2021 was a great year for reading I love hard copy books and also find reading glasses a necessity. My life is greatly enriched and blessed - I learn so much about the world and myself. Wishing you happy reading in 2022.
JANUARY
*Still Life – Louise Penny
“But standing now in the kitchen that had held so many birthday parties, and excited Christmas mornings, and had been the scene of so many batches of ‘s’mores’ and ‘yes yes” cookies, standing here he knew life would never be the same. Too much had been said and done. He also knew, with work, it could actually be better.”
*Under the Wide and Starry Sky – Nancy Horan
“Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.”
..when you have a gift, it isn’t yours to keep to yourself. It’s the reason you’re here. It’s your purpose.”
*The Choice – Dr. Edith Eva Eger
“To be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself. And to trust that there is enough, that you are enough.”
FEBRUARY
*Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann
“All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.” -Alexander Hemon
“The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough. “
“Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”
“I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they’re the things that matter.”
*Midnight Library – Matt Haig
“Maybe there was no perfect life for her – but maybe, somewhere, there was a life worth living.
*Hannah Coulter - Wendell Berry
“Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.”
“I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.”
“Sometimes too I could see that love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in. Though it contains all the world, the sun, moon and stars, it is so small as to be also in our hearts.”
MARCH
*Death on the Nile – Agatha Christie
“Love can be a very frightening thing. That is why most great love stories are tragedies.”
APRIL
*Moby Dick – Herman Melville
“Death glorious ship! Must ye then perish and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death, oh lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale, to the last I grapple with these, from hell’s heart I stab at thee for hate’s sake.”
*The Unexpected Deliverer – Emily Belle Freeman
MAY
*At Home in Mitford
“Well, I'm going to church. But i've got to tell you that it's full of hypocrites.
My friend, if you keep your eyes on Christians, you will be disappointed every day of your life.”
*Their Eyes were Watching God
“If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin’ round and God opened de door…the wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
*Atomic Habits
“The true question is: “Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?” The first step is not what or how, but who. You have the power to change your beliefs about yourself. Your identity is not set in stone. You have a choice every moment. Habits help you achieve…but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone.
JUNE
*The Secret Garden
“The sun is shining – the sun is shining. That is the magic. The flowers are growing – the roots are stirring that is the magic. Being alive is magic being strong is magic.”
“So long as mistress Mary’s mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determination not to be pleased or interested in anything she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored and wretched child. When her mind gradually filled itself with robust energy and moorland cottages crowded with children, with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day, there was no room left for the disagreeable thoughts.”
“And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles.”
*The Mitford Girls
“I often thought of happy days when you were all young and David and I had the children all around us I was lucky to have those perfectly happy years before the war. Isn’t it odd how, when one looks back at that time, it seems to have been all summers.”
JULY
*String too Short to be Saved – Donald Hall
“I heard suddenly, my grandfather’s tuneless voice intone the words beside me, and I turned to see him, but he was not there, only the fray of the red cloth where he had sat for over fifty years..then I realized that
it was I who sang timelessly the hymn I had loved as a child.”
“I tried to set in order the box of string too short to be saved, which I had kept as a miser keeps gold.”
“I understood that my grief, which I still carried like comfort was not for my grandfather..it was the death of childhood and the knowledge of my own vulnerability. (I Come to the Garden Alone)”
“What was different was my sense that I was returning, and that my return was the choice of one life over another.”
*CRYING IN H MART
“That was her duty to protect me from anything I might regret.”
“She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possession…She had all the knowledge of my being memorized.”
“The culture we shared was a tie effervescent in my gut and in my genes and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the pride of her life lives on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
*Beneficence – Meredith Hall
“I used to believe in happiness. I did not understand that we never fully arrive in that universe. We visit for miraculous moments, then travel all the other universes, and if we have any kind of wisdom, we refuse bitterness or regret when the happiness subsides. I have been slow to that wisdom. I imagined lives of happiness for my children, lives with no forethought of grief. Did I promise that to them? I hope not. They knew happiness when they were small children, real happiness. Joy, daily joy. Did they misunderstand and think that joy would carry through their Iives? I am sorry if I allowed you to believe in the grace we created for you here. It does not last.”
