Category Archives: books

Women reading and laughing.

books, friends, ,

As soon as I got inspired by the 5×5 reading plan that I mentioned in my last post, I collected most of the books from around my two-storey house that were in stacks and not on shelves, and spread them on the dining table. I started to arrange the appropriate ones according to topics, and the two categories of “Women” and “Church History/Saints” were quite overloaded.

As I perused this scene, I recalled that in the last few years, many books I’ve read have been by audio — and few of those on the table were of the sort that are easy for me to attend to, by the “ear gate.” I wondered, “When will I sit and read all these books, most of which are too big to read in bed at night?” Quickly my mood also went into the Overloaded/Overwhelmed category and I climbed the stairs to bed.

Soon I decided the 5×5 plan is not for me. Clearly it wasn’t designed for me, but for young homeschooling mothers who need to read more books and look less at screens, who need to develop the habit of lifelong learning. I picked out several — not 25 — that I want to try extra hard to read in print this year.

Hmm… I almost forgot these I want to read after that first bunch. Altogether I see that they add up to about half of 25:

My two long-time friends Cori and Di came to visit for a couple of days last week, and because I planned for us to eat at the smaller table near the kitchen, I left my book mess as it was. They each brought dozens of titles for show-and-tell, give-or-lend. The warmth of the wood stove drew us to the nearby love seats, where we talked about all the volumes they brought out of their bags, a broad variety of genres and titles that would make the Scholé Sisters proud.

Many of Di’s offerings had Cori in mind, because she and her husband had lost their extensive library when their house burned down, in one of the many northern California fires of recent years. The only books I kept from this trading session were small paperbacks that I can easily read lying in bed, while my mind is turning off just before conking out for the night.

Our gathering was a festival, and a marathon
of talking and thinking, laughing and even weeping.
Now, it’s time for the reading to begin.

Isaac Lazarus Israëls

Winter food and flowers.

books, food and cooking, Psalms, , , , ,

Last night the women’s book group of my parish met at my house to discuss Summer Lightning by Wodehouse, and The Holy Angels by Mother Alexandra. I cooked up two pots of soup, and the other women brought rustic loaves of bread and salad and dessert.

Long ago I had got the idea of Cuban Black Beans from the Laurel’s Kitchen cookbook, and devised a soup with the same name to eat in winter, when the fresh and raw veggies the book’s authors suggested for a topping weren’t available from the garden out back. Now in the era of internet recipes, I discovered several recipes for the soup, and they used a sofrito, added in the last stage of cooking, made up of the peppers, garlic and onion sauteed with olive oil and bacon, topped off with vinegar and spices. This is what my sofrito looked like:

The beans in this case are cooked with ham hocks at the beginning, so it ends up a meaty and flavorful bowl for a winter’s evening. Mine was just the amount of spicy I wanted, but I’m not sure I could replicate that next time, if there is a next time. I had printed out three recipes from online, and concocted a unique stew, using parts of all of them and my old recipe, too. It took two pounds of beans, and I had plenty to send home with a few guests, as well as to put in the freezer. Because we also had Florentine Spinach Soup, which I have posted about before. Overall the women liked the soups very much.

Thanks to our member who enjoys coming up with appropriately themed foods for our meetings, we ate angel food cake last night as well! I hadn’t read the Jeeves book that was discussed, but I did read The Holy Angels, and I plan to share a bit about that soon. We all thought it was a treasure.

This morning I actually took my walk before breakfast — that mostly because I ate breakfast so late. Now that I’m putting a high priority on walking, I need to keep re-setting it at the top of my mental list, so I don’t forget. One of these days I’m sure I will forget, and then (note to self) I’ll need to take a quick spin around the block in the dark, just before bed. I wonder if this is one of those behaviors that becomes a habit if you do it every day for three weeks?

I worked some more on Psalm 89 as I walked, and the beauty of its poetry did not distract me from the startling sights along the way, whose images I have shared here. One line from the Psalm:

So make Thy right hand known to me,
And to them that in their heart
Are instructed in wisdom.

Amen.

Shame and the modern identity.

books, humanity, quotes, , , ,

Father Stephen Freeman by his writing has been helping us for a long time, to understand how shame motivates our behavior, both good and bad. There is both healthy shame, which we are “hardwired” with, and toxic shame, which often has unhealthy ramifications down through the generations.

One particular article, “Shame and the Modern Identity,” I’ve wanted to share a link to for some time. In it Fr. Stephen explains how it happens that we start with a necessary form of shame and end up with the painful and crippling emotion of shame.

