The Crowd On My Bookshelf in 2024

In the middle of our granddaughter's soccer game last weekend, my son-in-law inquired about my favorite book in 2024.  I had no idea.  Even after perusing my list later that day, I still didn't have a definitive answer.  I loved the story in this one.  The characters were incredible in that tale.  I never knew the backstory behind that historic event. This narrative really made me think. And those other books, oh, I will definitely read again. (And some of them I already have).  I read history, theology, some great novels, and lots of children's books.  And the Bible, which holds us all together, more than we can know.

Here is my list for 2024.  Hope you enjoyed some of these as well.  Of making many books there is no end... Ecclesiastes 12.12.

Alongside my list of titles, for years I have archived notes or quotations from most of the books I read.  I have included just a few nuggets from this year at the end of my booklist.

1.     The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty by Martin Schleske (2020)
2.     Shadows on the Rock  by Willa Cather (1931)
3.     Waymaker:  Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of   by Ann Voskamp         (2022)
4.    The Many Assassinations of Samir, The Seller of Dreams by Daniel Nayeri (2023)
5.    The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis (1953)
6.    The Eyes & The Impossible by Dave Eggers (2023)
7.    Lifting the Veil:  Imagination and the Kingdom of God by Malcolm Guite (2021)
8.    Life After Power:  Seven Presidents and their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House by Jared Cohen (2024)
9.     The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others’ Eyes by C. S. Lewis (2019)
10.    My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman (2013)
11.    The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA by Liza Mundy (2023)
12.    If You Want to Write  by Brenda Ueland (1938)
13.    I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger (2024)
14.    Walking on Water:  Reflections on Faith and Art  by Madeleine L’Engle (1980)
15.    Outlive:  The Science and Art of Longevity  by Peter Attia, MD (2023)
16.    The Watchmaker’s Daughter by Larry Loftis (2023)
17.    The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (1989)
18.    Rules for a Knight: The Last Letter of Sir Thomas Lemuel Hawke by Ethan Hawke (2010)
19.    Blue Ice and Other Stories from the Rink by Frank Ewert (2009)
20.    Practicing the Way:  Be with Jesus, Become like Him, Do as He did by John Mark Comer (2024)
21.    The Women by Kristin Hannah (2024)
22.    Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (2014)
23.    The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez (2024)
24.    Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023 by Wendell Berry (2024)
25.    The Elephant of Belfast by S. Kirk Walsh (2021)
26.    Beneath the Swirling Sky by Carolyn Leiloglou (2023)
27.    The Hotel Balzaar by Kate DiCamillo (2024)
28.    A Long Road on a Short Day by Gary D. Schmidt and Elizabeth Stickney (2020)
29.    Blessed Are The Peacemakers: Christ’s Teachings about Love, Compassion and Forgiveness by Wendell Berry (2005)
30.    On Wings of Love:  Stories From Mission Aviation Fellowship by Lee Roddy (1981)
31.    The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History by Sharon McMahon (2024)
32.    Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating A Life Of Holy Attention by Sarah Clarkson (2024)
33.    Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White (1952)
34.    The Bible

 

The Sound of Life's Unspeakable Beauty by Martin Schleske (2020) Allow yourself to be led. Turn your troubles into prayer requests and let them come to rest before God.

Practicing the Way:  Be with Jesus, Become like Him, Do as He did by John Mark Comer (2024) Don’t fight against your season;  work with it.

Everyone is preaching a "gospel." The question is not "Are you preaching the gospel?" It's "What gospel are you preaching?"

The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez (2024)  It’s a cemetery for stories, the woman replies.  Con su permiso, how does one bury a story?  If a story is never told, where does it go?

My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman (2013)  All too often the task to which we are called is simply to show a kindness to the irritating person in the cubicle next to us.  

There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us.

The Many Assassinations of Samir, The Seller of Dreams by Daniel Nayeri (2023)   The lesson is that prayer is not for the moon to stop for us.  It is for us to stop and consider the work of heaven.

I ask Samir what we will do.  He says, "God will think of something."

The Hotel Balzaar by Kate DiCamillo (2024)  “There are days,” said the countess as she put on a hat that featured a yellow bird, “when the soul can be rescued from despair by the right hat.  Although some days, of course the soul seems beyond rescue, and then there is nothing to do except to be patient and wait for the light to return, with or without a hat upon your head.”
     This, thought Marta, is one of those days.

Life After Power:  Seven Presidents and their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House by Jared Cohen (2024)  [John Quincy Adams]  …in a much lower office found a much higher calling.

And he’s shown that defeat is not the end of the road – it can be the beginning of a new path.

[Jimmy Carter]  “My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can.”

[George W. Bush]   The next morning [after getting back to their ranch after 13 years as governor and president] Bush woke up early, as usual, and he asked Laura who was going to make the coffee.  “You are,” she told him.

 

 

The Secrets of Slow Cooking

The rock-hard frozen chicken thighs made a slight clunk as I dropped them into the slow cooker.  I threw in some spices, two cans of coconut milk, and a sauteed diced onion, and covered it with the lid.  The unlikely mixture did not look at all appetizing at this point. But I gave it a long slow afternoon.

