What has everyone been reading lately? I have a few selections that I liked.
One of them is Work in Progress, by Father Jim Martin, SJ. It is a coming of age memoir, telling the story of the jobs he worked before becoming a Jesuit priest, starting with the one where he worked in an ice cream parlor as a young teen in 1976. Of course everything was about the bicentennial then. It sounds like he was having more fun in his hometown of Quaker Meeting, PA, in the bicentennial year than we are having now. He had a bunch of other young people starter jobs, and one bigger one working for General Electric before he decided to become a Jesuit at, I think, the age of 29.
It sounds like he was a funny, goofy kid, with a lot of friends. The book said nothing about LGBTQ things, except to mention that he became an advocate later. It doesn't say that he himself is a member of that community, despite what people assume.
Another book I read was Homeschooled, by Stephan Miller Block. The author's mentally unwell mother took him out of regular school for five years starting in the fourth grade. She wasn't qualified to be a teacher, she basically was using him to cure her own loneliness. The book isn't a polemic against homeschooling, but he advocates for accountability. Of which there was none in his state of Texas. During the five years he was homeschooled, no one checked in to see if he was okay or if he was learning anything. My thought was that the author's father needed to take a more active role, but he was focused on his own career. The author took himself out of homeschooling as a high school freshman and struggled mightily to catch up. Which he eventually did, and later thrived.
I seem to be in a non-fiction streak lately, and the other book I have read lately is The Soul of an Octopus, by Cy Montgomery. It is described as a "soulful account of a soulful invertebrate". Amazon describes the author as an combination of Emily Dickinson and Indiana Jones. She is a naturalist who volunteers at the Boston Aquarium, and befriended several octopuses (she said that the plural of octopus "is not" octopi). I found it an entertaining read, and sad at times. Octopuses do not live very long, only 3 to 5 years. But they crowd a lot of life into those years.
I have been in escape mode again. I have been reading some of the cozy mysteries on the New York Times “ best” cozy mysteries list— most recently “The Thursday Murder Club,” which was also made into a movie with an all- star cast including Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie. It is targeted at old folks—older cast playing retirees in a British retirement complex who solve murders. It is now a whole series.
ReplyDeleteI haven't been reading much in the last few years. I don't know exactly why. But in order to move out of my apartment and take up residence in the OFH (old folks home), I had no choice but to give up the bulk of my book collection, which I found very difficult to do both practically and emotionally. I had sold a large number of books years ago to The Strand, which claims to be "the largest independent bookstore in New York City [which] carries more than 2.5 million used, new, and rare books [and at] whose flagship location alone, the shelves stretch over 18 miles—and counting." Years ago they came, packed the books, and transported them to the store free of charge. No more. To make a long story short, this time I had to hire a moving company to pack and transport the books. And because The Strand has a very limited schedule of times they will accept deliveries, the first date offered was June 21, to which we agreed. But the mover then realized the 21st was Father's Day and had to cancel. He has kindly and generously agreed to store the books (35 boxes, picked up June 2) free of charge and deliver them on a date early in July but not yet specified.
ReplyDeleteDeciding what to keep was somewhat like choosing one book to take on be in exile on a desert island. I wound up taking John P. Meier's five-volume A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus and J. G. Dunn's trilogy Christianity in the Making (Jesus Remembered, Beginning from Jerusalem and Neither Greek Nor Jew: A Contested Identity). I remember Father Komonchak spoke very highly of Dunn.
I am not entirely sure of what to make of my own choices, particularly because one of the two other books I felt the need to keep was J. L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of God because I am leaning toward atheism.
Finally, I keptThe Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler.
Of course, I have literally thousands of Kindle books and Audible audiobooks, but still giving up the physical books was painful.
I know what you mean about the physical books. I prefer them to the electronic ones, though I own some e books and borrow them from the library. When I run out of shelf space I figure it's time to donate some books to the Friends of the Library store.
ReplyDeleteMy mom used to donate books to the county jail, but when we checked into that, they said they couldn't accept books from outside. I suppose people might smuggle drugs between the pages, or something.
My husband has a lot of books on Biblical scholarship and exegesis, his shelves are running over. The deacons ought to develop a resource library. But not in our house, there isn't room.
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