Are You Satisfied with Your Reading Life?

Recommendations to Deepen Your Delight

It’s been a long time since I devoted an entire newsletter to book recommendations, but it’s been a great year for books so far, and I’m wondering how YOU are feeling about your own reading life. Whether you’re planning what to read at the lake this summer or if you’re more of a lawnchair-on-the-deck kind of reader, the warmer days ahead invite us to try something new. So I’ll share a half dozen of my favorites in both fiction and nonfiction genres, and then I’d love to hear from you: What will you be reading?

Favorite Fiction

Double the Lies

Patricia Raybon is a writer of mystery in the traditional sense, but her work is a unique blend of mystery and faith. Our paths first crossed over at (in)courage where her words are both daring and insightful. In her first award-winning mystery novel All That is Secret, she introduced the world to Annalee Spain, an overworked professor and amateur detective. Now the story continues...

The mystery genre meets historical fiction in Double the Lies, and Patricia Raybon has created a protagonist who carries the plot forward with grace. The reader is transported back to 1920s-era Denver within the experience of an African American woman. Operating at risk of being framed for murder, Annalee Spain hunts for clues to solve the mystery but soon finds herself entangled in the victim's family and their toxic secrets.

Crossing to Safety

Here’s a book that I return to whenever I want to sink into a comforting plot with intriguing characters and exquisite writing. (And it occurs to me that I’ve never reviewed this book on the blog, which makes me wonder why…?)

Wallace Stegner picks up the narrative in a college community during the Great Depression and follows the story of two couples and their lifelong friendship. Within the context of their quiet lives, Stegner examines themes of marital fidelity, professional jealousy, and the virtue of mundane faithfulness against a backdrop of tragedy. I re-read Crossing to Safety in March, and the experience was just as satisfying as ever.

Sugar Birds

There are very few books that I’ve listened to on audio AND ALSO read in print, but this is one of them, and I can heartily recommend both formats!

Aggie and Celia, Cheryl Grey Bostrom’s strong protagonists, have little in common. At ten, Aggie is most at home hunting bird’s nests in the towering tree tops around her home. However, it was only under duress that Celia had come to the Pacific Northwest. Even her deep love for her grandmother was not enough to defuse her rage at having been left behind by her dad while his work took him out of the country.

Sugar Birds carries readers forward into the stories of two families, their choices, their conflicts, and, ultimately, how they become part of each other’s narratives.

Realistic internal dialogue delivered in first person and enriched by regional colloquialism works “better than socks fit a rooster” to create three-dimensional characters who are wrestling with the weight that parental dysfunction, marital disputes, and mental health issues place on a family. Gram and Burn emerge as two strong and steady rocks who also provide fascinating insights flowing out of their shared love of avian life.

Besides a beautifully written novel with a strong sense of place, Bostrom’s great gift is the cautionary word that we are all sugar birds at heart, “scratching and pecking and clawing for a sweet seed that will soothe the ache.” May we find grace to look for the answer on our way to forgiveness, both given and received.

Necessary NonFiction

This is a tough category to weed down to size because most of my reading time goes into the nonfiction genre. However, I’m going to impose the boundary of “NonFiction Reads from 2023” to simplify matters, and I’m going to start with two that haven’t (yet) been featured on the blog…

The Jesus I Never Knew

Philip Yancy is an author whose work I want to keep close by, so I try to read or reread something he has written every year. Of course, recently learning of his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis has increased my connection to his work because I’ll be wondering how he’s managing.

I picked up The Jesus I Never Knew as a Lenten read. We know so very little of Jesus’s actual day-to-day life, but Scripture shouts about his priorities and his laser focus on the will of God. Don’t we all need to work on these two fronts?

The chapters of the book closely follow the chapters of Jesus’s earthly ministry, but with a keen eye to what was also going on behind the scenes. Who Jesus is, why he came, and what he left behind are all worthy topics for the believer who may feel as if she’s read Jesus’s story so many times that she’s stopped hearing it.

Love Has a Price Tag

Okay, I know that I quote Elisabeth Elliot now and then.
Well, maybe I quote her pretty often, but I rarely review her books, simply because they have, over the years, come to form the subtext for my rule of life.

Love Has a Price Tag is a collection of essays that began as Elisabeth’s regular contributions to the Christian Herald magazine in the 70s when she was also serving as an adjunct professor at Gordon Conwell Seminary. Consequently, the chapters stand alone and are perfect for that little bit of wisdom for the beginning or the end of your day.

Elisabeth covers everything from her love of animals to her home life as a child with insights on Scripture as it relates to suffering, the will of God, and mothering well. If you’ve never picked up a book by Elisabeth Elliot before, this is a great onramp to her thinking and writing.

In Good Time

I’ve read just about everything Jen Pollock Michel has written, including her regular newsletter, so I was intrigued by this most recent book, likely because I’ve spent my entire adult life enamored with efficiency. Even now, when I should be older and wiser, my online bio describes me as an advocate for “the prudent use of little minutes.” A neat row of daily checkmarks is the reward for time well-managed, but In Good Time is Jen Pollock Michel’s well-constructed argument that time was never given to us to be managed.

How is it, then, that we can stay true to our American Protestant roots without allowing time to become “a lash held in the hands of some imperious master.” Set against the backdrop of her family’s COVID-19 lockdown, Michel’s journey is a movement from “time anxiety” to “time faith. Like Brother Lawrence, the believer is called to “do all things for the love of God”–regardless of the tallying of hours and days.

In keeping with her previous book (A Habit Called Faith), each chapter describes a habit for readers to bring to our relationship with time. With lyrical prose and biblical fidelity, Jen Pollock Michel writes from the vulnerable place of one who has failed and been forgiven or plowed her determined way to a finish line only to realize that God is more concerned with the slow work of forming wisdom in her heart.

I am coming away from In Good Time with a new appreciation for the goodness of time. I am encouraged to come to my daily do-list with “Why?” as my biggest question in place of my prevailing “How?” And I’ve been startled into awareness of all the ways I have made an idol of time. God has a way of toppling our false gods–in mercy, freeing us from their rule over us.

God, who lives outside of time, has given us the gift of hours and days, not so that we can fret over their passing, but so, like the children we are, we will have something to offer back to our Father in love.

Happy Reading!

And that’s it for another month!

I hope your reading life will be enriched by these recommendations—and that you’ll let me know if and when you pick up any of these books. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I think this new format has made commenting really easy.

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Thanks to all for your eyes on these words and for your faithful encouragement!

Holding You in the Light,