For The Someday Book

Posts Tagged ‘reading

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that I have posted reviews of all the books I read, which I haven’t done since May 2016. If you are a regular reader, you can also guess why that happened: in June 2016, I moved to London and got diagnosed with cancer. My normal reading pace (about a book a week) slowed dramatically, as a fog from the move and the treatments kept me from reading. But I have read a little bit, and I have been collecting all my books to somehow catalog and review.

I began writing book reviews in a notebook for myself in 2002, because I was reading so much so fast that I was forgetting most of it. I wanted to slow down and capture each book in my memory. I started sharing my reviews here in 2009. It has become an important part of my spiritual discipline and reading habit, a way of spending time with my literary companions.

I didn’t have the time or energy for reviews in the last 18 months. Yet each time I completed a book, I couldn’t bring myself to put it away. The ritual of shelving a completed book is one of my life’s great (though simple) pleasures, but nothing felt complete without offering a few words of reflection. I like talking about the books I read as much as I enjoy reading them.

That’s what caused this to happen on top of the bookcase in my bedroom.

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The first stack, on the left, contains all the books I read in the remainder of 2016, from the time we moved to London until year’s end. It’s a mighty thin stack, because these were my months of chemotherapy. I could barely hold a book, and I couldn’t concentrate for more than a few pages at a time. Since birth, I can’t recall a season with so few books in my life.

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However, these books were loving companions to me. Three of the five were written by clergy friends, people who were praying for me and encouraging me during my illness. One of them is even a fellow cancer survivor. In reading, I felt their prayers and love with me. Two were full of spiritual testimonies of courage and hope, one was a twisted prose poem about death and grief, the other two were practical and inspirational guides for church leadership. These were the books I chose for this hard season—the witness of other faithful folks who had overcome hardship and suffering; a lament to give voice to my own; and two professional reads to keep me grounded in my vocation, a source of great hope for me.

Starting in January, the chemotherapy was leaving my body, and I had surgery. The surgery left me home for three weeks, and I planned to catch up on my book reviews at that time. However, my incisions left me unable to type or sit at the computer comfortably. My days alternated between reading books, watching television and checking Facebook on my phone. The middle stack represents my reading for those first few weeks of 2017. As you can see, there was a lot of it. The upright tome, The Reformation, was one I started reading in January 2016, abandoned when the move to London got hectic, and returned to complete in my surgery recovery. I alternated between various novels and The Reformation for most of that three weeks of recovery.

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My dad died on February 5, and I stopped reading again. The mountain of grief over all the year, combined with the lingering impact of chemo and radiation, again made it difficult to concentrate. Only since mid-summer have I slowly begun reading in a way that is more “normal” for me. The third stack, only slightly taller than the January one, represents the remaining eleven months of 2017. It is perhaps not as many books as previous years, but the balance of sacred and secular, the diverse categories and the tilt away from fiction much more closely resemble my normal patterns.

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With the new year turned to 2018, it’s time to clear the shelf and start anew. Now that my health is restored and life in London has settled into a routine, I plan to return to my regular reading and reviews. Lest you be concerned, this last picture is my “to-be-read” shelf shelves, sitting right under these three completed piles. I’m hoping to read more and buy less in order to get them all fitting on one shelf by the time 2019 arrives. We’ll see.

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Much like the year itself, with all its life-changing moments—much like my dad’s old snow hat in the picture, with all its attendant memories—I couldn’t let these books dissolve into the shelves without handling them one more time, marking their presence as companions through this year, and, yes, writing at least a little something about each one.

So, what will follow in the next couple of days will be two long posts, one fiction and one non-fiction, with mini-reviews of each book. (If you want to know more about any of the books pictured above, look there.)

After that, I hope I can happily place them in their appropriate places in my library. In the same way, after these book posts, I hope to start writing more regularly. I need to revisit so many episodes from this last year and write a little something about each one. It’s how I read and capture things in my memory —not just books, but my life.

Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013, 133 pp.

Reading for PreachingMy credentials as an avid reader are well established by the very substance of this blog. I love to read. I read a lot. I love to talk about books, to invest in them and dissect them and commit them to memory. Professionally, I am a preacher. When I read the title Reading for Preaching, I placed my book order without delay. I thought this book was written for me.

While I enjoyed Plantinga’s book, I quickly discovered it was not written for me. Plantinga makes a compelling case for why a preacher should endeavor to regularly read, especially novels, biographies, poetry and journalistic narratives. I am clearly already sold, and a quick skim through the long lists of reviews posted here will show that I most frequently turn to those precise genres (except poetry, which I should read more often). For example, Plantinga thinks it unrealistic for a preacher to read as many as six “classic novels” each year, and offers hope that preachers will read just one.(41-42) While all my fiction reading is not “classic novels,” I definitely read a lot more than that already.

