What I Learned from My 2019 Summer Reads

I read so much this summer that it was hard to choose what to include this year. And I almost added a new category titled BOOKS I HATED but thought that might be too much! Hint: They are excoriated (ahem! listed) on my Goodreads account.

POPULAR READS.

• Where the Crawdads Sing  Delia Owens’s language fills us with every sensation and plants us firmly in Kya’s world of loss and hope in a marshland setting. The land indeed nurtures her into and through her adult life with a “yearning to reach out yonder.” In her younger years, nature is a place of solace, a companion. But once her heart is awakened to human love and to the real relationship of years, creation cannot fill the void in the human heart. 
• The Favorite Daughter by Patti Callahan Henry. After reading Becoming Mrs. Lewis last year, I thought I'd try one of Henry's popular contemporary novels. I enjoyed meeting the Donohues and especially liked how Henry chose to end the story. No spoilers here! The family is realistic in many ways as they deal with work, love, relationships, death, and Alzheimer's. The only drawback was that all the talk about dealing with an aging father came across as a PSA at times. It was off-putting but obviously not intentional.​​

DEEP READS. 

• Leif Enger's Peace Like a River My first read of the summer resonated with me in its prose, its simplicity, its relationships. This struggling motherless family in 1963 North Dakota shared a beautiful, imperfect life. Through the young eyes of Reuben, however, life is different and his father, his tellings, his relationship with God throughout the story, are essential to the reality Reuben believes. His father Jeremiah Land is the everyday hero who loves well. Reuben witnessed and heard his father pray and speak to God in realness, and it tainted, yes tainted, everything the boy saw and experienced from the miracle of life when his lungs refused to breathe at birth to his father walking on water or to protecting a son, the miracle is there. It is a living, breathing thing. And I still can’t entirely grasp how Enger did it. It had to have been something he lived to inhabit the story so.
• J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion. Well... it wasn't exactly a summer read since it took five months, but I did finish it in the summer. The Silmarillion is the precedent. An ancient epic of its own genre, it remains the first saga of its kind. As Tolkien weaves mortal and immortal generations, he emphatically shows us the powerful consequence of choice amid the most eloquent storytelling. "But neither the Sun nor the Moon can recall the light that was of old, that came from the Trees before they were touched by the poison of Ungoliant. That light lives now in the Silmarils alone."

PHILOSOPHY.

• The World's Last Night and Other Essays by C.S. Lewis. Several of these essays and excerpts were new to me, or possibly, too much time has passed since I first read them! I especially appreciated "Lilies That Fester" and the concepts of refinement and culture. Culture or "being cultured" was an idol at the time of the essay and holds strikingly true still with each example. So relevant and so needed.

​POETRY.

• The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses. Editor Cecily Parks collected some beautiful pieces, many of which are 20th century. I delighted in reading some old favorites like Marvel's "The Ecchoing Green" and found some new ones like "To Be Fire" by Leigh Anne Couch. I do confess that some of the mid-century ones baffled me. Completely. I simply didn't understand them, let alone delight in their words.​

I have many, many more books to read (and a few to write), but do share your own favorite summer reads in the comments below. I'd love to hear what brought you delight or simply got you thinking!

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