Books Read 2011

January
Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka -O*
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath -O*
A Good Man is Hard to Find and other short stories by Flannery O'Connor-*
Library and Information Center Management by Stuart and Moran-T
The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt-Y*
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaimen-*
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway-*

February
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor, selected and edited by Fitzgerald
The Hunger Games, Book 1 by Suzanne Collins-Y*
For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway-*
The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger-G
Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World by John Yoder-O

March

The Dreamer by Pam Muñoz Ryan-Y*
The Hunger Games Book 2: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins-Y*
Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger-T
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't by Jim Collins-T
Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to accompany Good to Great by Jim Collins-T
Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (fabulous)
Blankets by Craig Thompson-G
La Perdida by Jessica Abel-G
The Hunger Games Book 3: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins-Y*
The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses by C.S. Lewis-*
All The Names by José Saramago


April

For the Time Being by Annie Dillard-*
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel-O
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation by Frederica Mathewes-Green
Great Lent: Journey to Pascha by Alexander Schmemann
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith-*
The Gift of Acabar by Og Mandino and Buddy Kaye-Y
Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment by Bryan Talbot-G
That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis-*
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech-Y*
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago-O (It's the only Saramago that I haven't enjoyed, and I own it, seeesh)
Show Me The Way: Readings for Each Day of Lent by Henri Nouwen-O
Death Note, Volume 1: Boredom by Tsugumi Ohba-G
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson-* (crap!)


May

The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that tunes the Heart to God by Frederica Mathewes-Green
Deathnote, Volume 2: Confluence by Tsugumi Ohba-G
Deathnote, Volume 3: Hard Run by Tsugumi Ohba-G
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot-*
Deathnote, Volume 4: Love by Tsugumi Ohba-G
Deathnote, Volume 5: Without by Tsugumi Ohba-G
Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life by Kathleen Norris-O* (so good.)
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrota-*
Deathnote, Volume 6: Give and Take by Tsugumi Ohba-G
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen-O*
Columbine by Dave Cullen-*
Deathnote, Volume 7: Zero by Tsugumi Ohba-G

June

Deathnote, Volume 8: Target by Tsugumi Ohba-G
The Ask and the Answer: Chaos Walking Triology Book 2 By Patrick Ness-Y*
Deathnote, Volume 9: Contact by Tsugumi Ohba-G
Bossypants by Tina Fey-*
Deathnote, Volume 10: Deletion by Tsugumi Ohba-G
Deathnote, Volume 11:Kindred Spirit by Tsugumi Ohba-G
Deathnote, Volume 12:Finis by Tsugumi Ohba-G
Xenocide by Orson Scott Card-*
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier-Y (sooooo good.)
The Big Crunch by Pete Hautman-Y
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt-O (I visited Savannah.)

July
Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy by Frederica Mathewes-Green
The Basics of Social Research by Earl Babbie-T (almost all of it, minus a few pages)
Monsters of Men: Chaos Walking Book 3 by Patrick Ness-Y*
Statistical Methods for the Information Professional by Liwen Vaughan-T(over half of it)
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell-*
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque-*

August
The Magicians by Lev Grossman-*
First Fruits of Prayer: Fourty Days through the Canon of St. Andrew by Frederica Mathewes-Green
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard-O
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making by Catherynne Valente-*M

September
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard-O
Adam Bede by George Eliot-* (hilarious.)
Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth by Tito Colliander
The Help by Kathryn Stockett-*

October
A Moveable Feast (updated and expanded) by Earnest Hemingway-*
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier-*
And then there were None by Agatha Christie-*

November
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman-*M
Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels by Scott McCloud-G
Developing an Outstanding Core Collection: A Guide for Libraries, Second Edition by Carol Alabaster-T

