So, I have been reading a lot, as usual. I have also had the girls the past two weekends, so I have watched a ton of Christmas movies, decorated my house for Christmas, and generally enjoyed my life, including getting to visit with my sister and her family. Anyway, some recommendations:
The Legacy by Katherine Webb
April discovered Katherine Webb somehow and told me that it was similar to Kate Morton. I love Kate Morton, but I have not loved the last two books that she put out. I feel like she is using way to much coincidence to tie the stories together anymore. That said, The Forgotten Garden and The Distant Hours are among my top twenty books ever of all time.
The Legacy reminds me very much of those two books, with the story dashing wildly apart and then merging together. I especially loved the ending, and I rarely ever like endings, much less feel like gushing over them, so I greatly recommend this book. I am looking forward to reading more of Webb in the near future.
Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty
I really enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I would. The premise is that two couples attend a barbeque at the home of another couple and something happens and everything unravels. It's funny at times, and profound at times, and mostly it talks about how we have these friendships that occurred when we were children and continue into adulthood on tender hooks of familiarity and offense and love and hate.
A Labyrinth Walk Under a Full Moon
Lisa Whelchel has been my friend for a very long time. Practically as long as I can remember, if we go back to her days as Blair on The Facts of Life. Her books have always reached me at just the right time in my life, dealing with motherhood and parenting and adult friendships. Somehow Lisa's life is always just a few steps ahead of my own. I have been anxious to see what she creates from her divorce and subsequent path forward for somewhat obvious reasons. She is at work on a book, but in the meantime she blogged about her travels as she walked a 500-mile pilgrimage called the Camino de Santiago. It is an excellent blog series (her life veered off on a path that she was completely not expecting) but this particular blog post that she wrote clear at the beginning of her journey struck me to my core.
"I felt the Lord saying to me, “I know you want me to seal this courage and feeling in your heart so that you will never lose it and will always trust me in faith but that’s not the way life works. The journey will always be more like two steps forward, one step back. Life is a mystery and it is not controllable. Trust the flow of it."
Yes, I need that. I need to know that no matter how much I manage to feel that I am moving forward, healing this damaged heart, it is okay that I am going to have moments where I have to step back, to feel something that I do not want to feel. To allow this grief it's life within me and know that it is serving some kind of purpose.
The Fine Feather
And lastly, there is a blog that I cannot say enough wonderful things about. January went to high school with me and we became friends on Facebook and Instagram sometime ago, as you do, and I discovered that she lives in Prague and takes beautiful pictures and has a little girl and is an amazing writer. And she has begun a blog, The Fine Feather. It is gorgeous. It is profound. Her life and my life could not be more different-she is happily married and living on the other side of the world, while I live in the house just beside the house I grew up in, divorced and somewhat badly broken. But her words sink deep within my soul. The internet has brought much negativity into my life, so much so that I purposefully have begun really monitoring my time and attention to it, but it has also brought connections to people that I now treasure and cannot imagine my life without.
No comments:
Post a Comment