Favorite Books 2024

Reading goals for next year!

It's the annual book blog, where I share my favorite books of the year and then ask you to please share yours! 

Here's the full list of what I read last year, if anyone wants to see it. This includes fuller descriptions of all the books mentioned in my favorites below, if you want to learn more.

I always start with a few thoughts on my reading life. The big change for me this year - in many ways, not just in the reading life - was going back to work after a fourteen year sabbatical. This has overall been a good change and maybe I'll say more about that in a future blog - but it has definitely changed my reading life. It's not primarily about time. Life is busy, but I'm not any busier than I was when I had two under two as a stay at home mom. But there's a lot less gas in the tank to read for fun, now that I'm back to reading court reports and orders and motions, even just on a part-time basis.

This makes me super thankful that half of my life is homeschooling, because that still includes a ton of the story variety of reading. And it also makes me super thankful to have finally picked up audio book listening last year, because this is a great way to keep moving through books, even if it mostly happens while you're multi-tasking with chores. I didn't make it through nearly as many adult literary / modern fiction books this year, and probably won't as long as my life includes both homeschooling and working. But one thing I've learned in the last fourteen years, along the lines of "the days are long but the years are short" - I've got many years left to be a reader, and only right now with my family at this stage. If you've got recommendations that work particularly well on audio, I would especially love to heaaer those.

Without further ado, here are my favorites of the year (each group in random order) -- 

Top 5 Fiction:

• "The Women" by Kristin Hannah - I love when a book makes you think about a specific group that you had never thought closely about before. In this case, it was women combat nurses who served in Vietnam - what that experience and then the aftermath was like.
• "Same as It Ever Was" by Claire Lombardo - I love messy family dramas that take place over time and include thoughts on friendship. 
• "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell - Amazing world building, great exploration of philosophical and theological questions, really asks you to go to a hard place in questions about suffering.
• "Ordinary Grace" by William Kent Kruger - I love his writing style, his grace-filled take on people, and the way he weaves a story. "This Tender Land", also by Kruger, was also a favorite this year.
• "Table for Two" by Amor Towles - a collection of short stories. This is not his strongest work, but it was still very enjoyable - he could write a grocery list and it would be well worth reading.

Top 5 Non-Fiction:

• "The High Sierra: A Love Story" by Kim Stanley Robinson - What a treat when a great writer also has as a serious hobby something that you're very interested in and writes all about it! 
• "Lovely One" by Ketanji Brown Jackson - Absolutely loved this memoir by the currently sitting Supreme Court justice, especially reading her thoughts on balancing work and family, as well as learning that she has a daughter on the autism spectrum.
• "Rembrandt is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith" by Russ Ramsey - Two parts art history, one part how art applies to faith, really well done. 
• "Parenting with Hope: Raising Teens for Christ in a Secular Age" by Melissa Kruger  - good gospel encouragement for parenting years when you'll take all the help you can get.
• "How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen" by David Brooks - Good, research-based advice on having deeper, better conversations and relationships.

Top Five Homeschool Read-Alouds:

• "Astrid the Unstoppable" by Maria Parr -a perfect winter read, set in winter in Scandinavia; featuring a very fun protagonist and an unlikely friendship.
• "The Warden and the Wolf King" by Andrew Peterson - this whole Wingfeather series was fantastic - I would put this series right behind Narnia and Harry Potter as a must read if you are a read-aloud family. And this fourth book was the best of the series.
• "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" adapted by Michael Morpurgo - a really fun version of this Middle Ages adventure tale, the kids and I all enjoyed it all the way through.
• "Glitch" by Laura Martin - A fun book combining time travel, history, adventure, and friendship.
• The first 4 Harry Potters, a 4-way tie, by J.K. Rowling - I did this series with Zoey a few years ago, but Josh and Ivy are now very interested so we're going through again - it's incredible how well these hold up on a re-read, and how much groundwork you can see her laying when you know where the story is going. 

These were my favorites of the year. And now for the best part, please share your favorites!  Happy reading :).

Advent Post: Hope

It's time for the annual Advent post! Since I wrote about hope last month, I was planning to go on to one of the other attributes of Advent - peace, joy, or love. But my mind is sticking on hope. This month of December is so crazy with the frenzy of activities and gatherings and traditions that we can easily lose sight of what the season is all about in the first place. And, this season can feel so lonely as life changes and it's no longer full of frenzy. Coming from both of these angles, I've been thinking about where we put our hope during the holiday season, and what makes for better and worse sources of hope.

Things not to hope in: 

- Getting that perfect Christmas card photo. 

- Cooking the perfect Christmas dinner, to be served on the perfectly decorated Christmas table, inside the perfectly clean and decorated-for-Christmas house.

- Finding / being able to afford the perfect Christmas gift for your loved ones. Having everything purchased with weeks to spare. 

- Having a full slate of magic Christmas parties and activities. No one is sick, distracted, grumpy, or too busy to attend. Everyone is in agreement about which traditions are awesome and which traditions should be skipped this year.

Why not hope in these things? 

Because they may or may not happen. They may not be executed to perfection. They may be executed to perfection and nobody appreciates it as much as they should have. You the preparer don't enjoy it because you are so exhausted from the month long build up, and because the sky high expectations to create Christmas magic can feel unattainable. 

At this point, you might be thinking, "this was not the feel good post I was hoping to read just a few days before Christmas". I would say, first, you probably should not come to this blog for feel good Christmas posts :). Second, it's great to enjoy these things when they do work out. It's special to enjoy a holiday feast together with lovely decorations and festive music. It's fantastic to express love and generosity through the giving of gifts. 

Most of all, it's wonderful to cherish the loved ones with whom you do the celebrating. But here again is bittersweetness - the holidays are a time where the pain of missing a lost loved one is especially sharp, even as we love and enjoy those who are still with us. So while the people we celebrate with are undoubtedly the greatest gift this life has to offer, and a beautiful thing to celebrate and enjoy and be grateful for - they are not a source of ultimate, eternal hope. 

What to put hope in?

Thankfully, Christmas points us to the one thing that does give us this eternal hope. The baby that we celebrate has come to make a way for us to be restored to eternal relationship with God. He's come to rescue us from all the things about this life that are hard and broken, and to defeat death. 

And the thing that's cool about this hope is that it brings the other attributes of Advent. Because we have this hope, we can also have peace, love, and joy in the crazy Christmas season, and throughout this life. Sending you all of these things in abundance this Christmas season!