Summer Reading

(from Tricia's article in the June Bellows)

One night last fall, Joseph Henry chose Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for bedtime reading. I’m a great Harry Potter fan, so I was delighted that Joseph Henry was ready to enter the magical world of Hogwarts. When we finished reading the first book out loud, he immediately wanted to continue with the next. Seven months and 4,100 pages later we finally finished the seventh and last volume. As I closed the book, Joseph Henry looked at me with concern. “Now what do we do?” he asked.

I recognized the feeling. It’s the same anxiety I get if there is not a stack of books waiting to be read on my bedside table. It’s the same concern that made me use more than half of my baggage weight allowance on books when I set off for the Peace Corps in Thailand years ago. For those of us who like to read there are few things more reassuring than the alluring promise of a stack of unread treasures. Here are some of the treasures that I have read in the past year. If you’d like to add to the list post a comment to this blog or send your list to stdunstansatl@earthlink.net and we’ll print them in the next Bellows. In the meantime, happy reading!

Fiction

Evil Intent by Kate Charles. This is the first of a mystery series set in London, whose protagonist is newly-ordained Anglican deacon Callie Anson. Women clergy are still a fairly new phenomenon in the Church of England, and Callie expects to meet resistance from both parishioners and colleagues. But even she is surprised by the vitriol spewed at her at a clergy meeting by hard-line conservative Nigerian priest Father Jonah Adimola. When Adimola is found dead in the sacristy the next morning, strangled by a priest’s stole, Callie finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Before I started this book I was skeptical – a strange title, two authors, and a book written as letters. None of that sounded particularly appealing. But I am glad I put that skepticism aside and read this charming and engaging novel about the German occupation of the British island of Guernsey in World War II, and its aftermath.

Bombingham by Anthony Grooms. Walter Burke is a black American soldier in Vietnam. The bombings and killings he witnesses there lead to flashbacks to his childhood in Birmingham and the violence he witnessed there growing up in the days of Jim Crow laws and the struggle for civil rights. A powerful novel about a bleak part of our history.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is a bit of a misfit. She graduates from college in 1962 and returns to her parents’ cotton farm in Mississippi. Unlike her friends, she is in no hurry to get married and wants a career as a writer. An editor advises her to write about what interests and disturbs her. She finds her topic literally right in front of her – the way the white women of Jackson, her friends and family, treat the black women who raise their children and clean their homes.

The Brothers K by David James Duncan. Hugh Chance is a baseball fanatic whose dreams of big league glory are ended when he smashes his thumb in an accident. His wife, Laura, is a religious fanatic. The Brothers K tells the story of their four sons, growing up in a household of competing obsessions and coming of age in the tumultuous 1960s. A very fun and poignant novel.

Nonfiction

The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew – Three Women Search for Understanding by Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner. Shortly after September 11, 2001, three women came together to write a children’s book about their faiths. But they soon realized they first had to come to understandings among themselves. The Faith Club is the story of that coming together, of learning to respect each other’s differences, and the realization that by learning about and respecting another’s faith they deepened their own. A book of hope in a time when religious intolerance rages across so much of the world.

The Temple Bombing by Melissa Fay Greene. In the 1950s, as tension over integration and equal rights grew throughout the South, one of Atlanta’s most vocal defenders of civil rights was Jacob Rothschild, rabbi of the Temple on Peachtree Street. How dangerous a position that was became apparent when the Temple was bombed in 1958 by extremists who had no use for Jews or African Americans. Greene’s telling of that event goes beyond the crime itself to paint a rich portrait of a pivotal time and place in Atlanta history.

Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and his Girl by Stacey O’Brien. Biologist O’Brien was a student researcher at Cal Tech when she had the opportunity to adopt an injured four-day-old barn owl. For 19 years Wesley the owl was O’Brien’s constant companion. “He was my teacher, my companion, my child, my playmate, my reminder of God,” she writes. This memoir of their life together will captivate anyone who has a fascination with these lovely creatures.

The Last Week by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. Borg and Crossan are familiar to those who attend Sunday School and the Lenten Lecture series. In this book the two scholars and friends present a day-by-day guide to the last week of Jesus’ life, based on the Gospel of Mark. The Jesus they depict is a political activist and moral hero who willingly gives up his life to protest power without justice. A very engaging and enlightening book.

An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor. From simple practices such as walking, working, and getting lost to meditations on topics like prayer and pronouncing blessings, Taylor reveals concrete ways to discover the sacred in the small things we do and see each day. Taylor is an Episcopal priest in this diocese and a professor of religion at Piedmont College.