Books I Read in 2023

Jan 7

* = Stars (rating)

#1 - Horse - 5*
Geraldine Brooks

Horse is based on a true story and real people but the historical data isn't really sufficient to make a whole story. I enjoyed the characters, the love story aspect, the way it has stories in present times touched by stories in the past. I thought it was really well done and after reading it I felt like I'd gained some understanding of civil war times, horse racing, and slavery and a little about its effects now. But it did not feel textbook-y or preach-y. I just enjoyed it.

It goes back and forth in time with several characters. It’s right before the Civil War and one of the characters is Jarret, a young slave who shows his talent and love for horses enough to be allowed to raise and handle a horse named Lexington that sets records in racing in the South. An artist of the time does several paintings of Lexington, including one with Jarret and the horse. Another character is Martha Jacksonnn who owns a New York art gallery in the ‘50’s and acquires—and loves—the painting. In 2019 in Washington, D.C. “Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse—one studying the stallion’s bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.” (Penguin Random House) Sometimes when an author goes back and forth in time and with different characters it annoys me, but Brooks does this with great skill. I highly recommend the book.

#2 - The Mountains Sing - 5*
Yen Phan Que Mai

I've started going to the library more now that I'm retired. Most of the time, I have lots of books I've read about and I just put one or two on hold and pick them up. But the other day I went and just browsed, which I haven't done in a long time. I found a novel called The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai. I've been kind of fascinated by Vietnam lately, thinking about my dad having served there a while, and interested in the land and the people. This is the first novel written in English by this author--she has written quite a few others in Vietnamese. The story is at least partially autobiographical. One interesting thing to me is that it is about a North Vietnamese girl and her family, so you see the story from a North Vietnamese experience, which is not something I'd seen before. The writing is beautiful, I think, besides being such a good story. I especially love when she translates Vietnamese proverbs. Such a gorgeous use of words.

She wrote that her grandmother was a great beauty and described as “a jade leaf on a branch of gold.” When saying good-bye and thank you to a family that had helped them, her grandmother quoted a proverb that said, “One bite when starving equals one bundle when full.” And the hostess quotes back, “Intact leaves safeguard ripped leaves.” The main character’s grandma calls her granddaughter a nickname, Guava, because she believes evil spirits “hover above the earth, looking for beautiful children to kidnap. She said that my real name, Huong, which means “fragrance” would attract them.” I liked the different ways the author used metaphors and similes, too: She was trying to eavesdrop through a door and wrote “but the murmurs melted into the air before their meaning could reach us.” When writing about a dying loved one, she said:

Human lives were short and fragile. Time and illnesses consumed us, like flames burning away these pieces of wood. But it didn’t matter how long or short we lived. It mattered more how much light we were able to shed on those we loved and how many people we touched with our compassion.

#3 - God, a Biography - 2*, but did not finish
Jack Miles

I was talking about how much I loved Holy Envy with a book club friend and something I said (I can’t remember what it was) prompted her to say that the concept I spoke of was like in God, a Biography. That intrigued me so I checked it out. I think I read maybe two chapters. When I read Holy Envy, I felt myself getting happier and feeling closer and closer to the love of God. When I read God, a Biography, I felt myself getting a stressful feeling in my gut and constantly scrunching my eyebrows in concern and consternation. I decided to stop reading it.

I can’t quite figure out exactly why I got so uncomfortable. The author said he was writing about the Bible as if he were writing about literature with God as a character, like any other character in literature. I thought I’d like that. I had taken a course in high school called “Bible as literature” (in a public school) and thoroughly enjoyed it. I had read various pieces talking about the poetry in Psalms and other types of literature in the collection of books that is the Bible. And besides that, the author is a previous Jesuit and I love the Jesuits!

Others raved about the book and the author received a Pulitzer Prize. One summary says:

What sort of “person” is God? What is his “life story”? Is it possible to approach him not as an object of religious reverence, but as the protagonist of the world’s greatest book—as a character who possesses all the depths, contradictions, and abiguities of a Hamlet? This is the task that Jack Miles—a former Jesuit trained in religious studies and Near Eastern languages—accomplishes with such brilliance and originality in God: A Biography.

