Nightstand (September 2013)

Thanks to yet another road trip (this time to Lincoln and back) where Daniel did a fair bit of the driving, I have some books to report in on this month. Were it not for that?

I’ve been struggling to keep my head afloat–except for the three days in which I whipped together a birthday party for Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.

8 hours, 20 people, 6 meals, 3 movies.

If I lie in bed for the entire rest of the month, I can still consider it to have been a HIGHLY productive month.

This month, I read:

• Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther by Roland Bainton
  What I liked best about this particular biography is that it is very obviously written by a lover of Reformation theology. Bainton writes so passionately of the miracle of the gospel, of being saved by grace through faith that one can’t help but utter the occasional “Amen” after a particularly swelling paragraph. Whether in a paraphrase of one of Luther’s sermons or simply a description of Luther’s teachings, Bainton wrote so eloquently of the Reformation truths that have changed the world that my heart was moved to worship the One who is the Truth revealed. Also, Luther is hilarious. He’s so…real, so…blunt, so…human. I highly recommend this book.
• Kneeknock Rise by Natalie Babbit
  A very sweet, quick read. I love that it doesn’t have chapters but instead has very short sections. That made it ideal for reading for bed, since Daniel and I couldn’t play the endless “Just one more chapter” game (in which he starts a new chapter while I’m finishing mine, and then I start a new one while he’s finishing his, ad nauseum.) Egan arrives at Kneeknock Rise to visit his family for the fair–and to hear the moaning of the Megrimum, the monster who dwells at the top of Kneeknock Rise. When his rather superior little cousin dares him to climb the verboten hill, he takes off like a flash–and discovers something he never expected. Read Carrie’s review for a more complete idea of what the book’s about.
• Love Blooms in Winter by Lori Copeland
  The plot was pretty average as Christian pioneer fiction goes; but this book had the weirdest “conversion” story I’ve ever read. The hero tells of his conversion to…theism. Yes, he realized at some point that there had to be a God. Never once did he mention Christ. In fact, I’m not sure if Christ ever really came into the whole book. Which is rather disappointing.
• Nothing Daunted by Dorothy Wickenden
  Read for book club last month. About halfway through, it tells the story of two college-educated society women of the 1910s who traveled to the “uncivilized” Western slope of the Rockies to teach school. The first half was hard to get into for me, since I wanted the society-girl-meets-wild-west story and was instead getting society-girls-grow-up-as-society-girls. If I’d been hearing that back-story AFTER I was already invested in the girls from their society-girl-meets-wild-west story, I might have liked it better. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book overall.
• 2 children’s picture books, author BRIGGS

On the docket for next month:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  I’m leading discussion for the Reading to Know bookclub this month–and boy am I excited to talk about Dorian Gray! Since my early teens, I’ve been fascinated by the general outlines of this story as told by Ravi Zacharias in the radio show my dad listened to every Sunday morning. But despite thinking about reading it every couple of years, I hadn’t actually read it until earlier this year, when I started it to get a jump start on discussion-leading for this fall. Oh my…so…much. Why did I wait so long? This is pretty intense.

  Join us?

Don’t forget to drop by 5 Minutes 4 Books to see what others are reading this month!