Review of When I Was a Child I Read Books, by Marilynne Robinson

Current Issues, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

When I Was a Child I Read Books

by Marilynne Robinson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012. 206 pages.
Starred Review

When I checked out this book, I expected a heart-warming memoir from someone I’ve been told is an outstanding writer. (I really must read her novels. I own at least one.)

Instead, I found scholarly and intellectual essays about a wide variety of things. Reading, yes, but also religion, justice, cosmology, ideology, liberalism, imagination, community, freedom. . .

I read it slowly, and the essays are on different topics, which I’m afraid is an obstacle to remembering all that was in this treasure-house of a book. But I did come back to it eagerly, and every time I dipped into it, it left me thinking deeply.

The essay I remember most distinctly, was, of all things, “The Fate of Ideas: Moses.” In it, she points out that the Mosaic Law, which we often think of as harsh, was much kinder to the poor and downtrodden than modern laws, and particularly than laws in England before America was founded.

Moses (by whom I mean the ethos and spirit of Mosaic law, however it came to be articulated) in fact does not authorize any physical punishment for crimes against property. The entire economic and social history of Christendom would have been transformed if Moses had been harkened to only in this one particular. Feudalism, not to mention early capitalism, is hardly to be imagined where such restraint was observed in defense of the rights of ownership. Anyone familiar with European history is aware of the zeal for brutal punishment, the terrible ingenuity with which the human body was tormented and insulted through the eighteenth century at least, very often to deter theft on the part of the wretched. Moses authorizes nothing of the kind, nor indeed does he countenance any oppression of the poor….

These laws would preserve those who were poor from the kind of wretchedness More describes by giving them an assured subsistence. While charity in Christendom was urged as a virtue — one that has always been unevenly aspired to — here the poor have their portion at the hand of God, and at the behest of the law. If a commandment is something in the nature of a promise (“Ten Commandments is an English imposition; in Hebrew they are called the Ten Words), then not only “you will not be stolen from” but also “you will not steal” would be in some part fulfilled, first because the poor are given the right to take what would elsewhere have been someone else’s property, and second because they are sheltered from the extreme of desperation that drives the needy to theft. The law of Moses so far values life above property that it forbids killing a thief who is breaking and entering by daylight (Exodus 22:2).

More along those lines are found in “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism”:

It is striking to note how protective, even tender, comparable Old Testament laws are toward debtors. This is Deuteronomy 24:10-13: “When you make your neighbor a loan of any sort, you shall not go into his house to fetch his pledge. You shall stand outside, and the man to whom you make the loan shall bring the pledge to you. And if he is a poor man, you shall not sleep in his pledge; when the sun goes down, you shall restore the pledge that he may sleep in his cloak and bless you; and it shall be righeousness to you before the Lord your God.” The Geneva Bible has a note that makes the law gentler yet. It says, “As though ye wouldst appoint what to have, but shalt receive what he may spare.” No one can read the books of Moses with any care without understanding that law can be a means of grace. Certainly this law is of one spirit with the Son of Man who says, “I was hungry and you fed me. I was naked and you clothed me.” This kind of worldliness entails the conferring of material benefit over and above mere equity. It means a recognition of and respect for both the intimacy of God’s compassion and the very tangible forms in which it finds expression….

The tendency to hold certain practices in ancient Israel up to idealized modern Western norms is pervasive in much that passes for scholarship, though a glance at the treatment of the great class of debtors now being evicted from their homes in America and elsewhere should make it clear that, from the point of view of graciousness or severity, an honest comparison is not always in our favor….

At present, here in what is still sometimes called our Calvinist civilization, the controversies of liberalism and conservatism come down, as always, to economics. How exclusive is our claim to what we earn, own, inherit? Are the poor among us injured by the difficulties of their lives, or are the better among them braced and stimulated by the pinch of want? Is Edwards undermining morality when he says “it is better to give to several that are not objects of charity, than to send away empty one that is”? Would we be better friends of traditional values, therefore better Christians, if we exploited the coercive potential of need on the one hand and help on the other? There is clearly a feeling abroad that God smiled on our beginnings, and that we should return to them as we can. If we really did attempt to return to them, we would find Moses as well as Christ, Calvin, and his legions of intellectual heirs. And we would find a recurrent, passionate insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the great blessings God has promised to liberality to the poor. These phrases are all Edwards’s and there are many more like them.

