2023 Reading Wrap Up

THE LIST OF ALL 2023 BOOKS 

I have participated in reading 52 Books in 52 Weeks again. Here are answers to the Wrap Up questions:

How was your reading year? 

Great, I read a lot more than I thought I would. How did that happen?

Did you follow a plan or go with the flow?

I am continuing to work through the 1000 Books to Read Before You Die List (read 54), but I took a break for a while. I also had Renovare Book Club Books (4) and many spiritual direction books that I am rereading to decide if I would include them in the curriculum I am writing for the training I am starting in the fall of 2024.

I also read some fun memoirs/autobiographies that I heard out and about. I liked all of them (Spare, Counting the Cost, But First God, All My Notted Up Life, Radical Love).

Did you stick to tried and true authors or genres or explore outside your comfort zone?

Many books on the 1000 Book to Read List are outside of my comfort zone. So, I tend to read new authors all the time! I read a lot of Science Fiction which is not my favorite, but I stretched myself!

Where did your adventure take you? Outside of time and into space? 

Yes, as mentioned above, I read Science Fiction: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ringworld, NOVA, The Day of the Triffids, Ender's Game, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Blade Runner, and Dune. Oh, my, I DID read a lot of Science Fiction!

I went to England (Tom Jones, Brief Lives, Diary of a Provincial Lady, A Bullet in the Ballet),  India (The God of Small Things), Montana (The House of Sky), the Eastern Seaboard (The Outermost House), New York (Bonfire of the Vanities), Australia (Narrow Road to the Deep North),  France (Adventures Along the Wine Route, Lost Illusions, A Year in Provence), Texas-Mexico border (Lonesome Dove), Mt. Everest (Ascent of Rum Doodle), Dublin (Ulysses) 

There are more places, but that is enough.

Which stories made your heart sing or cry or laugh or fly. Do you want to hug the author or country or city or state?

I really loved Cold Comfort Farm (funny and engaging with a good ending), The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton is a favorite author), Tom Jones, Tender is the Night. 

Surprisingly, I loved Lonesome Dove! I would not pick Western as my genre, but the writing was excellent, and I even watched the mini-series as a result.

I loved Balzac's Lost Illusions too. 

I am proud that I was able to finish Ulysses after several false starts! I want to go back to Dublin and follow his route. 

As mentioned above, I liked every single memoir/autobiography I read. I think that is one of my favorite genres (because I am a people person and love to see what makes people tick). 

I also really loved the books I read on "neurotheology" the influence of brain science on spirituality. I have really benefitted from learning this from The Joyful Journey, The Joy Switch, The Other Half of Church, and The Pandora Problem. Also, I enjoyed the reread of Anatomy of the Soul about the same subject.

Which stories made you want to throw it across the room in disgust?

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic - a graphic novel with pictures of sex. Ewww. Why does Mustich have this book on his list? There should have been a warning. Not to mention that her dad was a pedophile, and she glosses over it!

Which authors did you add to your "I want to read more or again pile"?

I don't think there is any I plan on rereading. I always want to read more Henri Nouwen though! 

Share quotes, covers, stats, and ideas for next year such as new or different authors or genres to explore.

This was my favorite cover. I just love the colors and style:

Next year, I plan to read the rest of the Renovare Book Club Books (The Great Divorce, Faith Like a Child, The Eternal Promise) and continue on my journey with the1000 Books to Read Before You Die List (I 38 books away from being 3rd on the list). 

I will probably not be reading any more Science Fiction for a while since I read so much last year, and I think I read all of the ones on the list! 

 

Citizen

This was beautifully written, and it was very eye-opening. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry (in a sign of the book’s multivalent singularity, it was also a finalist in the Criticism category), Claudia Rankine’s remarkable book is about being a citizen in an uncivil union, a relationship that renders one’s figure in the world alternatively ominous and invisible. Something like a gallery, Citizen is unconventional in form as well as force: Photographic images and paintings are juxtaposed with text, and a section of the volume presents scripts for “situation videos.” Created with John Lucas, these are collage-like constructions of quotations and meditations on injustice, discrimination, and violence as reflected in specific instances, including Hurricane Katrina, the killings of Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson, the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of British authorities, and the policy of stop-and-frisk adopted by urban police forces. In the pages of Citizen, Rankine holds fast to what she’s seen, brings close what others have felt and suffered, and breathes language into the deadened air of grief, forcing herself—and her readers—to scrutinize the pain that racism provokes, and to stand still and ponder its cumulative injury and sorrow. 

Look Homeword, Angel

I watched the movie Genius about Thomas Wolfe and the writing of this book several years ago. So, I have always been curious about it. 