December
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald-*
Are Women Human? by Dorothy L. Sayers-O
Mirror Mirror: a book of reversible verse by Marilyn Singer-PB
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz-M
Savvy by Ingrid Law-M*
Children's Literature Gems: Choosing and Using Them in Your Library Career by Elizabeth Bird
Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Nine Horses by Billy Collins
Is Everyone Hanging out Without me? and other concerns by Mindy Kaling-* (Tina Fey's book was funnier.)
Travels With Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck-*
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, Illustrations by Siobhan Dowd-M
Heartbeat by Sharon Creech-M
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard
The Mailbox by Audrey Shafer-M*
Out from Boneville (Bone #1) by Jeff Smith-G (why is this in the cannon of classic Graphic Novels??)
The Perfectly Imperfect Home: How to Decorate and Live Well by Deborah Needleman
Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas by Plough Publishing-O

(the month where i read lots of short books!)

40-Audiobooks-*
1-Picture Book-PB
7-Textbooks-T
14-Owned Books-O
18-Graphic Novel-G
7-Middle Childhood-M
12-YA lit-Y
100-Total Books


To Read in January (or Feb or March) because I ran out of time:
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
An American childhood / Annie Dillard
Bright's passage : a novel / Josh Ritter
Emily of New Moon / L. M. Montgomery
The name of the rose / Umberto Eco
The spirit of the disciplines : understanding how God changes lives / Dallas Willard
Seeing / José Saramago
Saint Francis of Assisi / G.K. Chesterton
The remains of the day / Kazuo Ishiguro
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / Annie Dillard
Of Water and of the Spirit / Alexander Schmemann
Moon Over Manifest by Vanderpool
Cutting for Stone by Verghese
The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers
Celebration of discipline : the path to spiritual growth / Richard J. Foster. Killer Cronicas: Bilingual Memories by Chavez-Silverman
Radical: Taking Your Faith Back From the American Dream by David Platt
Confessions of a Knife by Selzer
More Information than you require by John Hodgman
Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
The Road Less Traveled: A new psychology... by M. Scott Peck


(also, various books about Children’s Librarianship AND some good Children’s lit from another list…and maybe all the Newberry and Caldecott award winners. Some stuff by Robert Webber, Graham Greene, and really looking forward to Still by Winner, and some hispanic authors, AND the 19 bajillion free books/essays I've already downloaded to my sweet kindle. If I spent less time plotting what I want to read next, I think I'd get more reading done.)

Next year I'd like to challenge myself to not keep track of how many books I read until December 31, because it puts unnecessary pressure on me. I'd also like to read more theology next year and read more books that have been on my list for longer, instead of getting new recommendations and running with those. I did EXCELLENT at reading books I already own, which was an important goal. I still did not finish my Bible in Spanish, disappointing, I need a better plan than just having it in my purse all the time. It was this fall that killed me from getting all my reading done, and then I crammed a bunch into December. But on the upside, I now have a Master's Degree!! yay! Audiobooks saved my butt, as per usual. After reading so much Hemingway, seeing "him" in the movie Midnight in Paris totally made sense! I didn't realize I would like him so much.

As always, if you have questions about any of these, I'd love to give you my take or my recommendations.

ok. mandatory sentence wherein I remind myself that I will never be able to read all the books I want to because it's physically impossible. :) Happy New Year!!

Incarnation.

I've already shared this on facebook, but I wanna find it someday, and so this is a much better place to put this...It was on Fr. Ted's blog yesterday.

"From the human point of view, the coming of Christ undoes the Fall and restores the human race to its intended path; but this fall-redemption arc must be seen as a subsection of the greater arc stretching from creation to deification. The Incarnation is not primarily a remedy for something gone wrong; it inaugurates the union between God and his creation for which all things were created. The cosmic dimension of salvation is clearly expressed in Orthodox worship. The rejoicing of all creation at Christ’s birth, the sanctification of water at his baptism, the darkening of the sun at the crucifixion as ‘all things suffer with the Creator of all’ – these are not mere literary devices. They signal the intimate connections between the work of creation and the work of bringing what is created into union with God in Christ.” (Elizabeth Theokritoff in The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, pg. 69)