Here’s a paragraph I liked from the essay “Imagination and Community”:

When definitions of “us” and “them” begin to contract, there seems to be no limit to how narrow these definitions can become. As they shrink and narrow, they are increasingly inflamed, more dangerous and inhumane. They present themselves as movements toward truer and purer community, but, as I have said, they are the destruction of community. They insist that the imagination must stay within the boundaries they establish for it, that sympathy and identification are only allowable within certain limits. I am convinced that the broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global.

And here’s a section from that same essay about the nature of education:

From time to time I, as a professor in a public university, receive a form from the legislature asking me to make an account of the hours I spend working. I think someone ought to send a form like that to the legislators. The comparison might be very interesting. The faculty in my acquaintance are quite literally devoted to their work, almost obsessive about it. They go on vacation to do research. Even when they retire they don’t retire. I have benefited enormously from the generosity of teachers from grade school through graduate school. They are an invaluable community who contribute as much as legislators do to sustaining civilization, and more than legislators do to equipping the people of this country with the capacity for learning and reflection, and the power that comes with that capacity. Lately we have been told and told again that our educators are not preparing American youth to be efficient workers. Workers. That language is so common among us now that an extraterrestrial might think we had actually lost the Cold War.

The intellectual model for this school and for most of the older schools in America — for all of them, given the prestige and influence of the older schools — was a religious tradition that loved the soul and the mind and was meant to encourage the exploration and refinement of both of them. I note here that recent statistics indicate American workers are the most productive in the world by a significant margin, as they have been for as long as such statistics have been ventured. If we were to retain humane learning and lose a little edge in relative productivity, I would say we had chosen the better part.

I love it when she waxes eloquent about books:

Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library. I don’t know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever will read. This has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books. But it has caused me to ponder the meaning they have for me, and the fact that to me they epitomize one great aspect of the goodness of life….

I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of — who knows it better than I? — people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility….

I belong to the community of the written word in several ways. First, books have taught me most of what I know, and they have trained my attention and my imagination. Second, they gave me a sense of the possible, which is the great service — and too often, when it is ungenerous, the great disservice — a community performs for its members. Third, they embodied richness and refinement of language, and the artful use of language in the service of the imagination. Fourth, they gave me and still give me courage. Sometimes, when I have spent days in my study dreaming a world while the world itself shines outside my windows, forgetting to call my mother because one of my nonbeings has come up with a thought that interests me, I think, this is a very odd way to spend a life. But I have my library all around me, my cloud of witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience, who have helped me to my deepest enjoyments of it.

I didn’t intend to quote so much! But that gives you an idea of what’s found here. This isn’t light reading; it’s deep and thought-provoking. She’s coming from a Christian and intellectual perspective and I found her words stirred up ideas I’d never thought about before.

fsgbooks.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/when_i_was_a_child_i_read_books.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Falling Upward, by Richard Rohr

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review 0

Falling Upward

A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

by Richard Rohr

Jossey-Bass (Wiley), 2011. 198 pages.

This is a book about spirituality by a Franciscan teacher, and about how our focus changes in the second half of life.

I’d like to think that I’m young for this book, but I also think that my divorce was a huge crisis right at midlife, so in some aspects, I’m on the other side, and it’s fitting for me to read about the “second journey.”

Here’s what Richard Rohr has to say in his “Invitation to a Further Journey”:

A journey into the second half of our own lives awaits us all. Not everybody goes there, even though all of us get older, and some of us get older than others. A “further journey” is a well-kept secret, for some reason. Many people do not even know there is one. There are too few who are aware of it, tell us about it, or know that it is different from the journey of the first half of life. . . .

I find that many, if not most, people and institutions remain stymied in the preoccupations of the first half of life. By that I mean that most people’s concerns remain those of establishing their personal (or superior) identity, creating various boundary markers for themselves, seeking security, and perhaps linking to what seem like significant people or projects. These tasks are good to some degree and even necessary. . . .

But, in my opinion, this first-half-of-life task is no more than finding the starting gate. It is merely the warm-up act, not the full journey. It is the raft but not the shore. If you realize that there is a further journey, you might do the warm-up act quite differently, which would better prepare you for what follows. People at any age must know about the whole arc of their life and where it is tending and leading.

We know about this further journey from the clear and inviting voices of others who have been there, from the sacred and secular texts that invite us there, from our own observations of people who have entered this new territory, and also, sadly, from those who never seem to move on. The further journey usually appears like a seductive invitation and a kind of promise or hope. We are summoned to it, not commanded to go, perhaps because each of us has to go on this path freely, with all the messy and raw material of our own unique lives. But we don’t have to do it, nor do we have to do it alone. There are guideposts, some common patterns, utterly new kinds of goals, a few warnings, and even personal guides on this further journey. I hope I can serve you in offering a bit of each of these in this book.

