Two new books

For One More Day ~ by Mitch Albom, 2006, fiction

Mitch Albom, author of the bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, returns with a haunting novel about the family we love and the chances we miss.  It explores the question:  What would you do if you could spend one more day with a lost loved one?  As a child, Charley Benetto is told by his father, "You can be a mama's boy or or you can be a daddy's boy, but you can't be both."  So he chooses his father and worships him ― right up to the day he disappears.  Eleven-year-old Charley must then turn to his mother, who bravely raises him on her own.

Decades later, Charley is a broken man.  His life has been crumbled by alcohol and regret.  He loses his job, leaves his family, hits bottom after discovering his only daughter has shut him out of her wedding, and decides to take his own life.  He makes a midnight ride to his small hometown, with plans to do himself in.  On failing even to do that, he staggers back to his old house, only to discover that his mother ― who died eight years earlier ― is still living there, and welcomes him home as if nothing had ever happened.

What follows is the one "ordinary" day so many of us yearn for, a chance to make good with a lost parent, to explain the family secrets, and to seek forgiveness.  Somewhere between this life and the next, Charley learns the things he never knew about his mother and her sacrifices.  And he tries, with her tender guidance, to put the crumbled pieces of his life back together.

Harvest: Collected Poems and Prayers, 2nd edition ~ by Ruth F. Brin, 1986, 1999, poetry

Brin is one of the liturgical pioneers of the post-World War Two era.  In the 1950s, when most Jewish women still seemed content with their traditional subordinate role in public worship, she was already at work modernizing traditional Jewish prayers and texts and offering new interpretive readings and original poetry reflecting her own religious experience.

This second new book I've added to my shelves (not counting the e-books added to my Kindle) is one I've already told you about, so click the title for more about it.  The first new book was a Christmas gift from my daughter.  Thanks, Sandra.  It looks intriguing.  Have you read it?