For a time, slow cooking doesn’t look like anything heroic is happening at all.  And then, a gentle boil and perhaps a bit of condensation is visible on the lid.  We leave to do something else, but when we return and walk into the room, the aroma gets all over everything.

Faithfulness believes in the slow cooking of prayer. All too often, we pray pre-packaged microwavable prayers and expect an immediate pre-conceived plastic-wrapped answer in sixty seconds or less.   

But we just need to trust in the slow work of God.

A lot of ingredients have yet to be added.  And the flavors need long slow hours to meld.  God is at work.  Over time we may realize something else is missing, a vital element perhaps.  And many more long-simmering prayers are mingled in the pot, added in sequence when the time is right, and somehow our hearts come to a different understanding.

We don’t comprehend the tenderizing that is happening, the connections being made with unrelated people or situations that appear not to fit.  The deeper things cannot be rushed.  And the result would not be the same if it were hurried along.  The Lord is not slow to fulfill as some count slowness…  2 Peter 3. 9

It is just not the same without the slow cooking of our prayers.

Recently as I was cleaning out a file, I uncovered scraps of papers covered in prayer requests which I had jotted down in a Bible study group from years ago. We had prayed through personal disasters, heart aches, desperate needs, new jobs, new hearts in old jobs, difficult relationships, anxieties, and downright fears. 

I was not impacted by the “results,” but God’s faithfulness to that group, even when we could not yet see His hand.  And all the while, all that time, even now, God has been working.  The waiting is part of God’s gentle simmering. 

How long, O LORD?  (Psalm 13. 1)  His love extends as long as it takes.  We cannot measure the time it takes for a prodigal heart to soften – or maybe our own.  This feast may not be for us – or about us—after all.  But for a thousand generations.

The things we pray may never see the light of day in our lifetime, but that does not diminish the significance that we pray.  We have been entrusted to faithfully come before the Lord.  We may never taste the outcome.  Perhaps for us, to pray is just being embraced by the aroma of the Almighty.  That would be enough.

In slow prayer, the impossibly tough cuts of meat become amazingly tender.  The ordinary vegetables orphaned in the bottom of the fridge become royalty. The flavors join together seamlessly.  Every ingredient adds to the final result.  And when it seems like God is taking His sweet time – well, God has all the time in the world. 

At some point, we just have to trust. 

There are no secrets of slow praying.  Just that we pray.

The prayer of the righteous has great power as it simmers. 

                             James 5. 16

 

Quiet Undisturbed Hours of Midnight

It was a dark and stormy night of the soul when a young doctor precariously stood on the precipice of despair.  Nothing but nothing had turned out as he had envisioned.  His relationship with his engaged sweetheart had deteriorated.  With great excitement, he had opened a medical practice, and no one walked through the door.  He was penniless and discouraged.

A friend mentioned that he might be interested in a random article in a recent medical journal.   That evening, he began to read it.  Just twelve measly pages, but enough to put him into a deep sleep. The verbose article just did not pique his interest.  But something unexpected happened.

As mentioned in the book Breakthrough by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg:

"But at two o’clock in the morning he found himself awake, still clothed, still sitting in the chair by the bed, the journal still open in his lap.  What had awakened him?  A noise outside?  A dream?  No.  He was awakened by the force of an idea.

"He took the small black notebook from the bedside table and scribbled twenty-five words in a barely legible, sometimes misspelled, loopy, half-awake hand.  These twenty-five words scrawled at two o’clock in the morning on October 31, 1920, would eventually lead to the solution of a medical mystery that had persisted for thousands of years." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That young distraught man, Dr. Fred Banting, was not just at the end of his rope.  Little did he realize in those few moments half-asleep in the middle of the night, he was on the verge of the discovery of insulin for the treatment of type 1 diabetes.  Through all history, a diagnosis for type 1 was a death sentence. He pursued months of hard research in the face of skeptics and in a borrowed stifling-hot ill-equipped laboratory.  In July 1921 -- one hundred years ago last month-- those twenty-five words scratched out on a scrap of paper took root.  Insulin has saved the lives of millions of people.  Banting, that unsuccessful, unknown, and struggling doctor was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1923.

Banting remarked in a lecture in Chicago in March 1925:

"We do not know when ideas come, but the importance of [an] idea ... cannot be overestimated.  From the nature of things, ideas do not come from prosperity, affluence and contentment, but rather from the blackness of despair, not in the bright light of day, nor the footlights’ glare, but rather in the quiet, undisturbed hours of midnight, or early morning, when one can be alone to think.  These are the grandest hours of all, when the progress of research, when the hewn stones of scientific fact are turned over and over, and fitted in so that the mosaic figure of truth, designed by Mother Nature long ago, be formed from the chaos."

It made me wonder about how many others ignored those wandering thoughts in the middle of the night that led to such a life-altering solution.  God was trying to get someone's attention.  And as seen over and over in scripture, God again used the unexpected and the unlikely to manifest His purposes.