Using the Hebrew Bible as his text, Miles shows us a God who evolves through his relationship with man, the image who in time becomes his rival. Here is the Creator who nearly destroys his chief creation; the bloodthirsty warrior and the protector of the downtrodden; the lawless law-giver; the scourge and the penitent. Profoundly learned, stylishly written, the resulting work illuminates God and man alike and returns us to the Bible with a sense of discovery and wonder.

Sounds good to me! Maybe I felt uncomfortable thinking of the Bible in such an uninspired way, or so it seemed to me. Probably I gave up too soon and should have kept reading. An interesting review of it is here. Anyway, so it is.

#4 - Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life - 5*
Richard Rohr

Richard Rohr is a hero of mine. His books and writing stretch my mind and expand my love of God. I just realized I didn’t blog specifically about his book The Universal Christ although I referred to it in several blog entries. I have been thinking I re-read that so I’ll try to blog about it when I do.

In this book, Rohr writes about the first half of life (which does not literally mean the chronological first half) which he describes as the necessary task of creating your own identity, who you are. He says this is done with “dualistic thinking”—what you are NOT as opposed to something else. That identity is a “container,” according to Rohr—who you associate with, what you believe, and so on, forming who you are. Then in the second half of life, spiritual maturity is the goal. Rohr says:

Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues and letting go of our physical life, but the whole thesis of this book is exactly the opposite. What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward into a broader and deeper world, where the soul has found its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture.

I like one part where he talks about falling upward like a bounce.

I fell many times relationally, professionally, emotionally, and physically in my life, but there was always a trampoline effect that allowed me to finally fall upward. No falling down was final, but actually contributed to the bounce!

He wrote:

Like good spiritual directors do, God must say after each failure of ours, ‘Oh, here is a great opportunity! Let’s see how we can work with this!’

That reminded me of Marie Howe saying once in an interview that as she kept rehashing some horrible and traumatic events in her life, she started asking herself “What else is true?”

I highly recommend this book.

#5 - All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir - 5*
Beth Moore

I listened to this memoir because I wanted to hear Beth reading it in her Southern accent. I’m fascinated by accents, and by “regional words”—my term for words that a particular group of people, usually in a particular geographic location, use that many others are not familiar with. Beth exceeded my expectations by telling us at the beginning of the recording that she’d narrate the first part of her memoir in the deep Southern accent she had as a young child growing up with her family in Arkadelphia (how glorious is that for the name of a tiny town in Arkansas?!). She switched later to her current Southern accent, one heard more often in the state of Texas where she now lives.

At first, Beth’s story seemed a little slow to me, with some similarities to my own. Not surprising since we are about a year apart in age and, even though the religion of my family is very different from hers, still I grew up religious and so did she. Soon, the differences grew. Beth was abused by her father, something she told hardly anyone for most of her life. She was traumatized by that and the mental illness her mother had during a large part of her childhood. Her husband also suffered from mental illness and it affected her and her children very much. Beth herself suffered from long bouts of depression.

In spite of all that sadness, Beth tells of the many happy episodes of her life and through it all her undying joy in the Lord. Her stories are full of humor and love.

I, like many, was aware of Beth Moore for years. She became famous as a woman leader in the Evangelical world. She started out teaching aerobics to women during the ‘80’s, then wrote and led many women’s Bible studies with her Living Proof ministries. I have never read anything she wrote until now. As a woman in my Christian Reformed tradition, I had lived through and, in my small way, contributed to the movement my denomination went through to allow women in office—meaning ministers, elders, and deacons of our local churches.

Our denomination allowed women to preach starting in the late ‘70’s when I was going to college, but allowed individual churches to make up their own minds as to when women could hold office in their own, local church. My own church, full of people who loved me and who I loved nevertheless did not have a woman elder until about 8 or 9 years ago. Because of this personal journey, I had no interest in reading the writings of Beth Moore, who unabashedly held to and talked about the belief that women were never to preach (only teach) and that women were always to be subject to the headship of men, believing what her denomination, Southern Baptist, professed. I even remember one time when a group of women in our church decided to use one of her Bible studies. I called the pastor to talk over my concern, and my fear that it would bring up that whole topic of the women’s role again, a topic I was relieved not to have to address any more.