It is autobiographical. What a messed up life! What a materialistic mother and alcoholic, dreamer father. What a brilliant writer. I was engaged the whole time. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe's pioneering autobiographical first novel, is set in a town called Altamont, a thinly disguised version of Asheville, North Carolina; it follows the fortunes of Eugene Gant from his difficult birth through childhood, adolescence, sexual awakening, university days, to finally a career as a writer. In ornate, often breathtaking, sometimes unbearably intense prose—in which “the minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time”—Wolfe spins an almost mythic tale about hating a home you will long for only after you leave, and about forging a career as an artist in defiance of family expectation. Wolfe gave voice to an American experience that had not yet been put down in prose, driven by a sense of purpose both quixotic and noble.

Bonfire of the Vanities

It was an amazingly engaging book. It was satirical in many ways. I would recommend it, and I do believe it is a classic, but in today's climate, I wonder if it would be as accepted as it was when it was first written. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

What’s most impressive about Wolfe’s rollicking fictional tour of New York in the 1980s is its vigor. He depicts so many facets of the city’s life: Park Avenue and Wall Street and their social and financial scheming; inner city housing projects and their attendant miseries and machinations; the personal and political confusions of the criminal courts; the vapid, venal power of the media. Each slice of life is drawn and quartered with a wicked pen. Give Wolfe a shoe, an architectural detail, or a verbal inflection and he’ll turn it into a satiric weapon sharpened by insight. This is the novel as comic romp, riffing on observable reality with an intelligence that is both precise and completely over the top. There may be no psychological depth here, but that, in part, is the author’s very subject. His furiously paced, hilariously funny novel is an ideal witness to the sad comedy of a metropolis cowering behind the shattering glass of its glittering and glowering façades.

Advent Exercises

This was my devotional for the season. I had done this author's Lenten Devotional and liked it very much. I did not like this one as well, but it was still  great. 

The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emporer

This made me realize how much war has gone on in Afghanistan for centuries! I am not into war memoirs which is mostly what this is about (with some descriptions of animals, fruit, etc.)

It didn't really float my boat, and I have to admit that I read a version that was edited by the author (because I couldn't find it in any library, and I did not want to have to buy this book).

Meh. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Astonishingly, given its sophistication in both style and substance, the Baburnama was the first real autobiography in Islamic literature: With no literary precedent, and, as it were, between battles, Babur created a form and discovered a self within it. The result makes absorbing reading, presenting an engrossing account of the emperor’s adventures as warrior and potentate; it is filled with evocative attentions to the natural world as well, and with glimpses of the gifts of expression that inspired the emperor’s poetry (he was a man of many parts). The memoirs of this multifaceted Mughal remain intriguing reading as—all at once—personal narrative, historical chronicle, literary landmark, and enduring cultural artifact.

An Ignatian Book of Days by Jim Manney

This is one of the many beautiful readings in An Ignatian Book of Day compiled by Jim Manney. 

I loved this quote that I read today, and since I am only 9 days away from completing the whole book, I figured I would also write the review for the book. 

First, the quote from above. Silence is golden (thus why I have the golden sun from the Quote fancy stock photos). It goes along with a quote from the last book I posted about The Poetics of Space, "Silence affects not only man's time and speech but also his very being." 

I am convinced that it is important to speak out of silence. That is why I try to have a Centering Prayer time before I go into a Spiritual Direction meeting.

Second, the book in general. It has excellent "bite-size" tidbits from Ignatian spirituality. I ordered it this time three years ago, but since I was going through the Celtic spirituality book for two years, I put this one on hold until 2023. (Hmm. Should I go back to that? I certainly loved it when I went through the first two years, and I have two more years to go.)

I love it. If someone has not been exposed to Ignatian spirituality, this is a good introduction. 

The Poetics of Space

I checked this out more than once and was unable to get into it. I found it on CloudLibrary in a PDF and went to listen to it on my iPhone (two fingers down the center of the page reads it to you chapter by chapter), but it kept switching to FRENCH! I read through that particular chapter and then did some fiddling with my phone (in settings you can say something about not switching to another language, I think), and the next chapter read in English (even though there was French poetry sprinkled throughout my English reader mispronounced it and went back to the rest of it in English).

It was easier to get through then. I am not sure I would put this on 1000 Books to Read Before You Die, but it did bring me back to memories of my home in childhood and reliving some pleasant memories from there. It also brought me to live in the present moment in my own space in my cozy home. (Many people walk in and say how peaceful it is here. That is so nice to hear.) It also brought to mind how Proust waxed poetic when it came to living in the present moment in his childhood spaces in In Search of Lost Time. Those French people! 

