January was a month full of reading! I started out with one book on my Kindle, one audiobook on Libby and one physical book from my to-read pile in the house. Then, I kept going, reading 3 books at the same time …. There were some really good books this month, though! Here is what I read in January:
Jen Fulwiler is an author and a mother of six children, born in less than seven years. While many people around her gave her the advice to put her writing dreams on hold while her children were little, she just didn’t feel alive when she didn’t have time to write. It was a long process to finally find peace with pursuing writing with young children – she had to deal with guilt, time, pregnancies and health issues. She finally learned to pull her family into her writing process instead of vying them against each other after a long talk with a priest. She describes the whole process in One Beautiful Dream. At the end, she ends up with a published (after a huge rewrite) book that she is able to show her grandfather before he passes away. That book was Something Other Than God.
Something Other Than God is the story of Jen’s faith journey. She grew up as an atheist but fell in love with a man who was a tepid Christian. They would talk about faith once in a while, but Jen had trouble dealing with mortality and the atheist worldview. One day, she felt drawn to a book in a bookstore from across the room and found The Case for Christ by Lee Stroebel. Reading that book led her on a long journey that eventually ended with both her and her husband joining the Catholic Church.
In college, a group of 12 girls makes a trip down the Mississippi on a raft, inspired by reading Huckleberry Finn in class. Decades later, one of them has passed away and her husband has requested her closest friends to take her ashes on a riverboat cruise down the river and scatter her ashes in New Orleans. Harriet is in charge of the ashes but wonders if Baby’s death was actually an accident or if their past came back to haunt her finally. Their stories, along with Courtney, Anna and Catherine’s are told as they travel the river a second time in The Last Girls.
A child rarely comes into someone’s life without making a mark – especially a loved child. In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, Mitch Albom found himself not just reporting on how to help, but offering to help an orphanage that was destroyed. He was one of the few who managed to get a plane and team together and land on the island within days of the quake. Years of helping the orphans followed, yet he and his wife also had their life back in the U.S. Then, one little girl in the orphanage was diagnosed with a brain tumor and no one in Haiti could help her. Her story is told in Finding Chika.
In 1930s Kentucky, a small group of women sign up to be traveling librarians as part of an initiative by the President’s wife. Alice has just recently moved to Kentucky after a whirlwind courtship that had her leaving England with a man she married after only a few weeks of knowing. Margery is the daughter of an abusive moonshiner and desires to keep her independence above all else. Izzy is a teenager who starts out feeling she’ll be handicapped due to polio, but learns to ride. They also hire Sophia, who worked at a colored library in Lousiville, to help keep them organized. Each woman brings with her strengths and weaknesses that make the library a target for some people in the town in The Giver of Stars.
Anke is a midwife in Germany and ends up in a concentration camp after helping a Jewish woman give birth to a child in the forbidden area. In the camp, she tries to stay low, but one day a woman in the sewing room goes into labor and Anke helps her. From then on, she is helping deliver babies in the camp. In The German Midwife, she endeavors to give the mother as much comfort as possible since everyone knows the babies lives will be measured in minutes, days and maybe weeks. Her reputation becomes widely known and she is sought out to be the midwife for a very important person in Germany – Eva Braun.
Barely a day goes by without talking to a stranger in today’s society. It could be in a grocery store, a drive-thru or on Twitter. Most of the time, the encounters go very well. However, there are times when they don’t. Talking to Strangers looks specifically at the time when a police officer encountered Sandra Bland and their “talk” led to her arrest and subsequent suicide. What went wrong between these strangers?
Circe is born to the sun god Helios and quickly becomes an outcast with her plain hair and voice that sounds like a mortal’s. She spends most of her growing up years escaping to an island with her brother. When he leaves her, a sailor starts visiting and she falls in love. In her desire to make him a mortal, she stumbles upon a power she has that she didn’t know – she is not just a goddess, but also a witch. Her actions cause her to be banished, but fate will find a way to bend her future to its will.
Bernadette Fox is an architect who hasn’t created since her daughter was born 15 years ago. Without a creative outlet, her focus tends to be on not connecting with anyone or anything but her daughter. She fails to connect with the other mothers at the school. She fails to connect enough to call and make her own appointments. Her connection with her own husband is flimsy, too, as she puts in little effort, but he words endless hours at Microsoft. Their house is falling apart, but Bernadette can only focus on her daughter and how nothing else is working right in her life in Where’d You Go, Bernadette.
We all have difficulties in our life and have experienced hard times. Yet, many times we feel alone in those times, wishing there were others who understood how we feel and how we’re questioning God. Finally, there is a book for these times. It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way is an honest look at how Lysa TerKeurst dealt with some of the hardest times a soul can face – her husband dealing with addictions and having an affair, a medical emergency, an empty nest and breast cancer. She asked God, “Why?” all throughout and found out it’s okay to ask Him that question.
You can really go and do anything you want in life, but if you know and bank on your strengths, you can accomplish things much easier. A person who is not great with numbers can become an accountant, but success will be easier for a person who is good with numbers. Often, people learn and know what their weaknesses are and not their strengths. Strengthsfinder aims to let people focus on their strengths in the hopes that their successes will be easier to grab.
In The Alchemist, Santiago was in training to become a priest when he decided it was not what he wanted to do – he wanted to travel. So, his father gave him some money to buy sheep and he became a shepherd who traveled about the countryside. A pretty girl tempts him to settle down until a dream comes to him – twice – about finding a treasure at the Pyramids. It calls to him as his personal legend and after some help from a king in disguise, he starts after his treasure.
Rachel agrees to visit Singapore with her boyfriend Nick over the summer, expecting a nice vacation and a chance to meet his friends and family. They are both professors in New York and both Asian, but Rachel grew up in California and Nick grew up in Singapore. Their backgrounds don’t matter in America, but in Singapore, they mean everything because Nick is rich – crazy rich – and the wedding they plan to attend soon after arriving for Nick’s best friend is not just any wedding, but the society wedding of the year. Rachel is unprepared for what she encounters within hours of stepping off the plane in Crazy Rich Asians.
In The Poppy Wife, Edie believes her husband is dead, but the only official document she has says he is missing, presumed dead. She has no gravesite, just the stories from his brother, Harry, who served with Francis in WW1. Their other brother, Will, died early in the war. Edie has made her peace but then she receives a package that contains a photo of Francis with no note four years after the telegram. The picture makes her wonder if he could be alive – one of the many shell-shocked soldiers “lost” in hospitals in Europe. She has to go try and track down more information and Harry joins her.
Do any of these books sound interesting to you? What books did you enjoy in January? Share on the blog! I’m always looking for good book recommendations!