And then 2016 happened, the “locker room” talk of Donald Trump. Beth says, “I wasn’t surprised one iota by Trump. He was exactly who I thought. I felt like it was going to go down ugly for women. I was floored by my own corner of the evangelical world.” She could not believe that the leaders of her church, so strong in their principles of how to live as a Christian, would excuse and continue to support someone who was treating women this way. All this time she believed their reasoning about following the words of God regarding women’s roles because they were the words of God. Now she discovered that was not actually the reason. She felt it was because of a hunger for power. She felt betrayed that they had lied to her. After some years of inner struggle, Beth left the Southern Baptist denomination, leading to big changes in her career and life, many changes that resulted in the loss of income and support, and even death threats.

Beth’s memoir is honest and funny and heartbreaking. It’s the portrayal of a strong woman of faith. I enjoyed Beth’s book very much. I recommend it.

#6 - The Dean’s Watch - 5
Elizabeth Goudge

The link in the book title above gives a short summary of this book. It warns that the book is a little slow-moving at first and I agree, but not so slow as to discourage me from continuing. It’s very different but, looking back, the beginning of this book reminds me of some of Michener’s books, where he would begin a book about a place like Hawaii with the prehistoric times and moving forward in time to the present, describing the way the land changed over eons of time. The place in this book is the town where the cathedral at the center of the book exists. You come to know each of the deans of the cathedral and what happened to him, the cathedral, the town, and the townspeople during his time.

After centuries of building and destruction of the cathedral and of many deans or others in charge, both good and bad, in 1865 Adam Ayscough is appointed Dean. By then, the town was corrupt and the evil in it was like a slime. The Bishop who appointed the Dean knew that he (the Dean) was the person who would clean up the mess.

One of the townspeople, a main character, is Isaac Peabody, a clockmaker. I had never thought much about clocks and watches before the ubiquitous smartphones we have that are all we need to know the time. Isaac loves the clocks like people. It’s a holy thing to be with them, wind them, care for them, and build them.

Isaac and the Dean become unlikely friends. They and the other characters in the book are so good to get to know. Really, I loved them. I cannot do justice to how wonderful it was to read this book and live in the world of these people, the town, and the cathedral.

#7 - The Covenant of Water - 5
Abraham Verghese

I wrote a blog entry about this book because I liked it so much! The book is set in India and the main character starts out with an arranged marriage at the age of 12. The big story goes all the way to 1977 and includes many fascinating characters and details. I hope you’ll read what I and others wrote about it and enjoy it beginning to end, as I did.

#8 - Somebody’s Fool - 5
Richard Russo

This is the third book for what the reviewers are calling “The North Bath Trilogy” because they are all set in the fictional Maine town of North Bath. I love all Richard Russo’s book and, as I expected, I loved this one, too. The characters are fun to get to know, and so is the town. The movie based on the first of the trilogy was awesome, too, Nobody’s Fool, and—bonus!—it stars Paul Newman. Somebody’s Fool has several of the same characters, which I always enjoy. After I finish a good book I often wonder what will happen to the people I’ve gotten to know. I like learning what has happened to them and continuing to read their stories.

#9 - Color Me Happy - 5
Mary Jane Pories

#10 - An Altar in the World - 5
Barbara Brown Taylor

#11 - Do I Stay Christian? | A Guide for the Doubters, the Diappointed, and the Disillusioned
Brian D. McLaren

#12 - The Monk of Mokha
Dave Eggers

#13 - Remarkably Bright Creatures
Shelby Van Pelt

#14 - Untethered | Faith, Failure, and Finding Solid Ground
Laura Whitfield

#15 - The Evangelical Imagination | How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis
Karen Swallow Prior

#16 - Still Life
Sarah Winman

#17 - Shoutin’ in the Fire | An American Epistle - 5
Dante Stewart

#18 - The Wild Iris - 4
Louise Gluck

#19 - matrix - 3
Laura Groff

#20 - This House of Sky - 5
Ivan Doig