Teaching a Stone to Talk

Quotes from Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk

pg 32- A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one. In two thousand years, we have not worked out the kinks. we positively glorify them. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disciples' dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, It is all right- believe it or not- to be people.
Who can believe it?

pg 72- The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. it is simply to see what is there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place. We might sa well get a feel for the fringes and hollows in which life is lived, for the Amazon basin, which covers half a continent, and for the life that- there, like anything else- is always and necessarily lived in detail: on the tributaries, in the riverside villages, sucking this particular white-fleshed guava in this particular pattern of shade.

pg 77- The Napo River: it is not out of the way. It is in the way, catching sunlight the way a cup catches poured water; it is a bowl of sweet air, a basin of greenness, and of grace, and, it would seem, of peace.

pg 110- What if we the people had the sense or grace to live as cooled islands in an archipelago, live, with dignity, passion, and no comment?

Waiting by Henri Nouwen

(This is kinda long, but so worth it. These are a bunch of quotes taken from an essay entitled "Waiting" by Henri Nouwen. I have the full essay if you're interested, just shoot me an email. Hopefully it speaks to you as it did to me.)


For many people waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place. They want to get out of it by doing something.

Fearful people have a hard time waiting, because when we are afraid we want to get away from where we are.

Now Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon and Anna are waiting for something new and good to happen to them.

Waiting, as we see it in the people on the first pages of the Gospel, is waiting with a sense of promise.

They have received something that is at work in them, like a seed that has started to grow. This is very important. We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has already begun for us. So waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. It is always a movement from something to something more.

Second, waiting is active.

The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun. Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment.
A waiting person is a patient person. The word “patience” means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there. Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her.

For this reason, a lot of our waiting is not open-ended. Instead, our waiting is a way of controlling the future. We want the future to go in a very specific direction, and if this does not happen we are disappointed and can even slip into despair. That is why we have such a hard time waiting: we want to do the things that will make the desired events take place. Here we can see how wishes tend to be connected with fears.

Hope is trusting that something will be fulfilled, but fulfilled according to the promises and not just according to our wishes. Therefore, hope is always open-ended.

[Mary] trusted so deeply that her waiting was open to all possibilities. And she did not want to control them. She believed that when she listened carefully, she could trust what was going to happen.

We should wait together.

Elizabeth and Mary came together and enabled each other to wait. Mary’s visit made Elizabeth aware of what she was waiting for.

Mary affirmed Elizabeth’s waiting.

These two women created space for each other to wait. They affirmed for each other that something was happening that was worth waiting for.

Waiting together, nurturing what has already begun, expecting its fulfillment – that is the meaning of marriage, friendship, community, and the Christian life.

Travels w/Charley... 3

For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?

I wanted to go to the rooftree of Maine to start my trip before turning west. It seemed to give the journey a design, and everything in the world must have design or the human mind rejects it. But in addition it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it. Maine was my design, potatoes my purpose.

Travels w/Charley... 2

We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us….relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is a like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.


(on packing too much) I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless…Also I laid in a hundred and fifty pounds of those books one hasn’t got around to reading – and of course those are the books one isn’t ever going to get around to reading.

[best place to eavesdrop are the bars and churches] Early rising men not only do not talk much to strangers, they barely talk to one another. Breakfast conversation is limited to a series of laconic grunts.

-Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

Travels W/Charley... 1

Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from.
-Steinbeck

a few quotes...

“We Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat” (64) -Steinbeck

“‘If by force you make a creature live and work like a beast, you must think of him as a beast, else empathy would drive you mad. Once you have classified him in your mind, your feelings are safe’” (265) Steinbeck


"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
- Albert Camus

"There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and
discovering that you're on the wrong wall." - Joseph Campbell

Speech.

don't know who I stole this from...but I haven't read this book yet.

"Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable
process [...] Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps
better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and
baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty,
is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one
speech [...] What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I
regret its loss nevertheless" (106-107)

Travels with Charley- Steinbeck

Cute Robot!

Isn't this just the cutest robot you have ever seen? I found him while doing work at the library this week...He reminds me of all those drawings kids do, with the man looking over a wall?

