2017 Reading List

We rolled home tonight after spending the New Year in Charleston, South Carolina, with my paternal family.  I love Charleston: I love the Spanish moss, the camellias in bloom, the pluff mud. I love running outside at the stroke of midnight and listening to the barges on the Cooper River blow their horns to welcome in the new year. I love starting the new year with a brisk walk....although yesterday it was thirty-nine degrees.  (That is *not* normal.)  I love seeing so many friends and relatives at the two parties my parents throw, back-to-back, each year. 

But even better? Coming home.  Coming home has always been my favorite part of any trip.  I love walking back into my house and looking around: hello dishes! hello sofa! hello, you comfortable bed! hello, lamps! hello, books! As soon as we turned onto our gravel lane this evening, I told my children this is the moment I've been waiting for all day long.  Even better, we drove down the lane as a gorgeous full moon rose over the valley.  What could be better?

In the spirit of winter coziness and new year lists, I present: my reading list from 2017!  I hope to read a lot more this coming year.  These are the books that I read, not counting the Bible or any books I read to my children (there were lots of those, of course).  I also didn't count the many books I skimmed or read parts of throughout the year.  I don't always read every word of every book. :) In addition, I'm fairly sure I've forgotten a few books; if I see that I have, I'll add to the list later. 

My favorites from 2018: 

The Scent of Water, Elizabeth Goudge 

I had never read any of Goudge's books before, but my best friend Allison gave me this book as a gift, so I tried it out.  I love her writing! She's slow, deliberate, thoughtful.  There's nothing fast-paced here. But there's a richness to her fiction that I find nourishing and delightful. I plan to read more of her books. 

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield

This book is tough love for anyone suffering from thwarted creativity.  I love his pithy voice.  I will say that he uses bad language, so read at your own risk.  If you can filter out or ignore the vulgar language, the content is inspiring. 

Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey

I had read these poems before, but this summer I took them to the pool and read them again.  I admit to having a deep personal bias here, but I think Natasha Trethewey completely deserved the Pulitzer Prize for this wonderful volume of poems.  They are haunting, beautiful, agonizing, profound, graceful.  It's a masterpiece.

The Seven Worst Things Good Parents Do, John C. Friel and Linda Friel

This married couple wrote a book I re-read nearly every year and when I saw that they wrote a parenting book, I had to read it. So much of this book is sheer common sense.  But if you weren't raised in a functional family home, it might be illuminating and useful to create a new paradigm.  And if you *were* raised in one, it will be a good reminder!

Nurtured by Love, by Shinichi Suzuki

I'd read this book before, more than once, but when I took up violin in October I pulled it out again and re-read it.  Suzuki had such a gentle, loving spirit, and it comes across in this book which is ostensibly about "talent education" (ie, music lessons) but in reality it's about parenting, and more than that, it's also simply about life: about doing the best you can do, about devotion to your goals, about becoming a noble person, about developing habits.  I wrote a bit about this book here.  I love it!

The Witness, by Grace Livingston Hill

 

I confess that this book was the big surprise of my year. I've read a dozen or more Grace Livingston Hill novels over the years, and I consider them delightful, wholesome, light, cozy books to enjoy, and I don't mind the dated feel of them one single bit (I realize some people would!). The Witness is all of those things, but it goes deeper than her other books.  The protagonist, after witnessing a college acquaintance die in a fire, embarks upon serious soul-searching.  He struggles with many of the questions that Christians have to wrestle with when we grow into our faith, and following his journey is kind of like following the development of a person from unbeliever into devoted Christian.  I really loved it...probably because I made that journey myself, and the questions, struggles, doubts, and fears are all so familiar to me.  An excellent book, and one that I hope to read with my children when they are teenagers. 

The full list (I marked with an asterisk those I especially recommend): 

1. The Christian Family: Home-Making, J.R. Miller
2. The Secret of Your Naturally Skinny Friends, Monica Swanson
3. The Seventh Hour, Grace Livingston Hill
4. Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families--John C. Friel & Linda D. Friel* (see my review of this book here)
5. The War of Art--Steven Pressfield* (recommended, but with reservations about language)
6. The Scent of Water --Elizabeth Goudge*
7.  Home by Choice--Brenda Hunter, PhD
8. Teaching a Stone to Talk--Annie Dillard (selected portions)
9. Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child--Anthony Esolen (I didn't finish it, but I will!)
10. Common Sense Christian Living--Edith Schaeffer*
11. Love Wins, Rob Bell
12. Love Warrior, Glennon Doyle Melton
13. Pocketful of Pinecones-Karen Andreola*
15. Native Guard--Natasha Trethewey*
16. The Seven Worst Things Good Parents Do, John C. Friel & Linda D. Friel*
17.  Anne of Ingleside, L.M. Montgomery
18.  Witness, Grace Livingston Hill*
19.  Nurtured by Love--Shinichi Suzuki*
20.  Different--Sally and Nathan Clarkson
21. Simplicity Parenting, Kim John Payne
22. Educating Children at Home, Alan Thomas (a dry but helpful look at how children learn best....often via conversations!)
23. Greater Health God's Way, Stormie Omartian
24. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

Please pop over to check out Nancy Kelly's list this year.  She has some intriguing-looking books on her list--I especially like the looks of The Curve of Time. 

I am so excited about reading in this new year.  My best friend and I have decided to read Pride and Prejudice together...because guess what?  Although she has an English degree and I have an MA in English, neither of us have ever read Austen.  (I will say that I have memorized the BBC film version, so there's that.)  I'm excited to dip my toes into the land of Jane Austen.

My past reading lists are here:
2016
2015

Happy New Year, and happy reading!