When I was eight, I declared that I would live in my local library with apples. Twenty years later, I still think I’d be quite content with apples, tea, and a roomful of books to keep me company. I used to read upwards of 9–13 new books a month, and currently, I read about 5–6 new books a month. Trying to get back up there. Reading has been my most enduring hobby since childhood where my parents would ask me if I meant to eat my books when I’d bring them with me to the dinner table. Currently, I listen to audio-books, read countless articles online, and watch television/movies, but physical books are still my favorite medium of storytelling. I decided to share the books I read each month in 2019 as they’re on various topics and will help me with writing consistently. New books are featured along with repeats, books I’ve read before and now read mostly for comfort before bed.
Enjoy!
What The Church Won’t Talk About by J.S. Park (2014)
I first ran into J. S. Park’s writing when I was still active on Tumblr. The foreword is written by Todd Laberge, another Tumblr writer I admired. He is, to this day, the only author I have been so intrigued/convicted by that I brought one of his books online. (He currently has five.) This book is written in a Question and Answer format with questions he received from real people on his blog. He is a former atheist (like me) and writes like a person who knows that the Christian faith can seem crazy and ill-informed at times.
His writing is frank and conversational in this book as he tackles topics from depression to homosexuality to pornography/masturbation with grace. He admits that he doesn’t have all of the answers (which no-one does), and I appreciate that he’s honest when he’s stumped by either his empathy or his intelligence.
Most yes Section: “I know how hard it is to talk about Jesus. It’s the most awkward conversation you’ll ever have. If you even say the whole Gospel out loud right now, it sounds like the craziest thing you’ve ever heard. But the Gospel isn’t some “speech” you unload on people and then “leave it in God’s hands.” Blasting people with theology is like serving icing for dessert. Evangelism is your whole life, it’s sharing your home, it’s enduring patiently, it’s being a human being, it’s availability, it’s sharing Jesus through who you are; not perfectly, but passionately.
Yes, invite them to church and to that revival and talk about your faith and your testimony, but once you dare to go there, just know you might be rejected immediately, a lot, and aggressively. Except secretly they can’t deny there must be something to it, because you’re not just a billboard: you’re an overflow of a barely containable supernatural miracle.”
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (2009)
This novel was a random find at a free neighborhood swap earlier this month. Contrary to all the intelligent and well-meaning ways of seeking out novels, my random choices have turned out to be my favorites at times. This was one of those choices. Telling the life story of Henry Lee, a Chinese immigrant whose father is obsessed with Henry being raised “American”, and his childhood friend, Keiko Okabe. Henry’s story is told in alternating chapters of his childhood in Seattle and the discoveries of Japanese families’ belongings after being placed in internment camps during World War II. The novel switches between 1942 and 1986 bringing parallels, memories, and past choices into sharp focus.
I love chapters that alternate perspectives in a novel. Instead of switching between two people, Ford shows us the younger Henry Lee in childhood and the widower Henry Lee forty years later. Both periods highlight a volatile time in America’s history and the ripple effects of prejudice, choices, and childhood innocence being taken far too quickly.
Favorite quote: “Amazed that he was having this conversation, and that it sounded so normal, like a natural extension-a follow up to where they’d left off forty years earlier, as if they hadn’t each lived a lifetime apart.”
Gay Girl, Good God by Jackie Hill-Perry
This book was a Christmas gift from a dear friend that I got at the beginning of January. I wrote a bit about it here: Jackie tells her life story of being a lesbian stud in the LGBTQ+ community and how God reached out to her while she was in her bedroom with her girlfriend. While I cringed through some of the sections of this book, I’m the last person to disparage someone’s experiences. Some people pray to God and seem to hear nothing; others aren’t praying yet insist God intervened in their situation.
Jackie is a spoken word poet, and I’ve watched a few of her performances. She is an intense storyteller who makes you feel as if you’re sitting in the same smoke-filled room she was years ago. While she states the story doesn’t end with her being a heterosexual, the book does end with her marriage to another spoken-word poet. I do wish she would have written about her early marriage, sex life with her husband, and life with her two children. That would have been illuminating, but as it is, the story ends rather abruptly with her still feeling stiff and unnatural even as her fiancee hugs her. I don’t know how to feel about this book yet even though it’s a true story. Jackie seems to have brought into a very rigid, traditional Christianity belief of what it means to be a man or woman. She doesn’t seem to have learned that woman can have “masculine” personalities without being LGBTQ or that assertiveness/strength is not a uniquely masculine trait.
Most ick Section: “Womanhood is a strange thing, to me at least. Possibly because the way it was defined, then given to me, was not at all what it began as or was intended to be. By the time I’d received it though, I knew it couldn’t possibly have been meant for me. I was too aggressive for the kind of low-to-the-ground women they told me God loved. My edges were too rough to measure up to the soft ones men wanted to marry and deliver their offspring. Those women didn’t look like me.”
Repeats
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868)
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett (2009)
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
Read any awesome books lately? Want me to review a book? Got any good book recommendations?
Send ’em by way for February!