I don't know that this should be interesting to me, but Cuba is still keen on counting each and every anniversary. For example, check out this link... (or not.) It links to a scientific journal that in the upper right hand corner of the banner says "53rd Year of the Revolution." I wonder exactly who they are trying to remind.

http://revistascientificas.cujae.edu.cu/

Let me google that for you...

www.lmgtfy.com

Super helpful when someone asks you something they could find out on their own, but probably a tad snarky :)

Here's a friendly example...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=warrior+dash

another one from Kent... (traveling)

"But travel is not as romantic and exotic as it sounds. The familiar will always call, and your sense of rootlessness will not give you rest. Your emotions will fly crazily in all directions until sometimes you will feel that you have lost your moorings. If you travel alone, the warmth of families and couples will break your heart, and your loneliness will plunge you to depths you did not think possible.

And then, there are greater dangers. You may wake up and discover that you have become a runner who uses travel as an escape from the problems and complications of trying to build something with your life. You may find that you were gone one hour or one day or one month too long, and that you no longer belong anywhere or to anyone. You may find that you have been caught by the lure of the road and that you are a slave to dissatisfaction with any life that forces you to stay in one place.

There things happen. But how much worse is it to be someone whose dreams have been buried beneath the routines of life and who no longer has an interest in looking beyond the horizon?

I believe it is worth taking the risk. How else will you know the feeling of standing on something ancient, or hearing the silent roar of empty spaces? How else will you be able to look into the eyes of a man who has no education, never left his village, and does not speak your language, and know that the two of you have something in common? How else will you know, in your heart, that the whole world is precious and that every person and place has something unique to offer?

And when you have tragedies or great changes in your life, how else will you truly understand that there are a thousand, a million ways to live, and that your life will go on to something new and different and every bit as worthy as the life you are leaving behind?"-Kent Nerburn, Letters to my Son

Travel...

"That is why we need travel. If we don't offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don't lift to the horizon; our ears don't hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days. "- Kent Nerburn, Letters to my Son

Summer house

I want one of these...if you can't tell, it's a Russian Summer house with mosaic walls and beautiful stained glass! I'm not sure what other people would use them for, but I'd put plants and a comfy reading chair in it :)

original photo here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/russianjohn/4667122268/

empty.

We must empty ourselves, therefore, of the immoderately high faith we have in ourselves. Often it is so deeply rooted in us that we do not see how it rules over our heart. It is precisely our egoism, our self-centeredness and self-love that cause all our difficulties, our lack of freedom in suffering, our disappointments and our anguish of soul and body.

-Tito Colliander, Way of the Ascetics

Traveling...

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.


-G.K. Chesterton


El viajero ve lo que ve, la turista ve lo que vino a ver.

El propósito del viaje no es pisar tierras ajenas, sino pisar la tierra natal como tierra ajena.


-G.K. Chesterton

Work Rant.

Dear John Smith,

I know you are the only one with your name in your office, department, building, etc. BUT you are not unique or special, I assure you. When you fill out a form with a request for information and then put your email down as "John Smith" instead of johnsmith98@abcxyz.com I cannot send you an email. I CAN look in my outlook contacts for Smith, John and see approximately 368 people. The "advanced find" in outlook yielded no results when I tried to narrow the search by City, Office, or Company. Just thought I'd let you know what took so long getting your information back to you!!

Best Regards,
Jen

Beautiful Paper Sculptures

Check it out here...


http://community.thisiscentralstation.com/_Mysterious-paper-sculptures/blog/4991767/126249.html

(These have been given to libraries and have literary themes...)

Dedication/Vocation

"If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's." In his youth he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat...[Artists] possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not poweful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The work's possibilities excited them; the field's complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and kowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world flapped at them some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their tasks."

Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life"

careful...

[The writer] is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.

Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life"

Schedules. Super important.

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order--willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterwards as a blurred and powerful pattern...There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading-that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?


Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life"

more Adam Bede...

Get out of bed!
"He had been awake an hour, and could rest in bed no longer. In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories."