However, Plantinga does offer great perspective and insight about why reading matters–for me and for other preachers. He begins with the obvious: reading is a source of illustrations for sermons. There is nothing worse to me than a tired, canned sermon illustration, and Plantinga urges preachers to “dig up your own stuff.” (22) He points out the ways that reading can make preachers more attentive not only to the possible illustrations in texts, but events in everyday life that might illuminate the gospel. Reading also serves to “attune the preacher’s ear,” to help a preacher register how best to speak to a given audience. Plantinga identifies a variety of dictions a preacher might use–from tuxedo formal to tank-top casual to upscale colloquial or business casual (49). Each one pitches the message to a particular setting, designed to speak appropriately and engagingly to the audience at hand. Reading a variety of dictions helps the preacher recognize and develop the right tone for his or her own congregation and message. He recommends children’s literature as an especially good tool.

The second half of Plantinga’s book talks about the importance of reading as a source of wisdom for the preacher. While scripture remains the preeminent source of wisdom, other literature also provides a great deal of wise insight into the human condition. He highlights the way literature can open us to a variety of worlds and life experiences beyond our own:

The preacher wants his program of reading to complicate some of his fixed ideas, to impress him with some of the mysteries of life, with its variousness, with its surprises, with the pushes and pulls within it. (95)

Plantinga also points to the ways that literature and journalism can help us explore good and evil, sin and grace with a more complex, nuanced understanding.

The whole book is rich with appreciation and encouragement for the life of preaching, and the importance of sermons in the life of Christian worship. For example, he remarks:

The unpredictability of the preaching event gives no one license to wing it. Faithful preachers work hard on their sermons, understanding that although a fruitful result may be God’s gift, hard work is the preacher’s calling. After all, it is audacious to speak for God. (43)

It is a bold and humble task we do as preachers, and I cannot imagine undertaking it without an army of words behind me from other authors. Plantinga’s argument for the importance of reading did not move me because I am already convinced, but this book did encourage me to see my indulgence in good fiction not as a rest from quality reading, but a different kind of endeavor at building my theological and emotional vocabulary for preaching.

I finished this book and felt much better about setting aside the latest book from a consultant on church leadership, returning instead to the public library, where I checked out nearly a dozen new books, a mixture of quality fiction, history and biography. Now, to read them all!

The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared by Alice Ozma, Grand Central Publishing, 2011, 288  pp.

Reading PromiseI heard about this book after an interview with the author on NPR. I am parent and a certified book nerd (c’mon, not only do I read like crazy, collect books like personal friends, but I blog about what I read here), so I found it impossible to resist a book about sharing a love of books across generations.

Alice Ozma and her father began what became known as “The Streak” when she was in the fourth grade. They made a commitment to read together every night for 100 consecutive nights. To true readers, 100 nights is far too short–as it was for Alice and her father. The Streak continued for the next eight years, until Ozma left for college. The Reading Promise is not just the story of the books they read, but of their relationship over those years. Alice’s father was a single parent and eccentric elementary school librarian. He and Alice had a particular and sometimes peculiar life together, full of imagination and affection, but not without hardship. It is a touching memoir, full of humorous and touching stories of Alice and her father over the years of The Streak, including the sometimes extraordinary measures they would take to continue it.

I had expected the book to be like an extended book report, a catalog of how art imitates and informs life. I had hoped for advice about how to inculcate a love of reading in my child. I coveted a list of all the books they read, and how they managed to sustain a practice of reading aloud for so long. Those things were there, but they were implicit rather than explicit. She didn’t write about how the books impacted her life, but about how the books became the foundation of her relationship with her father, even through the difficult years of adolescence. And yes, there was also a list of all the books they could remember reading together–which was my favorite part of the book.

I recommend The Reading Promise to anyone wondering why and how reading with your child makes a difference, or looking for inspiration for the work of reading together every night for a sustained time. Alice Ozma is only in her early 20’s, which is young to have produced a memoir. I wonder if there will be more forthcoming books from her.


About Me

I am a full-time pastor in the United Church of Christ, mother of a young child (B.), married to an aspiring academic and curmudgeon (J.). I live by faith, intuition and intellect. I follow politics, football and the Boston Red Sox. I like to talk about progressive issues, theological concerns, church life, the impact of technology and media, pop culture and books.

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  • revjmk: Tammy, I'm not sure the "he" you are referring to here (Willimon, Hauerwas or me--who goes by the pronoun "she"). I'm also not sure why you think th
  • Tammy Sanders: Has no one noticed he has the 10 commandments wrong. 1. You shall have no other Gods before me. 2. You shall make no images. 3. Don’t take th
  • lorettajane: I needed to read this today! As always you bless me. I love and miss you my dear friend.

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