“Desiderantum: hope, dream, wish, the heart’s desire.”
“There is no room at our table for condemnation. There is no blame. We seek forgiveness. We ride this little planet with all its sorrow and all its love and all its beauty and hard mysteries. There is not time to waste. Learning love is, I think, why we have this inexplicable chance, these few years on this earth. I am grateful for this offering, beckoning toward all that we can make here.”
AUGUST
*Beneath a Scarlet Sky
“Trust in God’s plan for you. Someone very wise once told me that by opening our hearts, revealing our scars, we are made human and flawed and whole.”
“You have to find some happiness in your life, and just do your best with the rest.”
“Let not your heart be troubled.”
“Most people are essentially good You have to believe that.”
“Faith is a strange creature. Like a falcon. That meets year after year, in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever.”
“She didn’t believe much in the future, she tried to live moment by moment, looking for reasons to be grateful, trying to create her own happiness and grace and to use them as a means to a good life in the present and not a goat to be achieved some other day.”
*Jaber Crow – Wendell Berry
“But I have had a lucky life. That is to say that I know I’ve been lucky. Beyond that, the question is if I have not been also blessed, as I believe I have – and, beyond that, even called.”
“And so how was a human to pray? I didn’t know, and yet I prayed. I prayed the terrible prayer: thy will be done. Having so prayed, I prayed for strength. That seemed reasonable and right enough. As did praying for forgiveness and the grace to forgive I prayed unreasonably, foolishly, hopelessly, that everyone in Port William might be blessed and happy – the ones I loved and the ones I did not. I prayed my gratitude.”
“What can love do? Love waits, if it must, maybe forever.”
“For a while again I couldn’t pray. I didn’t dare to. In the most secret place of my soul I wanted to beg the Lord to reveal himself in power. I wanted to tell Him it was time for His coming. If there was anything at all to what He had promised, why didn’t He come in glory with angels and lay His hands on hurt children and awaken the dead soldiers…ly9ing awake in the night(for again sleep was coming hard) I could imagine the almighty finger wring in stars for all the world to see: GO HOME.”
“And so I thought I must forbear to reveal His power and lory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creature the groaning and travailing beautiful world.”
“The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death or grief either. After death and grief that (it seems) ought to have stopped the world, the world goes on. More things happen. And some of the things are good.”
*Migrations
“Mam used to tell me to look for clues. The clues? What, I asked for the first time. To life. They’re hidden everywhere.
*The Splendid and the Vile
“When I look back on the perils which have been overcome, upon the great mountain waves in which the gallant ship has driven, when I remember all that has gone wrong, and remember also all that has gone right, I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.”
SEPTEMBER
*The Various Haunts of Men – Susan Hill
We’ve been very lucky, Iris and me,’ Pauline Moss said, ‘we’ve had the same houses, same streets, same shops, and each other…it helps you, you know when you’re left on your own, that some things stay the same. You rely on that.”
“There was a warmth and a comfort here which had been so absent from Angela Randall’s sterile little house. Iris Chater’s rooms were crammed full of furniture, ornaments. Pictures, knick-knacks, clocks, tapestries, fire screens, plants in bowls, lamps, doorstops, knitting, jigsaw puzzles, photographs…Nothing was out of place, yet there was a pleasant muddle.”
“These are the times you remember until you die, these ordinary, unplanned, astonish, joyful things, these spur-of-the-moment, unexpected things. You remember every word, every gesture, the colour of the tablecloths in the restaurant and the smell of the liquid soap in the cloakroom, so that for the rest of your life, when you smell it again, you are there and you are the person you were, on that day, at that time, thinking what you though, feeling as you did. These are the times.”
How could she come from this and have so much exuberance? And I still don’t know how you did it. You’re unique, Lucy. You are a spirit.”
OCTOBER
*Great House – Nicole Krauss
“Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can’t protect her child – not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.”
