I am not going to do a full-blown top ten or twelve year-end book review but I can't let the year end without at least a little bit of commentary on some of the books I read this year.
My favorite fiction read of the year had to be The Help by Kathryn Stockett. This new 40-year-old Alabama author struck a cord with readers, especially Southerners, with her poignant account of life in Mississippi in the early sixties and the relationships of white women and their African American domestic workers.
A close second was The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society which left me feeling warm all over. Upon the recommendation of blog friends Quid and Steve, I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the chilling post-apocolyptic account which literally kept me up at night after I finished it. Did I enjoy it? That's hard to say -- don't know if I would use the word "enjoy" associated with this book. Did it keep me spell bound? Without a doubt. Now I'm trying to decide if I would dare go see the movie.
Also near the top of the list of fiction was Sarah's Key which centers around the little known (at least to me) part of the Holocaust which took place in France.
My hands-down non-fiction favorite was Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years in which this unconventional Christian author of Blue Like Jazz had me dying laughing then crying, as he related his journey of learning how his life is a story. Also loved Witsec, which tells the fascinating history of the U.S. Government's Federal Witness Protection Program; Letters from a Skeptic, a collection of letters back and forth between a seminary professor and his agnostic father; and Late Edition, a Love Story, by Bob Greene, in which he laments the shrinking of the American newspaper at the hands of the Internet by telling his own story of working as a high school student at a local newspaper in Columbus, Ohio.
Also on the non-fiction side, really enjoyed Three Cups of Tea, about Gregg Mortensen's amazing success at buiilding schools in Pakistan.
My nod to classical literature this year was J.D. Sallinger's Catcher in the Rye which somehow I misssed as a high school and college student. Really enjoyed it and I am open to suggestions for more classics in 2010.
I am ending the year with The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, originally written in French but translated into extremely readable English. I am about two-thirds through this one, which tells parallel stories of a middle-aged widowed concierge in a French apartment building and a 12-year-old girl who lives in the same building. I started it Christmas night and it has been a real page turner.
As usual, I would welcome your reading recommendations for 2o10. Good reading to all.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Friday, December 25, 2009
Notes from Christmas Day
Christmas night. It was a great, relaxing day. I did Christmas morning breakfast which we enjoyed about 10:45 -- we have to wake them up now! My how things have changed. We lingered at the table talking and laughing, then opened gifts.
We had about ten minutes of snow!
Lunch about 3:15. The young ones off to the Titans' game (which is proving to be sad) about 5. Wife and I in our PJs, watching the game but losing interest.
The menu for Christmas Eve ended up being Shrimp Scampi and Baked Ziti, both of which were wonderful. Also had a tortellini appetizer. Wife found a CD with Italian Christmas music. Great fun. Bread pudding for dessert. Mmmmmm!
Need to get to the Y early in the a.m. to start working off some of the excess I enjoyed these past couple of days. They're having a 90-minute cycling class, twice as long as the norm; think that could kill me but Daughter is challenging me to go. We'll see.
Hope everyone enjoys the long holiday weekend.
We had about ten minutes of snow!
Lunch about 3:15. The young ones off to the Titans' game (which is proving to be sad) about 5. Wife and I in our PJs, watching the game but losing interest.
The menu for Christmas Eve ended up being Shrimp Scampi and Baked Ziti, both of which were wonderful. Also had a tortellini appetizer. Wife found a CD with Italian Christmas music. Great fun. Bread pudding for dessert. Mmmmmm!
Need to get to the Y early in the a.m. to start working off some of the excess I enjoyed these past couple of days. They're having a 90-minute cycling class, twice as long as the norm; think that could kill me but Daughter is challenging me to go. We'll see.
Hope everyone enjoys the long holiday weekend.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
What I Love About Christmas
We will have a different kind of Christmas this year in that we will have no extended family. Over the time Wife and I have been married, we have gone to one of our parents’ homes and celebrated with them and, at times, our siblings, or, in more recent years, they have come to us.
My parents are now, of course, deceased. Wife’s parents, who live in Little Rock and are both 81, were here at Thanksgiving, along with their other daughter and family. They said they were staying home this Christmas, that the trip over in November was enough traveling for them for a while.