“We could say that toxic shame, or damaging shame, is the abuse of something that is essential and necessary. That is a useful understanding, and points to just how tricky the acquisition and formation of identity is. It is a razor’s edge and pretty much no one survives the years of its acquisition without a legacy of unwanted shame. The years following that acquisition can often be occupied with the patient work of cleaning up the unwanted bits that shadow our existence. Adults gradually gain a sense of their identity, but very few feel entirely secure about it. ‘Who am I’ can be a haunting question, for example, for someone going through a divorce or a loss of employment. When the props that we have gathered in the establishment of an identity are removed, it’s easy to fall apart.”

If you read the article linked above and still want more, you are in luck. Just last spring Fr. Stephen’s book came out: Face to Face: Knowing God beyond Our Shame. It is good to have much of his wisdom on the subject gathered in one place. Even those of us who aren’t plagued with these emotions ourselves likely know someone who is, and could possibly benefit from more understanding for their sake.

Mellowness and kindly wisdom.

books, culture, quotes, , , , , ,

This post that is very fallish in more than one way, I am sharing again nine years later. It is about Lin Yutang, whose writings my late husband and I were reading aloud together, during the illness that was to end his earthly life only a few months later. Much of what I read during that period is very foggy in my mind at this point, and many of those and other books from the past keep calling me back, especially when I read my own reviews.

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If you like thought-provoking quotes as much as I do, you might sometime run across one by the eloquent Lin Yutang. I find that I did have a quote by him about autumn in my files, so that is probably how he came under my radar recently, long enough for me to decide to borrow his book The Importance of Living from the library. It was in the closed stacks, and looks old and Chinese. But as Samuel Butler said, “The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them,” and for me, Lin Yutang is definitely a new and exciting discovery.

I expected a small book of proverbs, perhaps, but The Importance of Living is a large conversational and philosophical treatise that I won’t be ableLin Yutang - Living to read in bed. I may have to buy a copy, because in the very first paragraph of the preface I found beautifully written lines that drew me in to his mind and his ruminations:

“Very much contented am I to lie low, to cling to the soil, to be of kin to the sod. My soul squirms comfortably in the soil and sand and is happy. Sometimes when one is drunk with this earth, one’s spirit seems so light that he thinks he is in heaven. But actually he seldom rises six feet above the ground.”

I opened the book randomly in the middle and there, also, his words were worth thinking about as poetry or motivational talk. Did someone very gifted translate the works of this Chinese man? No, he wrote in English in such a graceful way that it is pure joy to read him aloud.

Lin Yutang was born in China in 1895 of Chinese Christian parents. His father was a pastor and a very progressive, forward-thinking man who made sure that Lin learned his Bible stories and went to the schools that produced the best speakers of English. He eventually got a degree from Harvard and another from Leipzig University.

I began to read The Importance of Living aloud with Mr. Glad. I usually do the reading because I enjoy it more than he does, and I immediately noticed the easy flow of Lin’s prose and the equally smooth progression of ideas. Everything he says makes perfect sense given his worldview in 1937, and at that time he was no longer a Christian.

What happened? Mr. Glad and I were very curious, because we had information Lin didn’t have at the time; we knew that later in life he would return to the faith and live to write about it, in his book From Pagan to Christian. So we stopped reading Importance and started in on the book about his spiritual journey that he wrote about 20 years later.

Putting together what he says in the relatively little we have read of him so far, I can tell you this about Lin’s first change of mind: As soon as he came of age to notice, he realized that he had not received the usual Chinese philosophical or literary heritage, much of which was typically learned through the theater; the theater was forbidden to Lin and his siblings who were in some ways raised as Puritans. He hadn’t taken the time to learn to write beautiful calligraphy, either, so he found that he was by Chinese standards completely uncivilized. At this point the one very Chinese thing he did know was intense shame.

He felt he had to go back and learn to be an authentic Chinese man, and having learned as a child the diligence and study habits of a Puritan, he did a very thorough job of learning Chinese philosophy and literature, not to mention a stunningly broad understanding of Western culture. This knowledge base combined with the ability to think and write about all that he has figured out — or is figuring out, as the story evolves — makes him fascinating to me.

We haven’t progressed very far in either of these books, but having this articulate author “friend” to explain Chinese culture and history to me from the inside has given me an interest in that part of the world that I have always lacked. So I hope to read more, and I expect to have more to share. But for now, I’ll close with his quote from My Country and My People about the lin_yutangseasons of the year.

“I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colours are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring,nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content.”

This meditation seems to me an expression of a perspective that could be both Chinese, as he felt at the time, and truly Christian. I’m looking forward to reading more of the kindly wisdom of Lin Yutang.