I thought it might be a good practice to share the books I am reading or have finished reading. I think that to be a great minister, you have to really study humanity, so most of my book choices are about this: how to know what it means to be human.
I am not a fast reader and don’t generally listen to audiobooks. My goal is to read 47 books this year. I read 44 last year (goal: 40). I know some people listen to audiobooks and can increase their reading list, but books don’t tend to stick with me that way, and I can’t mine for quotes. However, sometimes, it is fun to listen to children’s books this way.
I read almost all of my books on a Kindle unless I am purchasing it for a class reading. I use the Libby app from my local library to read most of my books for free. This means I’m not usually one of the first to read a brand-new book. The exception to this rule is when I preorder a book from an author I know and love.
As soon as I hear of a popular read or something that looks interesting, I add it to the holds at my library, knowing I will have to wait quite a while to get it. This keeps my to-read list, and it puts me in line. In order to mine quotes, I highlight quotes I want to remember and have them sent to my email when I finish the book.
The downside is that I often do not get to choose what I will read next, as the hold line often chooses for me. The other downside is that my library doesn’t have many spiritual books to read, so I usually look for those in other ways or purchase them. I usually purchase books secondhand from thrift books. You get points for purchasing and can easily earn free books. I still use Amazon (especially since I have a Kindle), but I am trying to make a conscious effort to buy books from local booksellers.
Here’s what I read in January.
1. Small Things Like These
Why I Finished It:
I think I heard a pastor mention this book in a sermon. Otherwise, I’m not sure where I heard about this one. I loved this little book. It is short and packs a punch. I would like to make it an annual Christmas read. I did highlight quotes but forgot to email them to myself. It’s a short Christmastime story about how the small things make a life, things like being present and paying attention.
2. Remarkably Bright Creatures
Why I Finished It:
This is an amazing piece of fiction. There is some adult language, but it is told from the point of view of three main characters: Marcellus the octopus; Tova, a woman in her 70s trying to stay present to life; and Cameron, a kinda deadbeat Californian in his twenties who can’t seem to get his life together. When the story unfolds, Tova’s husband has been dead for a year or so, and her son for almost thirty. She works as the night cleaner for the local aquarium in Sowell Bay, a small town outside of Seattle. Marcellus, we quickly learn, is counting down the days to his death. He’s the best part of the book, and Tova soon discovers that he wanders the aquarium for snacks and other adventures at night when no one can see him. There is a mystery surrounding Tova’s son, Erik’s death. Will she discover it before she moves to a retirement home in another city or not?
I loved it for the beautiful story the debut author weaved and its take on humanity.
Favorite Quote:
“Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.”
3. How to Stay Married
Why I Finished It:
Prior to this book, I’d never read a Harrison Scott Key book, but it seems his genre is humor memoir. This is the story about his wife’s infidelity and how they stay married. This hits on real life, faith/church issues, finding community in hard times, and what it means to be married. You will find yourself laughing about things that would not be funny in real life, with some occasional tears.
I enjoyed how he talked about church and finding friends and community and people that you can be down in the trenches with when life is hard. I especially love his tenacity to love his wife when she was beating the crap out of his heart through unfaithfulness.
I keep seeing people post this one as a must-read. It was a good read, but I don’t find it a must-read.
Favorite Quotes (sorry I shared so many):
“Even in smaller groups, like Sunday school, which often began with a short prayer led by the teacher, you’d be hard-pressed to hear genuine expressions of specific human suffering.”
“We could not bear to hear about the suffering of the people in the room, Good Lord, no: too real. We never prayed for our marriages, our children, our interior lives.”
“I resigned myself to a marriage as flat as root beer in the sun.”
“We didn’t need beatific and pious masquerades. We needed the masks ripped right off.”
“A church with broken windows is just what we needed: the community that would make us whole again and pull us through what had happened, and what was yet to come.”
“What if marriage, at its very best, exists to remake us into beautiful new creatures we scarcely recognize? What if, in some cosmically weird way, escaping a hard marriage is not how you change? What if staying married is?”
