From his obituary

"He enjoyed wood-working, reading, traveling, and helping others."

This may sound like a strange line to single out of the obituary of the man who died yesterday, but it's what this book blogger noticed.  He was an engineer and a perfectionist, so everything he made with his hands came out as perfect as it was humanly possible.  Always.  But reader?  Not when I first met him back in 1956 on what turned out to be a blind date.  I was sixteen, thought I was going swimming "with a group" of friends, and discovered "the group" consisted of my friend Mary, her friend David, and David's friend, who happened to have a car.  He was home from Germany, where he was stationed at Rhein-Main Air Force Base outside Frankfurt, and he had turned twenty-two the day before.  Six years is an awfully big gap in years for a teenager.

About that "reading" listed in his obituary — later when we were dating, I learned that he didn't read anything.  At Christmas, a friend had given him a subscription to Reader's Digest, but the magazines were piling up, unread.  I read the short articles and pointed out whatever I thought would interest him.  He began to read.  After we were married, he continued to read one RD article every morning during breakfast.  But after he graduated from college, he rejoiced that he'd never have to read another book!

Our three children are readers.  So are our grandchildren, except for the one who has always preferred to draw.  His second wife was a teacher before she retired, and I taught college classes as an adjunct.  Now his obituary lists reading, as second only to wood-working among the things he enjoyed.  Do you suppose the books on the shelves lining the walls of our den made a difference?  He made those shelves.  Perfectly.

Rest in peace, dear heart.

How to meet authors ~ Roberta C. Bondi

I'm writing a series of posts to answer a question posed by Helen of Helen's Book Blog:

"How the heck do you meet all these authors? That's awesome!"

Roberta C. Bondi

Roberta Bondi was one of my seminary professors when I was at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.  She and Bill Mallard co-taught a class on the history of the church that gave me a good grounding for the whole process of doing theology by knowing the basis of previous theological ideas.

So one way to "meet an author" is by attending a university or seminary.  Most professors are expected to "publish or perish," so — ta-da! — they are authors.

A Place to Pray: Reflections on the Lord's Prayer ~ by Roberta C. Bondi, 1998, religion, 9/10

The other day, I mentioned to my friend Donna that I may do a series on the Lord's Prayer for the Seekers Class at St. Luke, a church that occasionally invites me to teach or preach.  Her pastor is in the middle of such a class, she told me, showing me the most recent study sheet.  It started with their Lenten Luncheon series, and the group wanted to keep studying.  The upshot of that conversation was that I decided to attend the luncheon discussions with her.

The book they are using (see below) is only 112 pages long, so I read Donna's copy in a couple of days.  Although Willimon and Hauerwas have each written some pretty good books, this is not one of their better ones.  So Donna and I got out our copies of Roberta Bondi's book, A Place to Pray, which I first read in 1999 and have taught a few times over the years.  It is much better than the one the class is using.  Since I also bought the companion video series, Donna and I set it up on my porch to view during lulls in our recent Neighborhood Yard Sale.  I would pause the video whenever neighbors stopped by to look over my books.

Bondi put this study together in a unique way, with each chapter written as a letter to her friend.  From what she writes, we can infer what her friend has said (or written) in the meantime.  Here is a deep friendship.

"Dear friend, how grateful I am for the gift of your own existence in my life, for such a friendship in which we can talk openly about our lives with God and the hard and happy things for which we pray.  May God always keep in our hearts the knowledge that these words spoken between us are, after all, as much a part of prayer as anything we do" (p. 49).

One more quote from this book:

"As for us, ours is a God who loves, and if we love this God who is love, we long to express that love by imitating God, that is, by loving those whom God loves in the way God loves, in an appropriately human manner" (p. 128).

I rate this book 9 of 10, a very good book.

Whenever it works into the conversation, I try to share insights from Roberta Bondi's book in the study I'm attending with Donna.  Yes, I also use the notes I took while reading Donna's copy of their study book:

Lord, Teach Us: The Lord's Prayer and the Christian Life ~ by William H. Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, 1996, religion, 7/10

One good thing about this book is that it raises questions for a class to discuss.  Throughout the book, however, I got the distinct impression that they tossed the book together, and no one edited it to smooth the edges.  One minor slip — the index shows scripture in the order it's printed in the Bible, except Colossians and Philippians are out of order.  Another is that, in making Jesus "perfect," they overstep:

"There is nothing that we go through here on earth that Jesus has not also endured" (p. 36).

I know what they meant to impart, but this is just silly and likely to make thoughtful people pause.  It's too broad.  Jesus did NOT birth a child, I can imagine some new mother thinking.  Jesus did NOT have cancer, I imagine from a suffering patient.  Jesus did not even get old, like many of us in that class.  C'mon, guys!  You can do better.

Rated:  7/10, good because it encourages discussion.  By the way, I also met Will Willimon and talked to him after he preached.  That's why I expected more from this book.   (Check — another author I've met.)

I don't want to end on a low note, so I'll leave you with one especially good quote from this book:

"Too often, we are conditioned to think of prayer as asking God for what we want — dear God, give me this, give me that.  But now, in praying that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we are attempting to school ourselves to want what God wants" (p. 66).