There’s a lot of wisdom in this book. A lot of it doesn’t exactly fit the doctrine I was taught growing up. I’d like to think that the fact that doesn’t bother me, that I can see the wisdom, might be a sign I’m beginning the path of the further journey.

I did pull out many quotations from this book at Sonderquotes, which will give you an sampling of some of the writer’s wisdom.

Here’s how he finishes his “Invitation to a Further Journey”:

So get ready for a great adventure, the one you were really born for. If we never get to our little bit of heaven, our life does not make much sense, and we have created our own “hell.” So get ready for some new freedom, some dangerous permission, some hope from nowhere, some unexpected happiness, some stumbling stones, some radical grace, and some new and pressing responsibility for yourself and for our suffering world.

josseybass.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/falling_upward.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, by Nina Sankovitch

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

My Year of Magical Reading

by Nina Sankovitch

Harper, 2011. 240 pages.
Starred Review

Three years after Nina Sankovitch’s beloved older sister died, Nina decided to embark on a year of reading. One book each day.

Here’s where she explains setting out on her project:

I needed comfort now. I needed hope. Hope that when life turns on you for the worst, it will turn back again, for the good. We girls had been protected for so long from misfortune. But then everything changed. My sister, the one with the reaching hand, was dead. Life had unleashed its unfairness, its random dispersal of pain, its uncaring lynching of certainty. I had tried running, but now I would try reading. I would trust in Connolly’s promise that “words are alive, and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”

My book reading would be a discipline. I knew there would be pleasure in my reading, but I needed to hold myself to a schedule as well. Without a commitment, the rest of life could creep in and steal time away, and I wouldn’t read as much as I wanted or needed to. I couldn’t have my escape if I didn’t make books my priority. There is always dust to sweep and laundry to fold; there is always milk to buy and dinner to cook and dishes to wash. But none of that could get in my way for one year. I was allowing myself one year to not run, not plan, not provide. A year of nots: not worry, not control, not make money. Sure, our family could use another income, but we’d gotten by for so long on just one salary, we could do it for one more year. We would lay off the extras and find enough in what we had already.

I planned to begin my book-a-day project on my forty-sixth birthday. I would read my first book that day, and the next day I would write my first review. The rules for my year were simple: no author could be read more than once; I couldn’t reread any books I’d already read; and I had to write about every book I read. I would read new books and new authors, and read old books from favorite writers. I wouldn’t read War and Peace, but I could read Tolstoy’s last novel, The Forged Coupon. All the books would be ones I would have shared with Anne-Marie if I could have, ones we would have talked about, argued over, and some we would have agreed upon….

I was ready — ready to sit down in my purple chair and read. For years, books had offered to me a window into how other people deal with life, its sorrows and joys and monotonies and frustrations. I would look there again for empathy, guidance, fellowship, and experience. Books would give me all that, and more. After three years of carrying the truth of my sister’s death around with me, I knew I would never be relieved of my sorrow. I was not hoping for relief. I was hoping for answers. I was trusting in books to answer the relentless question of why I deserved to live. And of how I should live. My year of reading would be my escape back into life.

She doesn’t write in this book about all 365 books — though she does provide a list at the back. Instead, she looks at certain books and the insights from those books or memories they provoked that touched her life and advanced her healing. I’ll provide a few examples:

Man in the Dark is a novel that imagines another world mirroring our own. Two worlds coexisting: Auster uses the device to dig deeply into what keeps us going, what keeps us participating in the motions and the emotions of life. A man, his daughter, and his granddaughter are all facing their own private heartbreaks. They are unsure of how to go on and wavering as to the necessity of even trying to go on. Why bother? And then, in the prose of a lesser-known poet, they find a single sentence that makes perfect sense: “The weird world rolls on.”

The world shifts, and lives change. Without warning or reason, someone who was healthy becomes sick and dies. An onslaught of sorrow, regret, anger, and fear buries those of us left behind. Hopelessness and helplessness follow. But then the world shifts again — rolling on as it does — and with it, lives change again. A new day comes, offering all kinds of possibilities. Even with the experience of pain and sorrow set deep within me and never to be forgotten, I recognize the potent offerings of my unknown future. I live in a “weird world,” shifting and unpredictable, but also bountiful and surprising. There is joy in acknowledging that both the weirdness and the world roll on, but even more, there is resilience.