On assessing beautiful women:"Oh, that is one of the matters in which old bachelors are wiser than married men, because they have time for more general contemplation. Your fine critic of women must never shackle his judgment by calling one woman his own;..."

On enjoying bad habits:"it was the last weakness he meant to indulge in; and a man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion, than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it tomorrow."

George Eliot, Adam Bede

some Adam Bede...

Blind Love:
People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it. -George Eliot

Education:
But I'll not throw away good knowledge on people who think they can get it by the sixpenn'orth, and carry it away with 'em as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to me again, if you can't show that you've been working with your own heads, instead of thinking you can pay for mine to work for you. That's the last word I've got to say to you. -George Eliot, Adam Bede

Social Events cause stress, but working all day is better!:
"I'd sooner ha' brewin' day and washin' day together than one o' these pleasurin' days. There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an' starin' an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next; an' keepin' your face i' smilin' order like a grocer o' market-day, for fear people shouldna think you civil enough. An' you've nothing to show for't when it's done, if it isn't a yallow face wi' eatin' things as disagree." -George Eliot, Adam Bede

Even George Eliot thought spelling was terrible...

"It had cost Adam a great deal of trouble, ... — to get the mastery of his pen, and write a plain hand, to spell without any other mistakes than must in fairness be attributed to the unreasonable character of orthography rather than to any deficiency in the speller..." -Adam Bede

Joy.

The life you are meant to find will wring your heart to the point of breaking and then douse you with buckets of joy when you're not looking. --- Linford Detweiler

Annie Dillard's For The Time Being

"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as read in Dillard's book.

"[The Labor and Delivery Unit of the hospital is] the wildest deep sea vent on earth…where the people come out"

“The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call ‘acts of God.'" (of course this quote depends on your theology, but it's funny nonetheless.)

On writing letters. ha.

...the image of paul bent over his page, filling it with inky letters, illuminated by a flickering oil lamp, is a judgement on anyone who has ever claimed to have "no time to write,"... Cahill page 130 "Desire of the Everlasting Hills"

Beautiful quotes about Gardens and Plants

"Plants embody everything that I like to have around me: presence, personality, character. They are supple and therefore strong, yet softly-spoken and gentle; they are fragrant and delicate; they have movement, colour, structure, scale and proportion. Plants are large in form, tiny in detail and always a single whole. Plants are beautiful in sun and rain, in tropical heat, fighting immortal cold, dancing in the wind, buffeted by storms.
Plants have long been part of the earth’s history. They come from afar. Their beauty is deep and beyond question. It can be overwhelming; their fragrance beguiling. I look at my garden and I see vibrancy, opulence, serenity; I see dignity, playfulness, infinite tenderness, the nodding kindness of Herb Roberti, and in the larger, beautiful picture, I discover small, modest dots of colour that enhance the luxuriant whole."


"A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. It is close to us. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

Enclosed gardens fascinate me. A forerunner of this fascination is my love of the fenced vegetable gardens on farms in the Alps, where farmers’ wives often planted flowers as well. I love the image of these small rectangles cut out of vast alpine meadows, the fence keeping the animals out. There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big."

(to see the whole article, go here- http://archidose.blogspot.com/2011/07/half-dose-89-serpentine-gallery.html )

Quote about hearts

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.)

-Catherynne Valente "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her own Making"

Xenocide quotes

"Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.
...Humans mate with beings who challenge their supremacy. They have conflict between mates, not because thier communication is inferior to ours, but because they commune with each other at all."


Xenocide, Orson Scott Card

All Quiet on The Western Front

"Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades--words, words, words, but they hold the horror of the world." Erich Maria Remarque


"It will be like this too. If I am lucky, when the war is over and I come back here for good. I wil sit here just like this and look at my room and wait. I feel excited; but I do not want to be, for that is not right. I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, mameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait." pg 151

Highlights from Savannah

Jen Library- I don't have a picture yet, but there is a Jen Library. How cool is that!! This is the link for all you non-believers... Jen Library and a better picture of the sign on Flickr.