“Why is it that there was always a unit in history, math, science, and God knows what other useless, totally forgettable information…but never any unit on death? No exercises, no workbooks, no final exams on the only subject that matters.”
*Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill – Gretchen Rubin
“What was the source of his greatness? Not his predictions or strategies, but his determination to fight on, whatever the cost, for everything that mattered most.”
“There he is, my Churchill, braced on the quarterdeck of HMS Prince of Wales, cigar in his hand, surrounded by British and American sailors. For the moment, the urgencies of war have quieted the restlessness and ambition that dog him. His powers, too strenuous for peacetime, at last suit the hour. Now he addresses the troops, ‘we shall go on to the end’, he promises, we shall never surrender.” Flags snap in the breeze and Roosevelt’s wheelchair creaks its way across the deck, and Churchill leads everyone, Britons and Americans together in singing. In all his long history he will never see a greater day than this. Tears are running down his cheeks, tears not of sorrow but of wonder and admiration. This isn’t everyone’s Churchill but it’s my Churchill. It happened long ago and far away, but I can see Winston Churchill more clearly that I can see the page on which I write.”
*Oh William – Elizabeth Strout
“There was something about her that seemed deeply – almost fundamentally – comfortable inside herself the way I think a person is when they have been loved by their parents.”
“Lucy, I married you because you were filled with joy. You were just filled with joy. And when I finally realized what you came from – when we went to your house to meet your family and tell them we were getting married. Lucy, I almost died at what you came from. And I kept thinking, But how is she what she is? “
NOVEMBER
*No Cure for Being Human – Kate Bowler
“While I breath, I hope.”
“Trying again. Getting back up. Trusting someone new. Loving extravagantly inside these numbered days. Someday we won’t need to hope. Someday we won’t need courage. Time itself will be wrapped up woth a bow, and God will draw us into the eternal moment where there will be no suffering, no disease, no email. In the meantime we are stuck with our beautiful, terrible finitude Our gossip and petty fights, self-hatred and refusal to check our voicemail. We get divorced, waste our time, and break our own hearts.”
*Eleanor – A Life – David Michaelis
“It is not one’s activities which are really important in this life. When you lay down the things you do, day by day, someone else always takes them up. The really important thing is what you are as a person, what your character and presence have meant to those you lived with and what influence you have had on the atmosphere of your home…That is what lives afterwards in the memories and hearts of those who knew and loved you.”
DECEMBER
*A Christmas Memory – Truman Capote
“My, how foolish I am! You know what I’ve always thought? I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying fore they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realized the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are, just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”
*Jacob Marley
“Are spirits involved in men’s lives?” Marley asked. “Mankind is involved in men’s lives. We only help them know how….all around you every day, as you walk the miles of earth, there are calls to your spirit and to all others’ spirits as well. They come from your fellow beings and from life itself: the way the sun highlights a tree, a bird song lilting across the morning, the smell of flowers. All these are for your joy, but also for more. They call to you.”
*In Mary’s Arms
“It is not insignificant that the first thing we learn about Mary is that she was afraid. Undoubtedly that is why when the angel Gabriel greeted her, one of the first tings he told her was ‘fear not”. She was afraid and he knew it. Mary foreordained before the world was formed, chosen by God, and destined for greatness, was afraid. What distinguishes her is that she went headlong into her fear and found faith.”
*Better than Happy – Jodi Moore
“We must get better at focusing more on controlling our own agency and less on trying to control that of others. Because the people in our lives can do whatever they want. The people you love have agency. But so do you. The question I recommend you ask is not, how can I get that person to behave better?’ but, Who do I want to be now?”
*I Like Me Anyway – Brooke Romney
“If you believe in Jesus, redemption is the only story.”
“God can do so much more with me than I can do with myself, and that who we become is an accumulation of small changes and our willingness to hear him.”
*The Pearl of Great Price
“And behold thou art my son…and I have a work for thee…And lo, I am with thee even unto the end of thy days…” Moses 1:4,6,26
