Book List 2011

Here is my completed book list for this past year! My count is actually up from last year. (I must have taken advantage of Arden's excellent napping routine!) The list includes many "children's" books (some read aloud to Arden), but I happen to think they are written just as much for adults and make up an essential part of any serious reader's library. :)

The tally:
20 fiction
10 theology/Christian life nonfiction
3 general nonfiction
33 Total


Anne of Windy Poplars (LM Montgomery)
Anne’s House of Dreams (LM Montgomery)
The Great Dance (C. Baxter Kruger)
Love the One You’re With (Emily Giffin)
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Church, World and the Christian Life (Nicholas Healy)
The Abolition of Man (CS Lewis)
The Challenge of Easter (NT Wright)
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (CS Lewis)
The Silver Chair (CS Lewis)
Now We Are Six (AA Milne)- read aloud to Arden
Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
Little House on the Prairie (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
Farmer Boy (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
Winnie-the-Pooh (AA Milne)- read aloud to Arden
The House at Pooh Corner (AA Milne)- read aloud to Arden
On the Banks of Plum Creek (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
Cinderella Ate My Daughter (Peggy Orenstein)
By the Shores of Silver Lake (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
The Long Winter (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
After You Believe (NT Wright)
One Thousand Gifts (Ann Voskamp)
Little Town on the Prairie (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
These Happy Golden Years (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
The First Four Years (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
Habits of a Child’s Heart(Valerie E. Hess & Marti Watson Garlett)
Faith Begins at Home (Mark Holmen)
The Eagle of the Ninth (Rosemary Sutcliff)
Room (Emma Donoghue)
The Wilder Life (Wendy McClure)
On the Incarnation (St. Athanasius)
At the Heart of the Gospel: Suffering in the Earliest Christian Message (L. Ann Jervis)

Various Fairy Tales including:
East O’ the Sun and West O’ the Moon (George Webbe Dasent, illustrated by PJ Lynch)
The Snow Queen (Hans Christian Andersen)
The Twelve Dancing Princesses (illustrated by Kinuko Y. Craft)

And of course countless board books and picture books!

~lg

The Coming Again

This is miracle – that he comes again.

Now, even while I am running, he comes out of the warm house,
door flung open, running after me,
bare feet, short sleeves in the cold night.
He is smiling, white teeth flashing in the dark, eyes sparkling,
lit up with a strange joy,
all the more shocking when I realize it is joy to see me.

But how can this be?
How can he come again even when the No has just escaped my lips, and I am still escaping him?
How can he be standing here on the icy ground with that grin, stopping me in my tracks with that light in his eyes?
How can grace be so ridiculous?

His feet must be freezing. And the cold squeezing my chest begins to melt.
He is here – no matter where I run, he just keeps running too.
He just keeps coming.
Here, to me, with me.

This is the miracle of Christmas. That he comes again and again.


~lg

The Coming

You came, and I ran away.
I tried, I tried to say yes, but I’m no Mary.
I don’t know how to make room when everything else is crowding in.

All this waiting, and I was not ready.

And now what?
Will you come again?
And if you do,
will you create the space that can open up to let you in?
Will you make me Mary?


~lg

a time for longing

Advent.

I put myself in the place of longing. Back to a time before God pulled on the clothes of earth, back to our own nakedness. I remember the cries of a people enslaved – how long, oh Lord? I imagine the dark of the silent shadow, empty ears, blind eyes. I turn back the pages and enter the story that began before my own. I do this to remember where we came from, who we were without Him. I do this so joy will be all the sweeter in the morning.

But the time of longing is not only past. The earth groans still beneath my weary feet, aches with the weight of a laboring world. For glory shone around, but glory also resides in the hidden places – the crook of a musty manger, the splinters of a shameful cross. In this time, sorrow and singing mingle together, yet hope’s song can always be heard above the rest. We are still waiting for another advent, when heaven and earth will be united once and for all in the God-Man.

Oh Emmanuel! Come, come . . . 

~lg