In talking about The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald, she says:

But now, in reading my books of escape, I had found another way to respond. It was not a way to rid myself of sorrow but a way to absorb it. Through memory. While memory cannot take sorrow away or bring back the dead, remembering ensures that we always have the past with us, the bad moments but also the very, very good moments of laughter shared and meals eaten together and books discussed….

Only now am I grasping the importance of looking backward. Of remembrance. My father finally wrote out his memories for a reason. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth. Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.

The only balm to sorrow is memory; the only salve for the pain of losing someone to death is acknowledging the life that existed before. Remembering someone won’t literally bring them back, and for one who died too young, memories are not enough to make up for all the possibilities of life that they lost out on. But remembrance is the bones around which a body of resilience is built. I think my father found an answer to how his mother continued on, and he found a way to go on himself. He wrote a history for me to read. Stories helped him, and stories were helping me, both the stories of my father and the stories in all the books I was reading.

Discussing the book By Chance, by Martin Corrick, with its main character James Watson Bolsover, she says:

Bolsover tries to find an explanation for the two deaths, to uncover some reason they had to happen or if they could have been avoided. He searches for answers in books. At the beginning of By Chance, he asks the question, “If fiction is not concerned to understand, what is its subject? Is its purpose merely to pass the time?” but he already knows the answer. The purpose of great literature is to reveal what is hidden and to illuminate what is in darkness.

I especially enjoyed the part where she talked about the reviewing part of her year of reading:

People share books they love. They want to spread to friends and family the goodness that they felt when reading the book or the ideas they found in the pages. In sharing a loved book, a reader is trying to share the same excitement, pleasure, chills, and thrills of reading that they themselves experienced. Why else share? Sharing a love of books and of one particular book is a good thing. But it is also a tricky maneuver, for both sides. The giver of the book is not exactly ripping open her soul for a free look, but when she hands over the book with the comment that it is one of her favorites, such an admission is very close to the baring of the soul. We are what we love to read, and when we admit to loving a book, we admit that the book represents some aspect of ourselves truly, whether it is that we are suckers for romance or pining for adventure or secretly fascinated by crime.

And often, she’d turn to how much this experience was doing for her:

The Assault is about more than war. Hannah Coulter is about more than war. Those two books — and all the great books I was reading — were about the complexity and entirety of the human experience. About the things we wish to forget and those we want more and more of. About how we react and how we wish we could react. Books are experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfillment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory. Joy and tears, pleasure and pain: everything came to me while I read in my purple chair. I had never sat so still, and yet experienced so much.

I haven’t read a lot of the books she chose. So I especially took notice when she let her thoughts flow from a book I’d read and loved, Little Bee:

But books were showing me that everyone suffers, at different times in our lives. And that yes, in fact, there were many people who knew exactly what I was going through. Now, through reading, I found that suffering and finding joy are universal experiences, and that those experiences are the connection between me and the rest of the world. My friends could have told me the same, I know, but with friends there are always barriers, hidden corners, and covered emotions. In books, the characters are made known to me, inside and out, and in knowing them, I know myself, and the real people who populate my world.

Yes, this is a memoir for book lovers. Again, I especially loved her reflections on what she’d gotten out of writing about the books. This one was from her discussion of finishing up the year of reading:

I do need to talk about books. Because talking about books allows me to talk about anything with anyone. With family, friends, and even with strangers who contacted me through my Web site (and became friends), when we discuss what we are reading, what we are really discussing is our own lives, our take on everything from sorrow to fidelity to responsibility, from money to religion, from worrying to inebriation, from sex to laundry, and back again. No topic is taboo, as long as we can tie it in to a book we’ve read, and all responses are allowed, couched in terms of characters and their situations.

Now, one of my reactions to Tolstoy and the Purple Chair is envy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to make your “work” each day be to read a book! However, as I write this, I’m on the ballot for next year’s Newbery committee. And serving on the Newbery committee would be a way of dedicating my life to reading for a solid year, every bit as much as Nina Sankovitch did, though perhaps in a different way. I like her approach of treating books as therapy, as escape, as growth. Now my divorce is complete; I’m moving into my first purchased home on my own. What a good time it would be to celebrate the new phase in my life with books!

But even if you don’t have an opportunity to devote a year of your life to books, for anyone to whom that idea sounds delightful, I highly recommend the vicarious experience of spending some time with Nina Sankovitch as she explores her own healing through books.

ReadAllDay.org
harpercollins.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/tolstoy_and_the_purple_chair.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Glad No Matter What, by SARK

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Glad No Matter What

Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity

by SARK

New World Library, 2010. 224 pages.
Starred Review

Even though this is a book about dealing with loss and change, this is a truly joyous and exuberant book. I love SARK’s use of color and art in her pages.

