Currently, right now, in two neat stacks of seven each (which only Just So Happens to be the case; I didn’t realize, until I counted, that I had seven in each pile), Fourteen Books in the process of being read. By me.
Except for one, which I finished last summer.
A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (borrowed from our school’s headmaster, and he’s likely looked for it by now), a series of essays by Stanley Hauerwas.
After This, a novel by Alice McDermott, whom I was Never Ever Going to Read Again after that awful novel about Long Island, but then heard her read an excerpt from After This at the Festival of Faith and Writing and thought, Oh! And then Beth bought it for me for Christmas. Last Year.
Mrs. Dalloway, by (oh, you know this one) Virginia Woolf. (Joy!)
Two (count them–2) collections of poems by e.e. cummings (because one collection is Not Enough).
The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard (started reading it in November, haven’t finished yet, Definitely Discouraged by recent book club discussion of the same).
Crime and Punishment, by (you know this one, too) Dostoevsky. Definitely looking forward to a close analysis of this baby with my honors students. Haven’t read it since my senior year… of high school….
Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter, another Christmas present (from this year). It comes Highly Recommended, and I am looking forward to it, er, her.
Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, a collection of letters written by C.S. Lewis. Our small group read this Last fall (’07), but I was in the throes of writing my Master’s thesis at the time and therefore Failed To Keep Up with extra-curricular reading. I am (still) slowly making my way through now.
John Banville’s The Sea, which I read and adored last summer and which hasn’t found a space (yet) on one of our teeming bookshelves.
Augustine’s The Confessions.
Watchman Nee’s slender and wonderful Sit, Walk, Stand, the first Christian non-fiction I read as a teenager and which changed me and my understanding of Ephesians and God forever. Trying to re-read it. Wanting to….
A lovely little book called The Loveliness of Christ, which my dear friend Carolyn gave me for my birthday. She is the same one, by the by, who gave me Hannah Coulter. This volume is a collection of extracts from the letters of Samuel Rutherford, a Scottish preacher in the 19th century. Little extracts, little jewels.
And a very tiny and ancient book called The Book of Private Devotion: A Series of Prayers and Meditations; with an Introductory Essay on Prayer, Chiefly from the Writings of Hannah More. My father gave it to me last summer; he found it at my parents house and inside the inscription in childish scrawl, “To a nice friend. Have a nice summer. Beccy you are very nice. Love,” and it is signed by a summertime friend, one whose company I enjoyed during the weeks I spent each summer at my grandparents’ house on Long Island, where my parents now live.
I am amazed, as I take the time to write this list, to see how many of my friends and dear ones are represented by these small stacks of books. Nearly all of them were gifts by friends or family, or recommended by friends or family, or read along with friends and family.
Lovely companionship, yes?
The big question now, after I brush my teeth, is What Shall I Read Tonight?
What, O Reader, are you reading? I’d love to know….