While we will miss them terribly, we are turning our attention toward our own family and what we will do. We started a tradition last year of having an international theme on Christmas Eve. Last year was Mexico and we strung up red pepper lights, played “Feliz Navidad” over and over, ad nauseum, and ate tacos, etc. It was a riot.
This year, in honor of Wife’s and my recent European trip, we are going with an Italian theme. Haven’t settled on the menu yet but I am sure we will have some type of pasta and it will be wonderful. How authentically Italian it will be remains to be seen but it will be great. Not sure about the music.
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I think I might have written about this last year, too, but it’s worth mentioning again. I just don’t get worked up over whether people say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays” or whatever. There are some Christian organizations that are urging us to boycott stores that don’t say “Merry Christmas.” One even goes so far as to tell you how you can “rate” the various retail outlets for their attention to the word Christmas.
Please. Don’t you think those of us who are Christ followers can make better use of our time and energies? And don’t you think Jesus would rather we concentrate a little more on that “love your neighbor” stuff than trying to assure that those who choose not to follow Him acknowledge his birthday? Nobody can stop you or me from celebrating the birth of Christ, just as I can’t force anyone TO celebrate it. So please, chill out about this one.
*************************************************************
Have you seen this year’s hands down winner of the award for “Sure-to-make-you-cry” Christmas commercial? I’m telling you, Wife and I can’t even talk about this one, much less watch it, without tearing up.
It is presented by Publix Supermarkets and I haven’t been able to find it on YouTube so I owe it to you to try and describe it.
There’s this young man, looks mid-twenty-ish, and apparently he’s a medical resident and he’s having to work Christmas. He’s standing at the nurses’ station in the hospital talking to his mom on his cell phone and it’s obviously Christmas Eve. It cuts away to Mom and she’s just as wholesome looking as can be, standing there with the phone in her hand amidst all the activity around her – folks trimming a tree, rolling out biscuits, putting a pie in the oven -- while Christmas music plays in the background.
He tells her how he wishes he could be there and she says she does too. He has to go, he says, and tells her he loves her. You can tell Mom’s being strong for him, as moms are supposed to be.
The next scene is him standing at the foot of a hospital bed and you can hear the voice of his patient asking if he’ll be going home. He replies no, that his family will all be gathering but he won’t be there this year. He tells the unseen patient that he’ll see her tomorrow.
He is next seen walking down the street about sundown with just a hint of a slump in his shoulders, observing store windows with holiday greetings. We then see him walking down the hall of an apartment building. He stops and punches in the numbers on his phone and tells his mother that he almost forgot, but to please be sure and greet everyone for him and tell them Happy Holidays. She says she’ll be sure to do that.
He then opens the door to his apartment and what do you know, there is his mom, having just hung up the phone, and the other family members. All the while they have been getting his place ready for him to come home so they’ll celebrate Christmas together.
And folks, I’m getting choked up just typing this and my description doesn’t even do it justice.
*************************************************************
And that’s one of the many things I love about Christmas. I love the sense of family and togetherness that it evokes. My family could have been a case study in dysfunction and nobody knew it better than my mother, but until she died she and my dad had us, along with my brother and his family, come to their house on Christmas Day. It was not always -- nor even often -- the idyllic scene I have described from the TV commercial, but the holiday held enough significance for her that she would always make an effort to patch together a family celebration for a family that, sadly, was not often inclined to gather together.
Late Christmas Eve, after our internationally themed dinner, where there might or might not have been harmonious togetherness, Wife and I will gather our little brood and one of our grown or nearly grown children will read the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke as they have done since they were little guys. This will happen after we have a debate about whose turn it is to do it (we once thought of writing it down, but arguing about who did it last year has become part of the tradition).
At 11 p.m. we will go to a local church that we always attend on Christmas Eve, where we will hear beautiful music, listen to Scripture readings and take Communion. As midnight approaches we will light candles, sing “Silent Night” and usher in Christmas. We will welcome the Baby Jesus and prepare our hearts. For a moment things will be perfect, as He is perfect.
I will hear the music, see the candles glowing and look at my beautiful family and I will hardly be able to take it in.
And these are some of the things I love about Christmas.
My parents are now, of course, deceased. Wife’s parents, who live in Little Rock and are both 81, were here at Thanksgiving, along with their other daughter and family. They said they were staying home this Christmas, that the trip over in November was enough traveling for them for a while.