She puts it well right at the beginning:

This is NOT a book about feeling glad when you don’t.
How annoying.
This is a book about finding and living from the glad parts in all of your feelings.

There’s so much wisdom in these pages. Stories. Insights. Encouragement. I’ll post a few more excerpts to give you the idea, but remember that if you read the book, you have the addition of SARK’s wonderful colors and fonts and interesting emphases.

I’ve seen and experienced over and over that grief and loss are always doorways to transformation.

My experiences with both have showed me that we can more actively work with time as we process grief and loss, instead of just waiting for time to pass. We really can consciously practice integrating loss and grief and living with them more fully and beautifully.

I know now that this healing happens in spirals and layers and NOT in steps like a ladder.

We cycle back around and start over, get stuck in the middle, and sometimes get to what feels like the end quickly.

We can weave all of these experiences together into an eventually elegant tapestry. I’ve been speaking with lots of people about the subjects of loss and grief, and it’s clear that in every case, whatever has been lost — job, savings, home, health, money, life — has tremendous gifts and opportunities to offer

if

we do our transformational work.

When we are caring for ourselves, we discover that there is actually plenty of time and energy to care for others and the world too. It is not negatively “selfish” to care for yourself brilliantly and exquisitely. In fact, as you fill your own well from the inside and tend to yourself with great love, it will naturally and effortlessly “spill over” for others to appreciate and utilize.

When you see someone who radiantly glows from within, you are seeing a self-caring soul. This kind of self-care is a living example to be inspired by, so that you can live that way also.

The opposite of old is not young.
The opposite of old is new.
As long as we continue to experience
the new, we will gloriously
inhabit all of the ages that we are.”

In short, I was so happy and supported to read this book after dealing with the loss and change of divorce and then a stroke. So I am convinced this is a wonderful book for after you’ve experienced loss and change, but I believe it would also be wonderful to read during loss and change. And I’m convinced it would be beautiful preparation to read it before loss and change happen to you (and they will). So we’re left with the fact that any time is a good time to read this encouraging book. I recommend reading it slowly, like I did, dipping in to it a part at a time and savoring what you find there.

planetsark.com
newworldlibrary.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/glad_no_matter_what.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own personal copy, purchased via Amazon.com.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Praying for Strangers, by River Jordan

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review, True Stories 0

Praying for Strangers

An Adventure of the Human Spirit

by River Jordan

Berkley Books, New York, 2011. 322 pages.

River Jordan was facing a rough year. Both of her sons were active duty military. One was being deployed to Afghanistan and the other to Iraq. A crazy resolution came into her head, and it ended up being the only resolution she ever carried out, all year long. She began praying for a stranger every day.

This book is the story of that resolution and the way it transformed her year and her life.

The chapters are short. This makes a lovely inspirational book to read a chapter a day during your quiet time. Some of the chapters tell about strangers she met and felt compelled to pray for. Some told their stories to her and why they desperately needed prayer when she offered it. Some she never told she was praying. But what a thought, what a challenge: To pray for a stranger every day.

She reflects on what she learned in the amazing year, and why she’s going to keep going:

But what I am learning when I pray for strangers is that I fully expect those prayers to be answered for the simple reason that this act is carried out from one soul to another without any personal agenda attached. The faith attached to those prayers is tangible, sometimes more than others. When I pray for those closest to me, all those prayers are a part of my selfish heart. Yes, I pray out of love for them but also for my need for that love to continue. For them to be well, happy, successful. For them to thrive in their lives that I might find happiness.

I’m beginning to see that the part of me that reaches out to the homeless and the well-to-do, the young and the aged, the broken and lost, is the one that matters most. My heart has opened up so much further than I ever dreamed possible. These strangers, this adventure, are making me a better person in spite of myself. Once an internal recluse, I’m more open to not only meeting people, but opening myself up to truly caring what happens in their lives. . . .

That’s the way it is now: These people and their stories are no longer shadowy extras, character walk-ons cruising the periphery of my life. Their stories have become integrated into the fabric of my own. Perhaps the poets and prophets were right all along. We don’t come into this world separate, or belonging to a select few, but we’re a part of the human race. All of us amazingly the same in spite of our differences. This is the real thing. We belong to each other. We always have. And in the process of my understanding this, of walking out this resolution, I’ve lost my regret and instead have counted it lost if I don’t touch a life, offer a smile, a prayer, a pause along the way. So every day I continue to do this one tiny thing. This one tiny, incredible thing.

