May 17, 2021
This month's bookshelf
I know you look forward to the book titles that I share every month at Post Script. I know I also regularly get emails with questions like, “How do you manage to read so much?” Here’s the truth. I haven’t always read every book I share with you. These titles have sometimes crossed my desk serendipitously. Sometimes they’re blown in, like ships, in storm.
As a bit of a disclaimer, I don’t only read books to confirm what I think to be true about the world. I like reading “promiscuously,” as I’ve often heard Karen Swallow Prior describe. (The term, I think, is original to John Milton’s essay, Areopagitica.) It’s the idea that reading widely allows us to consider many varied perspectives.
As readers of Post Script, you’re charged with your own discernment as to what book is next and best for you. Whatever you choose, it’s likely going to be better than your next Netflix binge.
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick. This is reading I’ve done recently for my MFA. For writers interested in understanding the craft of the personal essay and the memoir, I can’t recommend this more highly. It handles the role the “self” should play in personal writing.
A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing by Scott McKnight and Laura Barringer. As stories emerge regularly about pastors and ministry leaders abusing their power, it’s essential that we gain a theological and biblical imagination for what “goodness” looks like in the church. “The church is part of the good news of Jesus,” writes Tish Harrison Warren in her foreword, and I couldn’t agree more.
Partners in the Gospel: 50 Meditations for Pastors’ and Elders’ Wives by Megan Hill. Speaking of the church, Megan Hill has written this and two other books to help readers imagine what it means to love and serve the church. You should also check out: A Place to Belong: Learning to Love the Local Church and Praying Together: The Priority and Privilege of Prayer in our Homes, Communities, and Churches.
Freedom to Flourish: The Rest God Offers in the Purpose He Gives You by Elizabeth Garn. Hannah Anderson, author of the recently released Turning of Days, has offered this endorsement for Garn’s book: “Sometimes you really do need to back up and start at the very beginning. Sometimes, knowing who you are begins with remembering whose you are. In Freedom to Flourish, Garn calls us to remember that the joy and fulfillment we seek cannot be uncoupled from our calling as God’s image bearers.”
The Possibility of Prayer: Finding Stillness with God in a Restless World by John Starke. I appreciated listening to John’s interview with Ashley Hales on her Finding Holy podcast. Starke spoke of the corporate prayer practices of his church community in NYC, which underscored how much I’ve been relying on morning prayer, three times a week, with our small group. This book invites readers to think about prayer as something to do alone and also together.
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk, and Motherhood: A Confession by Natalie Carnes. This is more MFA reading. I’ve been writing more about motherhood and wondering how other authors manage to write about this vulnerable aspect of their vocation and identity without trampling on the privacy of their children. Neither of these books was especially revelatory, but I did stop and gasp at this insight from Cusk: “I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood: this mere sufficiency, this presence.”
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art by Madeleine L’Engle. I’ve fallen behind on this collection of essays, which a small group of people is reading from my church. But I know it’s been very helpful and illuminating for others. Years ago, I enjoyed a biography of L’Engle by Sarah Arthur, which I am happy to recommend: A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle.
It’s time to pre-order Shawn Smucker’s novel The Weight of Memory. You might remember the correspondence that Shawn and I exchanged for a year. Shawn is a writer for whom I have immense respect. This new novel, Shawn explains, is “about a man named Paul who receives a terminal diagnosis and decides to return to Nysa, the area where he grew up, in order to find a guardian for his precocious and enigmatic granddaughter Pearl.” In the novel, Shawn explores the themes of death and dying, redemption and memory—and that’s all I needed to know.
Happy reading!
Jen