“I now understand that to comprehend the immensity of someone’s pain is to comprehend the full breadth of the soul.”
4. What’s Your Decision?
Why I Finished It:
This is one I needed to read for my spiritual direction cohort. I really enjoyed it, though. The writing is not fancy, but it is full of wisdom from St. Ignatius on discernment and how to make choices. If you are familiar with Emily Freeman’s work, this is very similar and is likely the type of source she may have originally pulled from. I recommend it to everyone!
Favorite Quotes:
“Our freedom has a purpose, and decision making is essentially a matter of discovering this purpose and aligning ourselves with it. God is at work in your life and cares about the decisions we make that shape our path.”
“Our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening life in me.”
“The only prerequisite for good decision making is a desire to make this one choice to grow in life with God.”
“The very confusion of thoughts and feelings is the place where we find God’s footprints.”
“Ignatius’s great discovery was that we can listen to the language of our hearts when making decisions.”
“We’re designed to hear God speak through our emotional responses to the experiences we have.”
5. The Covenant of Water
Why I Finished It:
I suppose I took this on as a challenge to see if I could read a 700-page book. I saw that it was recommended by Oprah (which doesn’t necessarily influence me too much) and Obama (he either, but he listed it as a top book of 2023, along with others that looked good).
This is such an interesting story of many generations and is told in ten parts at different times and locations throughout India. At first, the parts swing between two different sets of narratives: one about Mariamma and one about a Scottish doctor named Digby, but later, the narratives become fused. It spans 1900-1977, covering three generations.
The book opens in 1900 with Mariamma, later known in the book as Big Ammachi (big mama), as a child bride getting married to a widowed man who has a son named JoJo. Her husband has an extreme fear of water, which she doesn’t understand. When JoJo, her stepson, dies from falling from a tree into shallow water, her husband shows her a pictorial genealogy of men who’ve died via drowning. He calls it The Condition.
Big Ammachi has two children, and her son has children, and each generation’s story is told in detail.
This is a story full of spiritual formation imagery. It is a story about the human condition, life, art, doctoring, relationships, suffering, and how all those things fit together. There are Christian influences mentioned throughout the book.
As I read it on my Kindle, I read it at a normal pace, but the last 70% of the book really took off as the mysteries and questions were resolved. For more summaries about the book and characters, see here.
Favorite Quotes:
The book was so long that I have a lot of quotes, so I am drastically paring it down.
“Listening is talking for him; there’s an eloquence to this kind of attentiveness; it’s rare, and yet he’s generous with it.”
“Small things make a big difference, Digby. God is in the small things.”
“I never liked that Christianity begins by telling us we’re sinners. If I had a penny for the times my Nana said to me that all boys were thieving, lying connivers, and that I’d be no exception…”
“Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.”
“Before we treat the flesh, we must acknowledge the greater wound, the one to the spirit.”
“Success is not money! Success is you fully loving what you are doing. This only is success!”
“Just as the fields will lie fallow, so too the body must rest to emerge renewed, oiled, and supple once again.”
“Mariamma, sometimes when you are most afraid, when you feel most helpless, that is when God is pointing out a path for you.”
“He didn’t disagree that God may have other plans for me, but he said sometimes we have to ‘live the question’ not push for the answer.”
“We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.”
“You can confide in quiet people. They make way for one’s thoughts.”
“This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.”
Books in Progress:
Practicing the Way
A Hidden Wholeness
How to Know a Person
Books I Started and probably won’t finish or may come back to later:
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing
On the Table for Next Reads:
Samir, the Seller of Dreams
Pride and Prejudice
Go as a River
Hello Beautiful
The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory
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We have a very similar reading process--I read almost exclusively on Kindle these days using Libby. I love playing the library holds game! I’m eagerly awaiting Harrison’s book soon so I’m glad to hear you liked it. Thanks for the recommendations!