Thoughts on Books

If there is anything that characterizes this blog, even up to the title, it is BOOKS.   

Books ....

....read aloud to children, 

.... shared with friends, 

..... discussed.   

A recent phone call with Chari may have been the first time we ever DIDN'T talk about what we were reading!   Or did we?    Well, if Bible in a Year and Catechism in a Year count, and I think they do, we actually did talk about books this time too.      

Books...

.... listened to!

Here in Oklahoma I only have a tiny shelf of books.   Most of them are still back in California, where my three oldest sons are managing the house in our absence.    The lack of books gives me pangs sometimes, but not nearly so much as it would have before e-reading.   After all, I basically have a whole library on a small device.    And then, of course, easy access to audiobooks, as well.   It is something I never even visualized as a child carrying around as many books as the local library would let me check out, or rereading my home supply of books for the thirtieth time.  

Of course, digital reading is not quite the same.   My granddaughter tells me that a large part of what she loves about reading is holding the book, turning the pages, remembering where she was when she read that last chapter, which cat was sitting in her lap, and so on.      I have a whole collection of similar memories from when I was her age, sometimes with the very same book.    

A few books I have read recently:

The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day.   This is an autobiography, written when she was in her 50's; she lived to be over 80.    I had been wanting to learn more about this Servant of God.   Interesting to find she was in San Francisco during the Great Earthquake, as a child of eight; close to the same age as my husband's grandmother who was also a child in San Francisco during the earthquake.  

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton.   This one I read because I joined Well Read Moms this year.    I thought I had read it before, but it didn't seem familiar.    I know my Dad read it, so maybe I just saw it around the house as a teenager.     Very beautiful; basically about fathers and sons, and forgiveness, and a country broken and wounded by injustice.  

Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos.    Another sad one -- I guess it is Lent!   A small parish priest in 1930's France who lives out St Therese's maxim "To love is to give everything and to give oneself."

Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.  After I read Dorothy Day's book, I found a copy of Practice of the Presence of God with an introduction by her.    This book is a reread, but I thought it would be a good one to take me the rest of the way through Lent.    I'm reading it in bits and pieces during the day.