While we will miss them terribly, we are turning our attention toward our own family and what we will do. We started a tradition last year of having an international theme on Christmas Eve. Last year was Mexico and we strung up red pepper lights, played “Feliz Navidad” over and over, ad nauseum, and ate tacos, etc. It was a riot.
This year, in honor of Wife’s and my recent European trip, we are going with an Italian theme. Haven’t settled on the menu yet but I am sure we will have some type of pasta and it will be wonderful. How authentically Italian it will be remains to be seen but it will be great. Not sure about the music.
*************************************************************
I think I might have written about this last year, too, but it’s worth mentioning again. I just don’t get worked up over whether people say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays” or whatever. There are some Christian organizations that are urging us to boycott stores that don’t say “Merry Christmas.” One even goes so far as to tell you how you can “rate” the various retail outlets for their attention to the word Christmas.
Please. Don’t you think those of us who are Christ followers can make better use of our time and energies? And don’t you think Jesus would rather we concentrate a little more on that “love your neighbor” stuff than trying to assure that those who choose not to follow Him acknowledge his birthday? Nobody can stop you or me from celebrating the birth of Christ, just as I can’t force anyone TO celebrate it. So please, chill out about this one.
*************************************************************
Have you seen this year’s hands down winner of the award for “Sure-to-make-you-cry” Christmas commercial? I’m telling you, Wife and I can’t even talk about this one, much less watch it, without tearing up.
It is presented by Publix Supermarkets and I haven’t been able to find it on YouTube so I owe it to you to try and describe it.
There’s this young man, looks mid-twenty-ish, and apparently he’s a medical resident and he’s having to work Christmas. He’s standing at the nurses’ station in the hospital talking to his mom on his cell phone and it’s obviously Christmas Eve. It cuts away to Mom and she’s just as wholesome looking as can be, standing there with the phone in her hand amidst all the activity around her – folks trimming a tree, rolling out biscuits, putting a pie in the oven -- while Christmas music plays in the background.
He tells her how he wishes he could be there and she says she does too. He has to go, he says, and tells her he loves her. You can tell Mom’s being strong for him, as moms are supposed to be.
The next scene is him standing at the foot of a hospital bed and you can hear the voice of his patient asking if he’ll be going home. He replies no, that his family will all be gathering but he won’t be there this year. He tells the unseen patient that he’ll see her tomorrow.
He is next seen walking down the street about sundown with just a hint of a slump in his shoulders, observing store windows with holiday greetings. We then see him walking down the hall of an apartment building. He stops and punches in the numbers on his phone and tells his mother that he almost forgot, but to please be sure and greet everyone for him and tell them Happy Holidays. She says she’ll be sure to do that.
He then opens the door to his apartment and what do you know, there is his mom, having just hung up the phone, and the other family members. All the while they have been getting his place ready for him to come home so they’ll celebrate Christmas together.
And folks, I’m getting choked up just typing this and my description doesn’t even do it justice.
*************************************************************
And that’s one of the many things I love about Christmas. I love the sense of family and togetherness that it evokes. My family could have been a case study in dysfunction and nobody knew it better than my mother, but until she died she and my dad had us, along with my brother and his family, come to their house on Christmas Day. It was not always -- nor even often -- the idyllic scene I have described from the TV commercial, but the holiday held enough significance for her that she would always make an effort to patch together a family celebration for a family that, sadly, was not often inclined to gather together.
Late Christmas Eve, after our internationally themed dinner, where there might or might not have been harmonious togetherness, Wife and I will gather our little brood and one of our grown or nearly grown children will read the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke as they have done since they were little guys. This will happen after we have a debate about whose turn it is to do it (we once thought of writing it down, but arguing about who did it last year has become part of the tradition).
At 11 p.m. we will go to a local church that we always attend on Christmas Eve, where we will hear beautiful music, listen to Scripture readings and take Communion. As midnight approaches we will light candles, sing “Silent Night” and usher in Christmas. We will welcome the Baby Jesus and prepare our hearts. For a moment things will be perfect, as He is perfect.
I will hear the music, see the candles glowing and look at my beautiful family and I will hardly be able to take it in.
And these are some of the things I love about Christmas.
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