I just finished Will and Spirit by Gerald May, a commitment of careful reading. I took a year and a half to read it slowly while reading other things. Here’s a list of the ten books in my current pile. I’m holding the ones with asterisks now:
- The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok
- Blacks by Gwendolyn Brooks*
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
- Exploring Prosperity Preaching by Debra Mumford*
- Lying Awake by Mark Salzman*
- Faith in the Fire by Gardner C. Taylor*
- Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin
- An Altar In The World by Barbara Brown Taylor
- Allah: A Christian Response by Miroslav Volf
- A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias
Any recommendations for me, particularly for novels, short story collections, memoirs, or psychology and theology?
And what are you reading?
Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those souffles, all that creme caramel, all those daubes and albondigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of my life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots; the two systems existed for me on parallel tracks that occasionally converged, notably during earthquakes.
Michael Washington 