We saw the original metal film canister from Troop Beverly Hills (one of my favorite childhood movies) at Leopold's.

Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) owns half the town. literally. and we are thankful, because they are who helped spur/finance the restoration of the town.

St. John's Cathedral was pretty. No docent led tours of it :( The Baptismal font was GIGANTIC.

Originally, Catholicism wasn't allowed in Georgia, but they had an Anglican church and an Episcopalian church...and TWO African churches. They also had a John Wesley statue.

I love the large oaks that you can walk under, and the moss hanging off them. It's beautiful! Brittany said "You just like it because it's Spanish moss." hahaha.



Everything our tour guide said was "_____ is the 1st/oldest__________ in America/Georgia."

We visited the only Gothic Architecture style Synagogue in America. It was a little disconcerting. I kept thinking I'd see a stain glass window depicting Jesus or a station of the cross. The congregation is the 3rd oldest Jewish congregation in America.

She-crab soup!!!!!!!!

Rum Bisque Ice Cream!!!!!!

I'd almost like to come back to Savannah and just spend the whole week eating at every restaurant. That might get a leeetle expensive.



so Flannery O'Connor...
-according to our tour book, the house was only open on the weekends, so you can imagine my surprise and delight when it was open when we showed up!!

1. She started calling her parents by their first names when she was SIX.
2. She stopped playing with dolls when she was FOUR.
3. She wrote in her books at a young age, on the title page. "splendid first read" or "not a very good book"
4. The only fairy tales she liked were Grimm's.
5. She had a pet chicken that she taught to walk backwards.
http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=28819
and then she was on film for it!
6. She quit going to children's Mass and started going to adult latin Mass at age 6. When her school teachers found out, they told her parents she should be at the children's Mass, and Flannery said "I won't let the church dictate which service I go to!"' She was the only child in the adult latin Mass.
7. She didn't like other kids, but her mom forced her to have play dates.
8. She didn't care to spell right. About each of her classes she said "I would have gotten 100, but they marked me down for my spelling." On her report card that they showcased, spelling was her worst grade, 78, and algebra was her best! ha.
9. Her house was super skinny!!! But it had a fabulous door with multicolored glass.
10. She made her "friends" read her books out loud, or her writings out loud. That was her favorite activity, and she often made them reread parts she liked.
11. The tour guide said we should read her books out loud, because that's how she wrote them, saying all the words out loud while writing them down.
12. The bed set that her parents got when they were married was two tiny pine beds. They almost looked child sized. eeek. Later, their cousin Katie bought them a real bed.


ok. that's all :)

Highlights from the beach include:
My brother getting stung by a sting ray.
Catching 56 sand dollars.
The children that are so precocious and talk to strangers, i.e. me.
Running into one of my sister's college friends! (She knew he was on the island, but there are 12 miles of beach, what are the odds?!)
The white sand blowing over the hard wet sand like snow flurries
Kicking a soccer ball WITH the wind. It went faster than we could run! eeek.
The 230498309248 families getting their family pictures taken on the beach every night wearing all white. Really, it's only 10-15 families, but gracious me, it seems like an epidemic.


If you have never read "I am the Cheese" by Robert Cormier, you should.

ok. that's really all.

Communication

This is just a funny little quote from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis which I read a couple months ago... (of course, it is also a gross generalization)


"The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.' There is consequently a phatic hiatus."

For Whom the Bell Tolls- Quotes

There were a couple of my favorite quotes from Ernest Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls...


"Why do you speak in English?" Pablo asked.
"I don't know," Robert Jordan said. "When I get very tired sometimes I speak english. Or when I get very disgusted. Or baffled, say. when I get highly baffled I just talk English to hear the sound of it. It's a reassuring noise. You ought to try it sometime."
"What do you say, Ingles?" Pilar said. "It sounds very interesting but I do not undersand."
"Nothing," Robert Jordan said. "I said 'nothing' in English."
"Well then, talk Spanish, " Pilar said, "It's shorter and simpler in Spanish."



