Recently
I was visiting my friend, Violet, and we were talking about books.
Violet is in her 90s and lives with her daughter and family; she has very few personal belongings these days. Violet's criteria for
keeping a book: it had to be worth rereading, and she remembers she once owned over 300 books. It can take a lot of reading to find
over 300 books worth rereading; I discovered a few in 2015. We'll
come back to my top three reread worthy books of 2015 in just a bit.
You
may wonder what criteria determines when a book gets the distinct
privilege of being placed in the reread pile. I have no official
criteria. A book has to challenge me in some way and to reread it
would help me more fully absorb the truths or lessons I long to take
root in me, or it must be a beautifully woven story by a masterful
wordsmith. These are the primary reasons a book may be exalted to a
special shelf or stack in wait of another go around. I love words and
especially well crafted phrases I can taste, touch, smell, hear and
see. Reading has been a lifelong obsession for me.
As
a little girl I memorized the rhymes my mother read to me; with book
in hand I pretended to read to others all the while quoting from
memory. Once I mastered reading I would disappear for hours, held
captive by words between the cover of any book I could get my hands
on. We didn't have many books in our home, so I begged to order books
when money was available and borrowed from anyone willing to share.
I
am not sure how I developed such a voracious appetite for reading,
but no one else in my family seemed to have the same desperate need
for another book and time alone to read it. Many evenings my dad
would call for me to come out of my room and spend time with the
family; being with the family at our house meant watching TV. For
over 100 years several inventors worked on developing the technology
to give us a talking box with motion pictures. It is important to
note here the television came to America in the 40s, during my
parent's childhoods; you were practically a celebrity if your family
was the first on your street to get one. And in the 1960s, my
childhood years, color television sets became available for purchase.
By 1966 all of prime-time television was in color increasing the
thrill of watching anything. The idea of being able watch current
events live, like the first man on the moon, and movies in the
privacy of your home had American families mesmerized.
I
was usually more interested in living inside my own imagination, even
if guided by another's story, than watching sitcoms and movies.
Conflicted, I would join the family with my book in hand. If I was
caught up in a better story than the one playing on television, I
continued reading while sitting by this noisy box amidst the family,
training myself to tune out the noise with singular focus. My skill
for tuning out all sound and being fully taken in by a good book
became so fine tuned my mom would have to raise her voice to jerk me
from out under the cover of a book into the stark reality of chores
and crazy family business. A few of my favorite childhood books to
read and reread were Pipi Longstocking, Ellen Tebbits, Black Beauty,
Little House on the Prairie and Little Women. Some of my childhood
favorites, I have read and reread as a grownup: Anne of Green Gables,
The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia and Jane Eyre. And that's just
the fiction.
Over
the years I've reread many nonfiction books, as well as skimming all
I underlined, culling rich morsels to nourish to my soul. So no one
misunderstands, I am not leaving out the Bible. Those who know me
well know it is my life book. I find reading good writing
transforming; these days I read far more nonfiction than fiction. On
my list of of books read in 2015, here are three I plan on reading
again:
As
I look over the list of books I read in 2015 there are actually more
than three I would like to reread, but these I am certain to
read again. I wrote a post of
the impact of Benson's book, Dancing
on the Head of a Pen early
last year.
http://juliejjoiner.blogspot.com/2015/01/thebenson-influence-asi-set-up-to-begin.html
And of course there is a stack of new books to be read with a goal to
read even more books than last year. Though reading well is more
important than the number of books read; I like to challenge myself
to make reading and learning a priority. But those who know me well
know I can't help myself; I have to read and learn.
I
would love to hear about your top three favorite books read in 2015.
What are your favorite types of books to read?
I
love this excerpt from The Dean's Watch by Elizabeth Goudge, a
British novelist born in 1900. It is about a boy who is put in an
orphanage and finds it a miserable place. Health returned to the boy
as he immersed himself in reading.
“In
the schoolroom there was a shelf containing a few tattered books,
given by some kindly citizen, and the boys were allowed to read them
on Saturday nights. Few made use of the privilege, for they couldn't
read well enough, but Job read them all. . . . All the books had
pictures in them. The books were like rooms in a great house and the
pictures were lamps lit in the rooms to show them to him. As he read,
his dreams slowly changed. The nightmares . . . gradually gave way to
dreams of forests full of great trees, where fabulous beasts galloped
down the cool green aisles, meadows full of flowers and celestial
mountains musical with streams.”
Happy
reading!
