Yay, I don’t have to bother a mod to revive this thread. I’m simply delighted with my current book The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud. This is going to be fun, and well deserved after the last one, Trust Exercises by Susan Choi which was set in a special high school for the performing arts and is ostensibly about how girls process abuse. But it is told in three parts from three peoples points of view, the last of which I couldn’t figure out without looking up a review that explains it. That is too much work and sorry but high school is not an age group I much cotton to, especially not the those who live to perform (and may in fact always be performing, for all I can tell).
But the main character in The Woman Upstairs is one you will love right out of the gate. She says simply the most profound things that give you a little glimpse into this whole being gendered condition we share. All of you who teach, at home or otherwise, might like this especially those of you who on the other side of the gender divide from myself and sometimes chafe at society’s expectations. For some reason @beaglelady comes to mind as someone who might like this but also @Christy and @Laura. I wonder if any of your have read it already? It came out in 2013.
Has anyone read “Cry, the Beloved Country” lately? I am thinking of bringing it out for my son to read it. (It has been a decade or so for me, but I enjoyed it.)
My two favorite classic books that I always go back and read again are The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Such good books that in my opinion all high school students should read in English classes.
Just finished The Woman Upstairs last night. It starts out more hopeful than it finishes up. Not a total downer though. Gets a little edgy in places. Still the pages flew by.
I’ve not read many novels. Still building a regular reading habit. But whenever asked for my favorite books, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm pops to my mind. Arundathi Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a brilliant read. I’m a huge fan of most of Stephen King’s works and Mario Puzo’s Godfather.
An interesting take on time in heaven is in A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken in which he describes being on a walk, if I recall. He has agreed with Davy to meet her at a particular place and time, but runs into C.S. Lewis, his mentor and friend. They go to a pub together and they spend a couple of hours (beyond the scheduled meeting time with Davy), but when he leaves and goes to meet her, she is just arriving, on time, and has not been waiting.
It is about the death of his young wife, and again if I recall (it’s probably been almost forty years since I read it), she had become a Christian, but he not. It took her death for him to seek for and find God. An analogy that I sometimes use is that it may take a whack with a 2x4 ‘upside the head’ for God to get our attention, if we belong to him. Her death was said 2x4, and a severe mercy.
I’ve been stocking up on books in anticipation of getting my new knee the first Monday of October. I’ll finish Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman before then but I’ve stockpiled three others:
Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill;
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt;
and, How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti.
In addition I’ve put a hold on Jonathon Haidt’s The Righteous Mind so I may get another chance to finish that book.
Plato’s Republic
Be Here Now
Spinoza’s Ethics
The Bhagavad Gita
The Fellowship of the Ring
Matthew (if you want to get Biblical, but only the bits where Jesus is talking.)
The Prophet by Gibran
Confession by Tolstoy
Walden by Thoreau
and
Zarathustra by Nietzsche
I hope this does not count as hijacking the thread. Did not feel it’s worth a whole thread just for this. ( I mean well I do but they tend to get turned into private convos fairly quick ) but I was wondering in addition to just people’s favorite books since it’s halloween ( and several other nations have similar
Holidays around this time ) what are some of y’all’s favorite horror books? Any Christian horror or horror centered around science or even evolution?
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer is evolutionary sci fi horror based.
It isn’t my favorite genre but I’ve enjoyed a couple movies that fit, like Alien. But I don’t think the person who started the thread would object. He included Shelly’s Frankenstein in his original post.
“Malcolm” by George MacDonald–portrait of a man really trying to do the right thing.
“Return of the Prodigal Son” by Henri Nouwen–author humbly puts himself not only into the prodigal son and older son’s shoes, but into that of the father–turns things around.
“The Bible Tells Me So” by Peter Enns–testimony of an evangelical coming to grips with doubts, mostly from a science and textual standpoint (but also regarding biblical violence)
“Faith Unraveled” by Rachel Held Evans–evangelical struggling with doubts about God’s goodness.
“Benefit of the Doubt” by Greg Boyd–emphasizes intellectual integrity over tribalism, seeing beyond our house of cards.
“Cross Vision” by Greg Boyd–rethinks the Bible’s violence as imperfect, but Christ making more sense of God
“Father Brown” by GK Chesterton–allegories of faith and deep thinking in mystery tales from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Harry Potter Series” by J K Rowling–encourages growing up and imagination.
“World Book Encyclopedia”–just plain fun to read everything as a kid.
I see I’m not the only kid growing up reading encyclopedias. It sort of amazes me in retrospect, but my dirt poor farming parents bought multiple sets from the traveling salesmen, and we had a World Book, a Grolier, the Book of Knowledge (my favorite as a kid), a science encyclopedia and a Lands and Peoples. That is certainly something from the past that future generations will think strange.
I found a really old World Book series from the 1930’s, I think, in an old mission library where no one ever snooped–it described everything from the point of view of a bygone era. The present day coastal West African countries were the Gold Coast and so on–it was fascinating to compare. My kids also read an old World Book Childcraft Book series on animals, math, etc, that my mom bought for them at a second hand store–I like reading the book of poems and short stories, like Nils Karlsson, the Elf, more than they do (though they do like it somewhat).
Childcraft…that was it! My kids enjoy the Green Kingdom maze, where you have to choose the right tree labeled path, or you turn the page and get eaten by monsters.