I recommend taking a walk with River Jordan on her surprising journey. You will be inspired and you will be challenged. And your eyes will be opened.

riverjordan.us

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/praying_for_strangers.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Always True, by James MacDonald

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review 0

Always True

God’s 5 Promises When Life Is Hard

by James MacDonald

Moody Publishers, Chicago, 2011. 151 pages.

This is one of those bread-and-butter good spiritual reminders books. James MacDonald goes over five promises from God that you can always count on.

This makes good reading to slowly go through in your devotional times, and that’s how I was approaching it. The first four promises were nice steadying, comforting, encouraging reading.

Promise #1: God Is Always With Me.
I Will Not Fear.

Promise #2: God Is Always in Control.
I Will Not Doubt.

Promise #3: God Is Always Good.
I Will Not Despair.

Promise #4: God Is Always Watching.
I Will Not Falter.

Those were great, they were uplifting, and it encouraged me to read about them. But the fifth promise blew me away.

Here’s the deal. Back in 2006, when I first learned that my husband had filed for divorce, and I was completely devastated, God gave me this verse:

“If anyone does attack you, it will not be my doing;
whoever attacks you will surrender to you. . . .
No weapon forged against you will prevail,
and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.
This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord,
and this is their vindication from me,” declares the Lord.

— Isaiah 54:15, 17 (NIV)

Now, over the years that followed, whenever my husband would mention the word lawyer or threaten me with legal action, this verse would come up, somehow or other. It happened over and over and over again.

Eventually we did get divorced, but last April there was one part of the agreement my ex-husband had not complied with. I didn’t want to do it, but I felt I had to take him to court. My lawyer filed a motion for him to comply and it went to court in April, and things got taken care of, and I was awarded court costs.

The next morning, I opened up this book to read a devotional chapter. Here’s what jumped out at me, in a highlighted box as the chapter heading:

Promise #5: GOD IS ALWAYS VICTORIOUS
(I will not fail)

“No weapon formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is from Me,” says the Lord. Isaiah 54:17 (NKJV)

Yes, in that moment, I felt very loved, very protected, very cared for, and very noticed.

James MacDonald sums it up in a heading for this chapter:

Jesus Christ the Lord, who is Himself all the Promises of God, will be forever victorious. I’ve read to the end of the Book, and God wins.

This book is, plain and simple, a book of encouragement; a book to cheer you on as you overcome. Here’s another statement he makes that I love:

If we have to think hard to come up with God’s blessings, we must be walking around with our eyes firmly shut, our ears closed, and our hearts hard.

Read this book if you can use some encouragement and some reminders of God’s faithfulness.

JamesMacDonald.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/always_true.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, purchased through Crossings Book Club.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Each Day a New Beginning, by Karen Casey

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Each Day a New Beginning

Daily Thoughts for Women

by Karen Casey

Hazelden, 1991 (2nd edition. 1st edition, 1982).
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #7 Other Nonfiction

Karen Casey has so much wisdom. I first was introduced to her writings by her book Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow. I found this book of daily meditations I think in May 2011. I picked up the book in the middle, on the day I was on, and when 2012 came around, I started at January first and kept reading from it all year.

The thoughts in this book seem to be mainly geared toward people in 12-step programs, but even if you aren’t in one (as I am not), the wise words are a great way to start your day. The daily pages are short. Each day’s meditation begins with a quotation from a woman and ends with a summing up thought for the day.

I found an example to quote that happens to show where the title came from. Here is the meditation for April 7:

It is only when people begin to shake loose from their preconceptions, from the ideas that have dominated them, that we begin to receive a sense of opening, a sense of vision.

— Barbara Ward

A sense of vision, seeing who we can dare to be and what we can dare to accomplish, is possible if we focus intently on the present and always the present. We are all we need to be, right now. We can trust that. And we will be shown the way to become who we need to become, step by step, from one present moment to the next present moment. We can trust that, too.

The past that we hang onto stands in our way. Many of us needlessly spend much of our lives fighting a poor self-image. But we can overcome that. We can choose to believe we are capable and competent. We can be spontaneous, and our vision of all that life can offer will change — will excite us, will cultivate our confidence.

We can respond to life wholly. We can trust our instincts. And we will become all that we dare to become.

Each day is a new beginning. Each moment is a new opportunity to let go of all that has trapped me in the past. I am free. In the present, I am free.