It gave me food for thought but was not a book I would recommend. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

This book is beloved by readers and writers, thinkers and dreamers the world over, despite its sometimes recondite rhetoric and its always French intellectual élan. Metaphorically and metaphysically rich, Poetics follows the imagination into spaces that nourish and inspire it, “inside” realms within the world’s immensities that promise safe haven for the reveries that both define and enrich our lives. Bachelard begins with a philosophical anatomy of the house and a consideration of how inhabited space has a profound subconscious influence on how we perceive reality (houses, he explains, “are in us as much as we are in them”). Metaphorically and metaphysically rich, Poetics follows the imagination into spaces that nourish and inspire it, “inside” realms within the world’s immensities that promise safe haven for the reveries that both define and enrich our lives.

The God of Small Things

This book is beautifully written. But the story is so sad and goes back and forth where there was great confusion. I had to look it up on SparkNotes to understand what was happening. I wouldn't recommend it. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Skittering between present and past, Arundhati Roy’s intense novel of a shattered family is infused with the sights and smells of southern India; it’s an indelible depiction of the struggles of women and of lower- caste Indians against the enduring constraints of traditional society. Yet the sensual and social specificity of the tale only deepens the resonance of the book’s grasp of a far-reaching truth: how human structures empower fate, turning essential yearnings for love and security into ineluctable tragedy. 

Captain Blood

 It took me months to finish this book, primarily because I had a VERY busy fall reading all the other books I was reviewing for starting my spiritual direction school. But I am on vacation, and this is the first book I finished, and I was not disappointed! 

Peter Blood is so good!

This is my shout-out to Stephen on Goodreads who did a thorough review of this book that I heartily agree with! 

From: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/158446.Captain_Blood 

Old School, feel good, swashbuckling derring do, performed with style and panache, and featuring a larger-than-lifer whose battle savvy and intrepidity are matched only by his integrity, his keen intellect, and his imperturbable grace.

Captain Peter Blood...is the MAN...and the myth, and the legend, and the whole kit and caboodle, and he deserves VIP seating within the inner sanctum of literature’s most memorable heroic characters.

No wonder Errol Flynn became a star playing this singular figure.


He’s everything the hero should be, and this novel is adventure as it was born to be done.

If you haven’t read this, do so.

If you have read this, may I suggest a re-read along while listening to the superb narration of Simon Vance, who performs the audio version to perfection. (Carol's Note: This is the narration I listened to. It is excellent!)

PLOT SUMMARY:

Set in the 17th century, during the reign of James II, Peter Blood, Irish physician and former solider, is wrongfully convicted of treason for providing medical attention to a rebel combatant. Kangaroo courted and sold into slavery, Blood quickly finds himself in Barbados as the property of the malicious Colonel Bishop. From there follows hardships...injustices...anger...seeds of romance...escapes...piracy...battles and strategy and tactics...blossoming romance...betrayals...booty...revenge...more battles...friendship...courage...more battles and more betrayals...a reckoning...and a final comeuppance that will have you whooping and fist pumping.

THOUGHTS:

I loved it and sprained my jaw from excess grinning at the pure joy wafting off the pages.

The writing is polished and absorbing and very clever. Foregoing any hint of pretension or the use of overly ornate language, Sabatini simply goes about telling his story, and he tells it with skill, with wit, and with an eloquence at which you can not help but be impressed.

The man’s storytelling is fluid and flawless.

In addition, the story itself is so wonderfully deployed. The plotting is intricate and nuanced, yet remains inclusive and engaging throughout. True, Sabatini’s characters are somewhat married to their roles of white hats and black hats, but this is hardly a cause for criticism in this kind of tale, and even in this regard, there are moments of shading where splotches of gray appear.

And, of course, there is Captain Peter Blood. An attention-captivating, envy-inducing, singular aggregation of that which is cool. Sabatini never angers or disappoints the reader with Blood's decisions or actions. Blood never plays the patsy simply because he’s the “good guy,” he never makes you question his honor, he never makes you feel a twinge of uncertainty at the rightness of his cause.

He is the consummate hero.

4.5 stars. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!

P.S. A big thank you to Richard for insisting that I read this, and hammering the order home by rudely sending me a copy. Well played, sir, you win this round.

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Raids, sea battles, sword fights, acts of gallantry and low cunning: The stuff of Blood’s action-packed odyssey is recounted with zest and skill, in chapter after page-turning chapter, by a robust, natural-born storyteller. Filled with despicable enemies (in English, French, and Spanish flavors), an attractive romantic interest, and the inspiring élan of a dauntless hero, Sabatini's book dares you to put it down. You won’t.