Those words by Willimon and/or Hauerwas remind me of my favorite title:


To Love As God Loves ~ by Roberta Bondi, 1987, religion, 9/10.

Ha!  We now come full circle, right back to my seminary professor.  Thanks, Roberta!

Caturday ~ hug

I used to have kittens.
But that was a long time ago.
A long time ago, before I came to live with Bonnie.
I hug Bonnie now.
She hugs me too.
We're both huggers.

Kiki Cat, reminiscing

Once upon a time ~ a book beginning

Once Upon A Time, There Was You ~ by Elizabeth Berg, 2011, fiction (California and Minnesota)

"When John Marsh was a young boy, he used to watch his mother getting ready to go out for the evening. ... 'How do I look?' she would ask him, and he never knew what to say.  What he felt was:  Gone."

Notice that ellipsis (...) in the middle, showing there were sentences that I omitted.  Let me summarize those missing sentences for you:  lipstick, mirror, rouge, mascara, pin curls.  Those details make my eyes glaze over, creating a definite desire to put down the book.  Berg buried the only interesting word — gone — by continuing to pile up words in the first paragraph until the boy answered by saying, "Pretty."

"For though he had stood beside her, watching her every move as she transformed herself, he was never sure that the made-up woman before him was still his mother, and this made for a mixed feeling of fear and confusionn.  Nonetheless, he always smiled and said softly, 'Pretty.'"

I guess my own writing is more spare, allowing the reader to imagine details for herself.  I, as reader, don't need help to imagine that "getting ready to go out" involves (for most women) looking in a mirror and putting on make-up.

If you want to play along, this meme is hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages. Share the first sentence or two of the book you are reading. (Sometimes it takes several sentences to get the full thought.) Then, share your impressions of that beginning.  Click this link to see what others say about the books they are reading this week.

BTT (#5) ~ reviews

Hosted by Booking Through Thursday

"Do you read book reviews?
Whose do you trust?
Do they affect your reading habits?
Your buying habits?"

I read book reviews.  I read them by book bloggers.  I read them in print newspapers.  I read them in online newspapers.  I read them in bookstore handouts.  I read them here.  I read them there.  I truly read them EVERYWHERE.

(If that sounded a bit like Dr. Seuss, it was meant to.)

Mostly, I trust book bloggers I have come to know because I read their blogs frequently.  And I'm a regular readers of those blogs because, in comparing my own interests to theirs, I have learned that books they like and recommend are actually books I enjoy reading.

Of course, reviews by book bloggers affect my reading habits.  Often, I go to my library's online connection and put a book on hold while I'm still reading a blogger's review.  That's why I usually have more than one window open at a time, so I can do things like that.

On the other hand, my buying habits are primarily influenced by my pocketbook.  If a book is unavailable from my library or a friend (I take good care of borrowed books), then I might buy it if it's one I can't live without.

So it's ironic that the last thing I posted, before checking on today's Booking Through Thursday topic, was about that book report I did more than fifty years ago.  A book report that was itself pure fiction.  I trust other book bloggers, but now you may never again trust anything I say.  Maybe I shouldn't have told that story?

That book report I wrote

The year I was in the eighth grade, our English class had to write several book reports.  Since I always read two or three books a week, that was no problem.  But I was a smart-alecky little thing, and one week, just to see if I could pull it off, I decided to "make up" a book so successfully that the teacher would never know.

I picked up the novel I had used for my last book report, found a list of previous titles by that author, picked one, and used it for my next book report.  I made up a bunch of stuff about the book (which, of course, I had never seen), and wrote my report.  I felt rather cocky when I got an "A" on it.

The fiction that week was not in a book READ, but in a book report WRITTEN.  Maybe that's when I decided to become a writer.  My byline has been on articles and book reviews and other nonfiction that was published locally, nationally, and internationally — but my eighth grade book report was the only fiction I've ever successfully written.

This little girl seems as impertinent as I was.  I never wrote a book report on the dictionary, though it sounds like a great idea!

Library Loot ~ June 1-7

Caleb's Crossing ~ by Geraldine Brooks, 2011, fiction (Massachusetts)

Summary:  In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College.  Vreeland used that fact to tell this story.  Bethia Mayfield, narrator of the novel, is growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans.

Restless and curious, she yearns after an education that is closed to her by her sex. As often as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observe its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a tentative secret friendship that draws each into the alien world of the other.

Bethia's minister father tries to convert the Wampanoag, awakening the wrath of the tribe's shaman, against whose magic he must test his own beliefs. One of his projects becomes the education of Caleb, and a year later, Caleb is in Cambridge, studying Latin and Greek among the colonial elite. There, Bethia finds herself reluctantly indentured as a housekeeper and can closely observe Caleb's crossing of cultures.

The Year of Magical Thinking ~ by Joan Didion, 2005, memoir

Look at that cover!  I haven't read anywhere that the four blue letters spell J-O-H-N, her husband who died.  I thought it look kind of "blah" until I noticed some of the letters were a different color.  Now I see why.

Summary:  The story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack. This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

Library Loot is a weekly meme co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.  Marg has the Mister Linky this week, if you'd like to share a list of the loot you brought home.