And it made me think about what wakes me in the middle of the night.  Am I thinking?  Am I just worrying? Is God trying to nudge me about what I have left undone? Am I listening to Him? When have I welcomed those wrinkles in my sleep?

Few of us will discover medical breakthroughs, but God has strategically placed us for His glory right where we are to be faithful to Him.  Are we listening when seemingly unrelated pieces suddenly begin to converge?  Or do we dismiss those connections as random instead of recognizing the hand of the Almighty?  Or overlook the faithfulness of God breaking through? 

Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said,

"Surely the LORD is in this place,

             and I did not know it."

                       Genesis 28. 16

Whatever and whenever that might be.  All things are profoundly significant in obedience to Him.  Far more than we realize, far beyond our lifetimes or our myopic vision.

Are we responsive to God's nudges in the quiet hours of midnight?  Or just turn over and go back to sleep?  How much do we miss because we are not listening?

 

For we are His workmanship,

created in Christ Jesus for good works,

which God prepared beforehand,

that we should walk in them.

                     Ephesians 2. 10

 

A Year in Books 2019

I chuckle as I post this list of books that I devoured in 2019.  When I was a little girl, my extroverted musician mom would literally hide my library books, in an effort to get me to do something useful, purposeful and life-affirming like learning to play the violin like her and moving freely among large gatherings of people.

I am still at it, Mom, sometimes (gasp!) reading more than one book at a time.  My life now, as then, was not consumed by books, but energized and in many ways enlarged by them, similar to how Mom herself was impacted by her music.  Just as she always had a piece she was working on, well, I almost always have a book cracked open, keeping my place with a pen or scrap of paper -- to underline, to take notes, to savor a truth, to grab a paragraph or two even in a brief opportune moment. 

One principle that continues to guide my reading, as C. S. Lewis recommended, "It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."  I tried to include new and old, fiction and nonfiction, children's literature, spiritual formation, historical, scientific, and favorites read again.

And when I reluctantly come to the end of a really delightful book, I know now that this first reading is only preparation for a second reading sometime down the road.  As the French say "au revoir," see you again.

Enjoy!

Books 2019

1. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery (1941)
2. Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson (2018)
3. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016) 
4. The War Before the War:  Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War by Andrew Delbanco (2018)
5.  Giving:  Purpose is the New Currency by Alexandre Mars (2019)
6. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century  by Kirk Wallace Johnson 2018)
7. The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal (2018)
8.  Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland (1993)
9. Madison Park:  A Place of Hope by Eric L. Motley (2017)
10. An American Childhood by Annie Dillard (1987)
11. The Secret at Pheasant Cottage by Patricia St John (1978)
12. The Tanglewoods’ Secret by Patricia St. John (1948)
13. Rainbow Garden by Patricia St. John (1960)
14. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (1989)
15. The Gospel Comes with a House Key:  Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield (2018)
16.  Betrayed! by Stan Telchin (1981)
17. Nathan Coulter  by Wendell Berry (1960)
18. A World Lost by Wendell Berry (1996)
19. Remember by Wendell Berry (2008)
20. Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry (2004)
21.  Half the Church by Carolyn Custis James (2011)
22. Things As They Are:  Mission Work in Southern India by Amy Carmichael (1903)
23. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (2000)
24. John Steinbeck Working Days:  The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath by Robert DeMott, editor (1989)
25. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (2018)
26. The Root of the Righteous by A. W. Tozer (1955) 
27. The Storm On Our Shores by Mark Obmascik (2019)
28. Mama Maggie by Marty Makary and Ellen Vaughn (2015)
29.  Fidelity:  Five Stories by Wendell Berry (1992)
30. How (Not) To Be Secular:  Reading Charles Taylor by James K. A. Smith (2014)
31. Watch With Me by Wendell Berry (1994)
32. Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien (1978)
33. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life by C. S. Lewis (1955)
34. Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary D. Schmidt (2004)
35. Tender At The Bone:  Growing Up At The Table by Ruth Reichl (1998)
36. The Second Mountain:  The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks (2019)
37. Running:  A Love Story: 10 years, 5 marathons, and 1 life-changing sport by Jen A. Miller (2016)
38. Prayer:  Forty Days of Practice by Justin McRoberts and Scott Erickson (2019)
39. The Road to Paris by Nikki Grimes (2006)
40. The Volunteer:  One Man, An Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz by Jack Fairweather (2019)
41. Life Without Lack:  Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23 by Dallas Willard (2018)
42. The Testament by John Grisham (1999)
43. Save Me the Plums:  My Gourmet Memoir by Ruth Reichl (2019)
44. Ripple Effects by Pam Tebow (2019)
45. Racing the Rain by John L. Parker Jr. (2015)
46. What is a Family? By Edith Schaeffer (1975)
47. Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation by Frederick Buechner (1983)
48. The Eyes of the Heart: A Memoir of the Lost and Found by Frederick Buechner (1999)
49. Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
50. 26 Marathons:  What I learned about Faith, Identity, Running, and Life from My Marathon Career by Meb Keflezighi (2019)
51. My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers (1935)
52. The Bible