That gives you the idea of the format and content. Encouragements and wise thoughts to get you going on your day. I found another Karen Casey book to start in 2013, but I will keep this one around for some time in the future.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/each_day_a_new_beginning.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own personal copy.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of A Praying Life, by Paul E. Miller

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Starred Review 0

A Praying Life

Connecting with God in a Distracting World

by Paul E. Miller

NavPress, 2009. 279 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #3 Other Nonfiction

My small group began this book more than a year ago, and I continued slowly through it on my own. I think it’s the best book I’ve ever read on prayer, full of practical ideas for really getting personal with God and listening for His voice.

I like the first section: “Learning to Pray Like a Child.” He thinks of prayer in a very personal way with God, and gives examples of how that has worked in his life. He prays like someone really talking with his Father, and helps me want to do that, too.

And Paul E. Miller doesn’t simply talk about prayer. He talks about a praying life. Here’s a section from the Introduction:

Because prayer is all about relationship, we can’t work on prayer as an isolated part of life. That would be like going to the gym and working out just your left arm. You’d get a strong left arm, but it would look odd. Many people’s frustrations with prayer come from working on prayer as a discipline in the abstract.

We don’t learn to pray in isolation from the rest of our lives. For example, the more I love our youngest daughter, Emily, the more I pray for her. The reverse is true as well; the more I learn how to pray for her, the more I love her. Nor is faith isolated from prayer. The more my faith grows, the bolder my prayers get for Jill. Then, the more my prayers for her are answered, the more my faith grows. Likewise, if I suffer, I learn how to pray. As I learn how to pray, I learn how to endure suffering. This intertwining applies to every aspect of the Christian life.

Since a praying life is interconnected with every part of our lives, learning to pray is almost identical to maturing over a lifetime. What does it feel like to grow up? It is a thousand feelings on a thousand different days. That is what learning to pray feels like.

He goes on to explore many different facets of prayer. How much do we really know our Father? How comfortable are we talking with him? The ideas in this book can help.

There were many, many sections of this book I especially like, and I’ve posted them on Sonderquotes. I am sure I’m going to come back to this book again and again for encouragement from a fellow-traveler.

When it comes to prayer, we, too, just need to get the words out. Feel free to stop and pray now. It’s okay if your mind wanders or your prayers get interrupted. Don’t be embarrassed by how needy your heart is and how much it needs to cry out for grace. Just start praying. Remember the point of Christianity isn’t to learn a lot of truths so you don’t need God anymore. We don’t learn God in the abstract. We are drawn into his life.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/praying_life.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy of the book.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of A Jane Austen Education, by William Deresiewicz

Austenalia, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review, True Stories 0

A Jane Austen Education

How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter

by William Deresiewicz

The Penguin Press, New York, 2011. 255 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #3 Nonfiction: Personal Stories

I’m a huge Jane Austen fan. I wrote a paper on her my Sophomore year of college. I had lots of time in which to write the paper — so I read ALL her novels, and then wrote the paper staying up all night the night before it was due.

A Jane Austen Education is perhaps my favorite so far of nonfiction Jane Austen take-offs. William Deresiewicz was a graduate student of literature, and he writes about how things he learned from Jane Austen mirrored and informed his life as he became an adult. He’s not afraid to pull out lessons that he needed to learn, and there’s a lovely combination of personal observations and stories with ideas and examples from the novels.

Here’s how he begins:

I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she’d been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

He goes through all the novels, matching them up to different periods of his life. There’s lots and lots of good stuff here. He has studied all the novels and studied Jane Austen’s life, so he has plenty of information to convey, and along the way, he comes up with some profound insights and self-deprecating humor. I’ll include at least one paragraph from the chapter on each novel, but there’s a lot more where this comes from.

From Emma:

There was one more thing about my life that had to change, now that I’d read Emma: my relationships with the people around me. Once I started to see myself for the first time, I started seeing them for the first time, too. I began to notice and care about what they might be experiencing, and they began to develop the depth and richness of literary characters. I could almost feel along with their feelings now, as we talked, feel the contours of them as they tried to express them to me. Instead of a boring blur, the life around me now was sharp and important. Everything was interesting, everything was meaningful, every conversation held potential revelations. It was like having my ears turned on for the first time. Suddenly the world seemed fuller and more spacious than I had ever imagined it could be, a house with a thousand rooms that now lay open to explore.

From Pride and Prejudice:

But Austen, it turned out, did not see things that way. For her, growing up has nothing to do with knowledge or skills, because it has everything to do with character and conduct. And you don’t strengthen your character or improve your conduct by memorizing the names of Roman emperors (or American presidents) or learning how to do needlework (or calculus). You don’t do so, she believed, by developing self-confidence and self-esteem, either. If anything, self-confidence and self-esteem are the great enemies, because they make you forget that you’re still just a bundle of impulse and ignorance. For Austen, growing up means making mistakes.

