Stopping to Think

I like to read. I love to read. But very rarely am I happy with the amount of time I have to read. Many people are in the same boat, so it's always fun to give my suggestions based on the previous year's reading. I don't track what all I read in a year, given that I pick up and put down so many books. Sometimes I'm purposely dipping into a section of a longer book, or re-reading a section from an old favorite. And I start countless books and stop-either to begin again later, or to never pick them back up. This Top 10 list comes with caveats. Obviously it is limited to the books I finished in 2018, of which there were only 28. Second, I'm not including re-reads in the Top 10, otherwise The Great Divorce would likely be the top book. Also, I'm only allowing each author one Top 10 appearance, though Tim Chester and Sherman Alexie probably deserve to appear multiple times. And finally, I'm not counting in any of this the books my wife reads to our family...

"[In reading the Bible] Let yourself be humbly troubled by puzzling things. The deepest insights come from trying to see the unifying root of two apparently antagonistic branches" John Piper Commonplace Monday is a series of posts wherein, on Monday mornings, I share short quips, sentences -perhaps as much as a paragraph- which I have collected in my various commonplace books and files. If I wrote down or recall where it came from I will certainly give attribution. However, sometimes I write down things and not where they came from. So if you see anything like that here and recognize it, that's what comment sections are for.  

If you've followed my blog at all over the years, you know I like to put forward some sort of book list to start the year. Here are five books which I read in 2016 that I think would be well worth the investment of your time: Father Hunger , Douglas Wilson I'm a little bit of a Wilson fanboy, but I think this is clearly his best book (at least of what I've read). Are you a father, a son, or do you have fathers and sons in your life? Then read this book. Life Under Compulsion , Anthony Esolen Esolen essentially attacks and reveals as stupid much of the modern compulsion and drive toward busyness, arguing instead that we, especially those of us raising children, ought to spend more time being human . Crunchy Cons , Rod Dreher Sick of the fact that you don't fit into the typical Liberal/Conservative paradigms and stereotypes? Does it frustrate you that simply because you identify as conservative people automatically think you are a pro-Big Business, anti-earth, uncar...

This is a somewhat overdue follow-up to my post on Speaking With Your Kids . A while back, my children and I finished reading through The House at Pooh Corner  by A.A. Milne (you can see my mini-review here ). While there were things all throughout the book that struck me, this interchange near the end of the final chapter snagged my attention like a flashing red light: So they began going there, and after they had walked a little way Christopher Robin said:  "What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?"   "Well," said Pooh,"what I like best----" and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called. What is that called? The thing which brought this particular exchange to my attention was the fact that what Milne, through the honey-stained lips of Pooh, describes is the...

I am an avid, if not particularly prolific, reader. Folks sometimes get the impression that I've read more than I have, partially because I retain fairly well, and I like to use quotations.  I suppose I could read more if I were to read faster (that seems logical enough), but I don't seem to enjoy the reading experience nearly so much when I do so, and the last thing I want is for my favorite leisure activity to become drudgery.  One thing that I have always lacked in my reading, besides speed, is any sort of tracking mechanism. I decided to change that this year, just to keep tabs on what sort of things I'm reading, if there are any books I need to focus more heavily on, and to keep track of what I've finished. I've included my first three entries for the year down below. I don't try to be weekly or anything like that with my entries, updating only when I finish a book, upon which I will leave a few thoughts. I believe the rest of it is fairly self-explanat...

First of all, it's far too late in the year to be writing a list like this. But here I sit. Secondly, I was going to do a top 10 or 15 book from 2015 post, but then I realized I hadn't put together such a post in about 3 years (what have I been thinking?!). So what I decided to do instead is try to compile a list of books I've read in that span that I would commend to you to consider this year. My memory is sketchy, and I've not done well at actually recording my reading, so this is off the top of my head (The order is semi-intentional, but not firm). The content of this list reflects the directions of my reading, obviously, but I did intentionally throw in some things off the beaten path of my typical diet. 1: Til We Have Faces, CS Lewis This is the best book I've read from Lewis, and I've read a substantial amount of Lewis. I cut my teeth on his non-fiction, but fiction was his true genius.  2: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson I picked this book up after rea...

How should we speak to and with our children? Realizing that a) I'm no expert and b) I'm mostly thinking aloud, I think we need to ponder these things. That is the intention of this blog, after all. To think aloud, and to invite you to join my thinking. On Conversing: Some form of this post has been stirring in my mind for many a moon, but what finally kicked me over the edge to put finger to keyboard was this article in The Atlantic . The focus of the piece, if you have not read it, is on early childhood education, preschool specifically, and the fact that though children are being taught  more information than every before, they are in fact learning  less. The author, a professional in the field, discuses various reasons for this, but then points to a number of things that provide a genuinely healthy learning environment for children. Here is a section: As an early-childhood educator, I’ve clocked many hours in many preschool classrooms, and I have found that I c...

Disregard the milk seeds, I simply felt like rhyming. Just a quick thought on the value of thought and/or meditation and/or wrestling to understand. I want to break my thoughts into to groups of reading, first Bibles, and second, everything else. This post will only cover #1. And perhaps not even that. So, Bibles. Consider this my critique of paraphrastic "translations" (eg, the New Living Translation), and/or straight up paraphrases (eg, The Message). Before I go too far I do want to be up front and say that part of my frustration with paraphrases is that it can be very frustrating when you know a passage to tun there and find words all out of place or changed. And that frustration can be found even among more literal translations, simply because there are a lot of words that can be translated more than one way. It simply is more common in a paraphrase. Also, I do not claim to be any expert on translations, most particularly because I do not read, write, or speak any of th...