of prayer draw us out of ourselves, out of our own time bound moment, into the long story of Christ’s work in and through his people over time. Using the scaffold of a particular Compline prayer (Compline – meant to be prayed at nighttime), Warren puts together this remarkable work on finding our way …

For Christians, the teaching and example of Christ are not just one more portion of the Bible, equal among others. Christ’s life and message form the centerpiece of the Bible to which every other aspect of Scriptural teaching points toward or reflects on.  In this book Cavey offers a good overview of the myriad ways …

Brother was gone, and he wouldn’t be back. And the things that had been so before would never be so again. Things are. And then one day they aren’t and will never be. Wendell Berry does a marvelous job writing a moment in the passage of time. Having just read Jayber Crow, I wanted to …

I can’t look back from where I am now and feel that I have been very much in charge of my life. Certainly I have lived on the edge of the Port William community, and I am farther than ever out on the edge of it now. But I feel that I have lived on …

“…..she saw love as something that gets you what you want. She didn’t understand at all.”  A boy grows to better understand his mother. Himself. And the truth of things. This was a very good book.

“But I’ll tell you something else, too. Something I’ve learned, the hard way. I guess”—Gram laughed a little—”I’m the kind of person who has to learn things the hard way. You’ve got to hold on. Hold on to people. They can get away from you. It’s not always going to be fun, but if you …

I always enjoy looking through year-end reviews of people’s favorite things. For instance, and in particular, Austin Kleon has long been one of my favorite follows on the internet and I always look forward to his annual review of 100 Things. And if I remember to look for it, I like to skim through the …

“Oh, children,” said the Lion, “I feel my strength coming back to me. Oh children, catch me if you can!” He stood for a second, his eyes very bright, his limbs quivering, lashing himself with his tail. Then he made a leap high over their heads and landed on the other side of the Table. …

He (Sam) thought back over the extraordinary, coincidental chain of events that had brought him here at this particular time and then left him marooned so that he had no choice but to stay. With hindsight, it seemed as though it had been carefully mapped out by fate. Some – hopefully benign being; the influence of …

“Why?” Dicey asked (of Will). “I mean, why should you bother? You have your own life.”“You’re a little bit of my life now. You can’t get away, and I can’t get rid of you. That’s a fact.”Dicey understood. A lot of people had little bits of her life now, and they were tied to her …

I now understand that the secret to good farming – a secret shared by all the farmers in this book – is to care for the farm than for any product that the farm may produce….all these farmers are much more focused on the soil – both literally and metaphorically….what occupies their attention day in …

“I will learn the steady accumulation of devastating losses that often accompany chronic illness, one loss after another after another, each one a new reckoning of grief and a new reorientation to the discipline of joy.” This book is full of honest story and I appreciate that. Perhaps I would have gotten more from it …

The picture you get at the end of a connect-the-dot activity really depends on which dots you decide to use. So try things and go through phases. Put down a lot of dots. Later you can look back and pick any of those dots to create a picture of how you became who you are. …