From Northanger Abbey:

Catherine thought she saw things at Northanger Abbey that weren’t really there, but the novel, my professor explained, was not against imagination. Quite the opposite. It was against delusion, against projection, against thinking the same old thing again and again, whether it’s the idea that all balls are “very agreeable indeed” or that all old houses conceal dark secrets. True imagination, he went on, means the ability to envision new possibilites, for life as well as art. Mrs. Allen and the rest of Austen’s dull adults were not ignorant or stupid so much as they were unimaginative. Nothing was ever going to change for them, because they couldn’t imagine that anything ever would.

From Mansfield Park:

How different this was, I realized, from the kinds of stories I had trained myself to tell my friend and his wife, those polished little anecdotes that had to have a laugh at every turn. “You shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.” All about: no impatience, no competitiveness, no interruptions, no need to worry about being entertaining, no having to watch your listeners’ eyes glaze over while they thought about what they were going to say when you finally stopped talking already. Did Edmund really care about her brothers and sisters? Probably not. But he cared about her, and she cared about them, and that was enough for him. To listen to a person’s stories, he understood, is to learn their feelings and experiences and values and habits of mind, and to learn them all at once and all together. Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else’s stories — entering into their feelings, validating their experiences — is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.

From Persuasion:

Putting your friend’s welfare before your own: that was Austen’s idea of true friendship. That means admitting when you’re wrong, but even more importantly, it means being willing to tell your friend when they are. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that notion, because it flew so strongly in the face of what we believe about friendship today. True friendship, we think, means unconditional acceptance and support. The true friend validates your feelings, takes your side in every argument, helps you feel good about yourself at all times, and never, ever judges you. But Austen didn’t believe that. For her, being happy means becoming a better person, and becoming a better person means having your mistakes pointed out to you in a way that you can’t ignore. Yes, the true friend wants you to be happy, but being happy and feeling good about yourself are not the same things. In fact, they can sometimes be diametrically opposed. True friends do not shield you from your mistakes, they tell you about them: even at the risk of losing your friendship — which means, even at the risk of being unhappy themselves.

From Sense and Sensibility:

If love begins in friendship, I was now able to see, it has to adhere to the principles of friendship as Austen understood them. The lover’s highest role, like the friend’s, is to help you to become a better person: push you, if necessary, even at the risk of wounded feelings. Austen’s lovers challenged each other: to be less selfish, more aware, kinder, more considerate — not only toward each other but to everyone around them. Love, I saw, for Austen — and what a change this was from the days of my rebellious youth — is an agent not of subversion, but of socialization. Lovers aren’t supposed to goad each other toward extremes of transgression, the way that Marianne and Willoughby did; they’re supposed to teach each other the value of behaving with propriety and decorum, show each other that society’s expectations are worthy, after all, of respect. Love, for Austen, is not about remaining forever young. It’s about becoming an adult.

Now, undoubtedly, my knowledge of all the Austen novels contributed to my enjoyment of this book, but I have little doubt that it would also encourage people to read the novels who haven’t before. All in all, it’s a wonderful contribution to Austenalia, a delightful, thoughtful, even scholarly contribution, and from a male perspective, as a nice contrast to so many others. I highly recommend that Jane Austen fans read this book.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/jane_austen_education.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, which I got at an ALA conference.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Help Thanks Wow, by Anne Lamott

Christian, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Help
Thanks
Wow

The Three Essential Prayers

by Anne Lamott

Riverhead Books (Penguin), 2012. 102 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #1 Other Nonfiction

I’ve always loved Anne Lamott’s down-to-earth spirit, and this book’s title says it all. If you think about it, isn’t it true: Help. Thanks. Wow. Those are indeed the three essential prayers.

She has a chapter for each prayer, with funny and insightful observations. Then there’s a chapter at the end titled “Amen.” Her observations move me, inspire me, make me laugh, and encourage me to pray.

I’ll include some bits from her “Prelude” chapter:

Some of us have cavernous vibrations inside us when we communicate with God. Others are more rational and less messy in our spiritual sense of reality, in our petitions and gratitude and expressions of pain or anger or desolation or praise. Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.

Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true. We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape.

I’ll post more from this book on Sonderquotes, because it’s full of nuggets that uplift and inspire me.

Why am I saying so much? Put simply, my reaction when I finish a book by Anne Lamott is: Wow.

riverheadbooks.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/help_thanks_wow.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.