(Carol's Note: As I already mentioned, I was one of those people who put it down several times, but it was not for lack of interest but other priorities in the Fall of 2023!)

But First, God: An Audio Memoir of Spiritual Discovery

Finished Reading: December 1

I really loved this memoir. God has her heart 100%. So encouraging! 

Spiritual Direction by Henri Nouwen

I think I will put this in the curriculum I am developing. I love Nouwen. I also love that Belovedness is included in this book. It is a combination of formation and direction. It has just one problematic part because he speaks of Vanier of L'Arche. Nouwen died before anyone knew of Vanier's sexual abuse. I will have the participants skip this part, and maybe future editions of this book will take this out of the book (which is a collection of his writings about spiritual direction in one volume). 

Our Un-Forming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation

Finished Reading on November 5th

This was recommended as a possible book for a spiritual direction curriculum that includes cross-cultural spiritual direction, but I just didn't think it really offered anything of value. Where were the ideas for De-Westernizing? 

Sorry, missed the mark. I will use the wonderful articles I found online. They are written by people with years of experience doing direction in cross-cultural settings.  I also plan on reading the book Pastoral Counseling Across Cultures.

Anatomy of the Soul

Finished: October 23

This is my third read of this book. I did a little teaching on body awareness in spiritual direction, and it is so helpful to understand how important our body and brain are in spirituality!

Here is my pervious review

Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction

Reread October 26

This is my second read. Here is the first review. 

Sacred Companions

Finished Reread: October 4, 2023

This is a reread, and I still love it. It is such a gentle and wonderful introduction to the practice of spiritual direction. 

Here is my previous review.

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

Reread Finished: September 30

I read this in May 2021, and here is my review.

I work for a ministry called the 2nd Half Collaborative, and the participants read an excerpt from this book. So, I thought I would reread it again. We do it on the "unhurrying" station where we purposely attempt to slow our lives down. 

I had a fun month of "unhurrying," and this is a fun book. 

The Second Sex

This woman is so BRILLIANT. Wow! I can see why it is on the list of books to read, and if you want to understand modern-day feminism, this is an important book to read. It is a big commitment. I had to check it out twice because I could not get through it in the 21 days given. 

All that said, she pretty much bags Christianity, and I see no reason to do that. She talks of Christian culture but not following Jesus. Jesus cares for women. :) 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

By Simone de Beauvoir’s own account, Sartre had a critical role in the genesis of The Second Sex. When she told him that she was about to embark upon a memoir of her childhood, he suggested she consider how being a woman had shaped her upbringing and engagement with the world. After some resistance, she took his advice; more than a year and a half of research and reflection—and some eight hundred pages of prose—later, The Second Sex was completed. Its publication in 1949 sent waves of influence through subsequent decades as its arguments and insights disrupted, redirected, and recalibrated conventional thinking about the lives of women. Both formative and transformative, Beauvoir’s scrutiny of the physical, social, and existential experience of women in the West is a groundbreaking work of feminism—and humanism, too. 

The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

Finished Reading: August 15 

Fascinating read. Virginia Woolf was brilliant. It was fun to read her thoughts on people I have read over the years.

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

One of the most articulate and enjoyable essayists of the modern era, Virginia Woolf makes literary criticism personal, private musing universal, and social commentary both particular and purposeful. Woolf’s essays are legion, and they have been collected and regrouped in any number of individual volumes. Start with the pieces the author gathered in two volumes and called The Common Reader, in which Woolf assembles a refined personal library. Scholarship takes a back seat to serendipity, education seems—as it should—a circuit of enthusiasms, and a serious mind finds its shape among the sentences and sentiments that speak most directly to it. In these engaging volumes, Woolf develops her understanding while the reader learns valuable lessons about Chaucer and the Elizabethans, Montaigne and Defoe, Joseph Addison and Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot. Of special note are the essays “On Not Knowing Greek” and “How It Strikes a Contemporary” (in the first volume), and “How Should One Read a Book?” (in the second). Making their acquaintance, one gains insight not only into reading, but into thinking and being as well. 

The Reservoir: A Fifteen-Month Spiritual Formation Devotional

Finished: April 21

This has sat on my bookshelf since 2019. I LOVED it. I highly recommend it. It would be perfect for mentoring another person or just your own personal devotionals. It goes through Richard Foster's streams of formation: The Prayer-Filled Life (Contemplative), The Virtuous Life (Holiness), Spirit-Empowered Life (Charismatic), The Compassionate Life (Social Justice), The Word-Centered Life (Evangelical), The Sacramental-Life (Incarnational). 

It is not overwhelming to do daily. Highly recommend.