Books

Does anybody care about book reviews? If not, click on by!

First let me tell you that I don't generally read inspirational books. Sorry. Just another way in which I don't groove to the same beat as many Christian women. So you'll rarely find a recommendation for Christian books here. And I may as well tell you that inspirational books for Christian women are pretty much never going to show up. Just not my thing.

That being said I am a reader. I am usually reading more than one book at a time and I always read for an hour in bed at night, usually 8-9:00 p.m. I don't generally watch television so while the men folk catch up on the Sara Conner Chronicles, I'm reading. This year I decided to stop buying books which wasn't easy for me. Books are my luxury item. But I realize that much as I love owning them, I don't need stacks of books all over the house and it's money better spent elsewhere. Now I go to the library every 3-4 weeks and check out a stack. I actually love the library so I'm not in too much pain. Our city has a library system and the nearest local branch is called the Snow Branch (pretty name, huh?) It's an older building as any proper library should be. My only complaint is that it's rather on the small side and I predict I will have more or less exhausted it by year's end. The good news is that the city does have several branches and there's another one five minutes away so I'll just have to expand a bit. Well for heaven's sake, obviously all of them are within the city so I guess I'm not exactly braving the wild frontier here.

I generally check out 3 fiction and 2-3 nonfiction books at once and read one from each category at a time. Some books are good reads but not good bedtime reads; I choose the more peaceful ones for bed. Currently reading the biography of James Herriot. LOVE James Herriot. Just finished 'Bridge of Sighs' which was good too. It was basically written from the perspective of a man in his sixties writing his own memoir and I love that kind of detailed historical story where I can picture the rooms of the houses and the voices of the people. It had a goodness to the story if that makes sense. The main character, Lou, and Bobby were best friends from boyhood through high school. Lou's wife, Sarah, meets Bobby in high school and they become close as well. Bobby leaves town and they lose touch over the intervening years leaving Sarah and Lou happy in their lives but both suspecting that Sarah could have loved Bobby instead. In the end through the unfolding of Lou's life from early childhood to 64 years old the characters are flawed but good and come to realize that the love they have invested in one another was the right love. I'm probably not doing the story justice but I appreciated the fact that the human doubt and imperfection were there without the author taking them into immorality and destruction. The characters controlled the impulses that would've torn their friendships and marriages apart because they were wrong, not because they always felt like it. And in the process they built a beautiful life that was no compromise of what might have been but far superior to what they could have imagined. I finished the book convinced again that people do not live free of doubts and second-guesses but can still find ultimate joy and completion if they stay the course of what is right. And let's be honest, most of us (all?) have moments when we wonder, what if I would've done this differently?

So that's my latest review. I'm about half way through the Herriot biography and starting 'The Last Town On Earth." That one is more disturbing so I probably won't make it my bedtime story, it's about a town wiped out by Spanish Influenza at the turn of the century and the descriptions of the victims are very graphic.

So, what are you reading?