It is the people you meet and the books you read that change you most in a year. Whoever said that forgot to include experiences, invited or not, that change our lives in a moment. But that line about books and people has stayed with me since I read it sometime in my teens. While … Continue reading Fiction, Politics and Spiritual Physics: Sparrowfare’s Most Surprising 2021 Reads
Rarely do I begin a contemporary book and feel it's paid for itself before the end of the first chapter. But I've begun 2019's reading year wth Karen Swallow Prior's On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books and I'm feeling grateful and inspired. My college major was English and when I finished, I spent ten happy years teaching communication … Continue reading Happy New Year! A Planner and a Playlist for the Road Ahead
Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer-prizewinning Gilead is a book for our contentious time. I'd picked up a copy when it first became a best seller, but this year when I went through my shelves looking for books I'd bought but hadn't yet read, its weathered green spine beckoned. When I broke the book open, Gilead began the … Continue reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead: A Merciful Mind for Our Contentious Time
The first paragraph of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It delighted me when I opened the book on a camping trip many summers ago. "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing," the narrator begins, noting that his father was a minister who tied his own flies. He told us … Continue reading The Fishermen and the Risen Christ: 153 Reasons Why I Love and Believe the Story
“To most people, Hans Huberman was barely visible. An un-special person....Not important or particularly valuable.” The speaker is Death, the steely-yet-bemused narrator in Markus Zusak's The Book Thief. But his description of this “un-special person” isn't finished, as the phrase “to most people” intimates. “The frustration of that appearance, as you can imagine, was its … Continue reading The Book Thief Stole My Heart (and Reminded Me Why I Read)
