Sarah's Key ~ by Tatiana de Rosnay

I've written about Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay (2007) several times on this blog, but somehow it didn't occur to me to post it on my Book Around the World challenge blog as a good choice for traveling to France.  Amy @ In Consideration of Books suggested this book for the challenge, so read about it on all three blogs:

• Bonnie's Books
• Book Around the World
• In Consideration of Books

Here's the first paragraph to intrigue you:

The girl was the first to hear the loud pounding on the door.  Her room was closest to the entrance of the apartment.  At first, dazed with sleep, she thought it was her father, coming up from his hiding place in the cellar.  He'd forgotten his keys, and was impatient because nobody had heard his first, timid knock.  But then came the voices, strong and brutal in the silence of the night.  Nothing to do with her father.  "Police!  Open up!  Now!"

I rate this book 9 of 10, an excellent novel.

Not so patient about words

"Thanks for your patients."

It's bad enough to read this anywhere, but it seems especially disturbing when it comes from an elected official.  (He's a local official, so let's not get into a row about our country's current government shut-down, okay?)  How patient are you with a typo like this?  Or was someone who really knows better simply distracted?

Cross-posted on my word blog.

Spirited Woman ~ The Golden Years

Sue Sutherland-Hanson wrote about "The Golden Years (Creatively Speaking That Is)" on the Spirited Woman blog:

This past week, I spent three days driving my eighty-two-year-old mother over rolling country roads in Eastern Washington searching for the family farm of her early grade-school years. ... For the elderly to embrace life, they must be able to integrate their past into their present.  In their reflections, they must find their past as meaningful and worthwhile. ... Mom enjoyed relating memories to me which effectively collapsed time, bringing the past near, helping me see my grandparents and bygone days as complex and real.  I could also see that this trip required mom to do some spiritual work.  She had to let go of how-things-were seventy-five years ago.  I heard her sigh and often shrug saying, "That's progress for you."

It's an interesting meditation, making me think I do need to integrate my past into my present.  Now I need to figure out what that means, exactly.  A complaint about the elderly I have heard all my life is that they seem to be living in the past.  Maybe they are simply sorting through the pieces of their lives, doing some spiritual work.

What memories come to mind today?

Sue's mother was searching for her early grade-school years, so I'll think back to that time.  I remember feeling very brave when I sat on the high wall over the sidewalk at my school.  I've been back there as an adult, who can see that awe-inspiring wall is only about four feet high.  I must keep in mind, however, that's probably taller than I would have been at that time.

This photo shows me with my mother, baby sister, and brother about that time in the 1940s.  Google "3090 East 37th Street, Chattanooga, TN" and click on the street view.  Turn right and you'll see the crenellated wall behind my elementary school.  Yes, I was once tiny enough to sit between those upright stones.

I was indeed very brave when I inched my bottom forward and jumped off.  Did I continue to do brave things as I grew older?  What brave thing am I willing to try these days?  No, I don't intend to jump down from a 5'-9"-high wall.

Sunday Salon ~ junk mail edition

I was re-reading Barbara Brown Taylor's Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (2006) and laughed when I came across this on page 168:

"I looked at life through the windows of the church, using the language I had learned there not only to describe what I saw but also to make sense of it.  My context was so tightly focused that even my junk mail was Christian."

I laughed because I remember Christian junk mail I received when I was the pastor at Forrest Avenue United Methodist Church.  Spelling out the whole denominational name gets tedious, so churches often condense "United Methodist Church" to a simple UMC.  Someone misunderstood and sent me junk mail addressed to "Mr. Forrest Ave Umc."  Ha!  I wonder how they thought "his" last name was pronounced.  I re-read the book and rated it 9 of 10 both times, an excellent book.

ON ORDER

The Returned ~ by Jason Mott, 2013, fiction

Harold and Lucille Hargrave's lives have been both joyful and sorrowful in the decades since their only son, Jacob, died tragically at his eighth birthday party in 1966. In their old age they've settled comfortably into life without him, their wounds tempered through the grace of time…. Until one day Jacob mysteriously appears on their doorstep — flesh and blood, their sweet, precocious child, still eight years old. All over the world people's loved ones are returning from beyond. No one knows how or why this is happening, whether it's a miracle or a sign of the end. Not even Harold and Lucille can agree on whether the boy is real or a wondrous imitation, but one thing they know for sure: he's their son. As chaos erupts around the globe, the newly reunited Hargrave family finds itself at the center of a community on the brink of collapse, forced to navigate a mysterious new reality and a conflict that threatens to unravel the very meaning of what it is to be human.

Having ordered this, based on what I read in a book blogger review and on a couple of other sites, now I'll ask you what you think.  Have you read it?  Does it sound as interesting to you as it does to me?

The Sunday Salon's Facebook page has links to other blogs.

Beginning ~ never saw it coming

Not My Daughter ~ by Barbara Delinsky, 2010, fiction (Maine), 9/10

"Susan Tate never saw it coming."

That's a real hook!  And it hooked me into wanting to know what "it" could be.  Well, that's not quite true, since I already knew the book is about Susan Tate's seventeen-year-old daughter getting pregnant, along with other girls at her school, where the mother just happens to be the principal.  It was a quick read, so I've already rated it 9 of 10, an excellent book.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.  Click here for today's Mister Linky.

What are you reading?

Here are the books on my plate.  The first one is by a woman living in a small town about 30 miles from me.

Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions ~ by Rachel Held Evans, 2010, memoir

"Monkey Town" is Dayton, Tennessee, where Rachel lives.  From the back cover:  "Eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial made a spectacle of Christian fundamentalism and brought national attention to her hometown, Rachel Held Evans faced a trial of her own when she began to have doubts about her faith."

The Dalai Lama's Cat ~ by David Michie, 2012, fiction

I gave this one to my roommate for her birthday.  From the back cover:  "Starving and pitiful, a mud-smeared kitten is rescued from the slums of New Delhi and transported to a life she could never have imagined.  In a beautiful sanctuary overlooking the snow-capped Himalayas, she begins her new life as the Dalai Lama's cat."

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth ~ by Reza Aslan, 2013, biography

My Sunday school class has decided to study this book, starting in a couple of weeks.  From the dust jacket:  "Aslan explores the reasons why the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary. And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself, the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity."

YOUR TURN
Tell us in the comments what's on your reading plate right now.

Teaser ~ The Enoch Factor

This paragraph from page 30 will probably surprise many Christians.  The author says:

I am sometimes asked, "If there are many ways to God, how do you understand Jesus' instruction to 'Go and make disciples' (Matt 28:19-20)?"  When Jesus said, "Go and train everyone . . . in this way of life" (Matt 28:19), he meant, as it is correctly paraphrased here in The Message, that we are to teach people his way of life, his way of thinking and living.  Jesus did not say, as most Christians have mistakenly thought, "Go and train everyone to believe in me," or worse, "Go and train others to believe as you believe."  Jesus said to spread around his "way of life."  The world around you will never change until the world within you does.  That's the message Christians know as the good news.

This quote is from The Enoch Factor: The Sacred Art of Knowing God by Steve McSwain (2010).  The book "has been described as a candid memoir on how misdirected religion can become.  It calls for an end to religious dogmatism and fundamentalism and the consequential crisis of faith that is driving millions to question lifelong beliefs, change religions, or abandon faith altogether."