"Let me finish, you mule," Pilar said to him. "He teaches Spanish to Americans. North Americans."
"Can they not speak Spanish?" Fernando asked. "South Americans can." (16.171-2

Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners

Quotes on Writing and Art from Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners.

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste?
Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibilty. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us. Usually the artist has to suffer certain deprivations in order to use his gift with integrity. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect, and the practice of any virtue demands a certain asceticism and a very definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part of the ego. The writer has to judge himself with a stranger's eye and a stranger's severity. The prophet in him has to see the freak. No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

I think it is usually some form of self-inflation that destroys the free use of a gift. This may be the pride of the reformer or the theorist, or it may only be that simple-minded self-appreciation which uses its own sincerity as a standard of truth. If you have read the very vocal writers from San Fran, you may have got the impression that the first thing you must do in order to be an artist is to loose yourself from the bonds of reason, and thereafter, anything that rolls off the topic of your head will be of great value. Anyone's unrestrained feelings are considered worth listening ot because they are unrestrained and because they are feelings.

St. Thomas called art "reason in making." This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artistst uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.

Willa Cather Quotes

These were some of my favorite parts from her book, Death Comes for the Archbishop.

pg 289 Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

On Death pg 267 "...You should not be discouraged; one does not die of a cold." The old man smiled. "I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."

On Farming and Wilderness pg 273 He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost the lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.

On the Death Bed pg 288 He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with the calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. Sometimes, when M or B came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life- some part of which they knew nothing. When the occasion warranted he could return to the present. But there was not much present left; ....only the minor characters of his life remained in present time.

Alone?

Monday of the First Week in Lent

It remains true that loneliness often leads to hostile behavior and that solitude is the climate of hospitality. When we feel lonely we have such a need to be liked and loved that we are hypersensitive to the many signals in our environment and easily become hostile toward anyone whom we perceive as rejecting us. But once we have found the center of our life in our own heart and have accepted our aloneness, not as a fate but as a vocation, we are able to offer freedom to others…We can only perceive the stranger as an enemy as long as we have something to defend. But when we say, “please enter- my house is your house, my joy is your joy, my sadness is your sadness, and my life is your life,” we have nothing to defend, since we have nothing to lose but all to give….Who will be our robber when everything he wants to steal from us becomes our gift to him?...Who wants to sneak into our back door, when our front door is wide open?”

Show Me the Way, Henri Nouwen

God vs. Neighbor

First Sunday in Lent

“Perhaps we must continually remind ourselves that the first commandment requiring us to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind is indeed the first. I wonder if we really believe this. It seems that in fact we live as if we should give as much of our heart, soul, and mind as possible to our fellow human beings, while trying hard not to forget God. At least we feel that our attention should be divided evenly between God and our neighbor…It is this unconditional and unreserved love for God that leads to the care for our neighbor, not as an activity which distracts us from God or competes with our attention to God, but as an expression of our love for God who reveals himself to us as the God of all people. It is in God that we find our neighbors and discover our responsibility to them. We might even say that only in God does our neighbor become a neighbor rather than an infringement upon our autonomy, and that only in and through God does service become possible.”

-Show Me the Way Henri Nouwen

Lent Readings...

I'm reading through Show Me the Way, an anthology of Henri Nouwen for Lent. There have been quite a few things that I've wanted to think about harder, and that I believe are worthwhile to share with others. So here is the first installment.

Saturday after Ash Wednesday
“[When our lives are transformed]…What is new is that we no longer experience the many things, people, and events as endless causes for worry, but begin to experience them as the rich variety of ways in which God makes his presence known to us.”

Death with Interruptions...

a couple gems from Jose Saramago's Nobel Prize for Literature winning book...

“Context gives not only the background, but all the innumerable other grounds that exist between the subject observed and the line of the horizon.” -69

“It is still too early...so it can sleep a little more. This is what insomniacs say when they have not slept a wink all night, thinking, poor things, that they can fool sleep by asking for a little more, just a little more, when they have not yet been granted one minute of repose.” -204