Madeleine L’Engle

I picked this up a couple months ago, but put it aside, because I’d been reading so much religious/spiritual stuff that my head was getting clogged. I’m glad I waited, because this book, really a series of essays, was refreshing and inspiring.

L’Engle’s been a favorite author of mine since I first read A Wrinkle in Time when I was seven or eight, and I’ve read much of her fiction (both fantasy and not) over the years, as well as her Crosswicks Journals. It seems I always find a L’Engle work in my hands just when I most need one.

THIS book included the author’s reflections on what makes a Christian book, or a children’s book, and included some interesting etymology on words like “whole” and “holy.”

I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but if you’re inclined to this sort of reading, definitely add it to your list.

Sue Monk Kidd

Last year, when I read The Secret Life of Bees, I fell in love with it. In that book, Sue Monk Kidd’s words had a rhythm of their own, reminiscent of a sultry summer day, and the slow blossoming of a girl into womanhood.

This year’s offering, The Mermaid Chair, is a vastly different novel, told in a totally different tone, but there’s a similar vividness in Kidd’s scene-setting. Her fictional Outer Banks island is so real I could smell the salt air, and feel the sand under my feet. Her characters are distinctive – the daughter who is having a mid-life crisis, the mother who is still mouring her long-dead husband, and doing a personal penance by cutting off and burying her own fingers, the young novice monk who finds God in the island’s bird rookery…all are fundamentally gentle characters, with streaks of quiet ferocity…and all are intertwined.

To describe the plot would be to ruin it. There is romance and pain, enduring friendship, and the strained relationship that often occurs between grown women and their mothers.

If you read The Secret Life of Bees, and liked it, than read The Mermaid Chair. Actually, read it even if you haven’t read the other.

by Ursula K. LeGuin

My aunt gave me this book when I turned 21. It’s not a novel, but a collection of essays and transcribed speeches – the commencement address given to a graduating class at Mills College, is one such speech.

Nearly fourteen years later, it’s still a book I go back to, and is most often found in the upstairs bathroom, the one between my office and Fuzzy’s.

LeGuin’s fiction is wonderful, but this book is truly insightful, inspiring, and interesting.

Kathleen Norris

In many ways, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith is a direct sequel to Norris’s earlier work, The Cloister Walk, but in just as many ways it stands alone.

Where the first book was a series of essays based on the experience of studying the Liturgy of the Hours with the Benedictines, this work is more of a lexicon in essay format. Each section ranges from half a page to several pages in length, and each focuses on a different word often encountered in the Bible and other religious venues. And each is interpreted, personally, by the author.

I read this book slowly, during the last few weeks of confirmation class, and it, more than anything, helped me to understand what we were discussing in the weekly sessions that I dubbed “Episcopalianism 101.” The choice to read this was mine – I saw it while shopping for something entirely different, had really enjoyed the author’s other work, and took it home. That it ended up being the perfect companion during these past few weeks was largely circumstantial.

It’s not light reading, though, I confess, as with everything I read, large chunks of it were bathroom reading. It requires reflection, and some degree of introspection. But Norris is so accessible that I have to recommend it, especially to women who are exploring Christianity.

Kathleen Norris

I first encountered Kathleen Norris’s book, The Cloister Walk, when we were still living in South Dakota. It is mainly autobiographical, sharing the personal history of a woman who is a midwesterner more by choice than anything else, and a poet, and a feminist reclaiming religion after rejecting it as a young woman.

More specifically, it’s her exploration of being a lay student of the Benedictines, and following the Liturgy of the Hours.

It’s not preachy, and it’s not always gentle. In the book, Norris confronts dark parts of her past, and tries to make peace between her political sensibilities and her yearning for faith.

It has become one of my favorite books, one that I can re-read more than once, always finding something new. (I also recommend her earlier work Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, especially for those transplanted to the Great Plains from other parts of the country – it totally saved my sanity when I was living in South Dakota).

Author: C. S. Lewis

Sometimes I can be clueless. I grew up reading the Chronicles of Narnia, but, at seven, had no concept that it was all a metaphor for Christianity.

Still, I’d read The Screwtape Letters one summer when there was nothing else to read, so I was reasonably familiar, I thought, with Lewis’s style.

Then Fr. Bob recommended Mere Christianity as a good introduction to the tenets of the Christian fath, and what I found wasn’t some dry old English guy proselytizing, but a collection of witty radio addresses on the basics of faith.

I’m not sure I’d recommend this to the general public, but if you’re leaning towards the Episcopal church, this should definitely be part of your reading list.

Author: Stephen King

I have a thing for writing books, and when I was younger I was quite the fan of Stephen King’s novels, but it wasn’t until Wil Wheaton quoted some of this book in his blog, that I decided it was worth checking out.

It isn’t the best writing book I’ve ever read, but it was one of the most engaging, and direct. Reading it feels like a conversation with an older and wiser friend.

I definitely recommend it.

Two years ago, this same writing team of Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Klaus offered the world a novel called The Nanny Diaries, which I read, and found delightful, so I thought picking up their second title, Citizen Girl, would be safe enough.

Wow, was I wrong.

It wasn’t just that the title character was known as Girl, and that her boss was the too-cute Guy, it was that none of the characters seemed three-dimensional, with the possible exception of the sixteen-year-old little brother who graced a couple of scenes.

If the cheery red cover sporting a latte cup tempts you to pick up this book, do yourself a favor – put it down, and get a real latte instead.