photo: CCO Public Domain

Books I have read this past year? Wow! I haven’t done well on reading this year at all. This is going to be one sorry post!

Most of what I read this year had to do with things I had to read for studies I was doing. I did very little fun reading. Most of it was magazine or internet reading.

My current favorite

There is one book I’m planning to read as a result of my other reading. In fact, I have started it already. It is not a disappointment at all! The book is by Rosaria Butterfield. The title is The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert. There are a number of interviews of Rosaria as well as lectures with Q and A’s at the end that are very open and vulnerable on her part.

Reading her book is starting out to be quite interesting. If you have a child who has drifted from the church, they will enjoy her perspective at the beginning of the book. You will find her perspective helpful, particularly if you grew up in the church and didn’t really stop to think what it would feel like to a non-believer who walked into the church and heard some of our words and comments. Sometimes we just don’t think!

Her perspective was so different from anything I could imagine. It is helpful to think through and take seriously that perspective and not just laugh it off. It is woven all through our colleges and universities. So we need to understand that thinking and how to interact with it. Many of our children will come home from college and we will not understand how to talk to them otherwise.

I’ll be reading this book and discussing it in more detail on the blog in the next month or so.

Most of the books I have read this year were related to Bible studies I was in

Books I have read for Bible Studies in 2015 have been Deuteronomy  More Grace, More Love:Living in Covenant with GOD by George Robertson and Bible Study: Following the Ways of the Word by Kathleen Busby Nielson.

Both are good studies. Deuteronomy is set up more like a Bible Study Fellowship Study where you do the study the week before the information is available on it. Since it is all together in the book, it is okay to look ahead if you are stumped on a question.

The book by Kathleen Nielson is teaching us how to study the Bible. It is a bit different from many books you may have studied on the topic. She comes from a background in literature (PhD in lit.) as well as pastoral ministry and the past 10-ish years before they they “retired” were in a college (Covenant) where her husband was president.

I’ll admit some of the women who did the study this past year found the book a bit dry, others of us enjoyed it. I didn’t think I was a geek, but I may be. The best part of the book was the emphasis on the wholeness of the Bible and reading the parts in the light of the whole story. It makes a considerable difference when we read Scripture that way.

The other value of that book is that it emphasizes the benefits of many of the literature aspects of the Bible…such as learning how to interpret Scripture using metaphors, similes, etc. It brings many parts of Scripture alive!

This book was fun to read with a group online as we blogged about it

I was also in an online study of the book On Being a Writer by Ann Kroeker and Charity Craig. It was a first for me and was a thoroughly enjoyable experience! I met other writers like me…and better as we blogged about each chapter. It took up part of August and all of September. Then I went into my 31 day October series. It was crazy busy!

I know I have read other books, but nothing very memorable. Honestly, I haven’t read much this year. I have mainly tried to survive!

The question is, what about this coming year? My goal is to read a book a month! I also want to include some fiction, not just non-fiction. So we’ll se how it goes this year. This was not a good year in terms of reading. I must do better!

I look forward to a better year of reading in 2016. How about you?