Reading

Sharing stories is a beautiful (and necessary) part of the human experience. It's how we connect with our past, learn possible paths to the future, and touch the places inside each other that make us one. Reading and writing are like air to me. Without them, I suffocate. Reading fuels my soul, and writing expresses it...lets out all the thoughts and feelings that would otherwise drown me. And so here I offer you my reading list. What you'll see here is a conglomeration of things I'm reading over time, and novels I'm devouring in a few sittings. Some are soul food. Others are quick bites and escapes. Enjoy them.

Quick Bites:

Ugh......these ones always kill me! Grab a box of tissues and curl up with this gem of a many-tiered story. The narrator is a dead woman (a vet) who has come back to "witness" what becomes of her lawyer husband, her menagerie of pets, and some of the people she left behind, including a researcher desperately trying to save the chimpanzee she's been working with, a vert grappling with too much loss, and a woman with a young son who has Asperger's and can understand what the animals around him are feeling. It's a story about how we communicate with the animals we love, how we nurture our relationships, and how me move on. Legacy. That's a word that comes to mind here. And hope. I look forward to more books by this author, who actually is a lawyer married to a vet.

Don't Let Me Go by Catherine Ryan Hyde - I picked this one up for a couple of bucks on my Kindle. It's good. Not great. But I went with it based on my love of another book I read by the author (Pay It Forward). She strikes me as the type of author who churns out stories like an Easy Bake Oven. They're palatable and simple and formulaic. Nothing spectacular, but fun. This one is about a young girl living in a "project" type apartment building with a strung-out mother who sleeps away her days in a drug-saturated haze. The occupants of the building band together to take care of the girl and come up with a plan to encourage her mom to pull her head out of her ass and start being a real mother. The characters are fairly shallow, and don't make me feel emotionally attached in any way. But, if you like quick reads that don't expect a whole lot from you as a reader, this author might be for you (and she's prolific, so you'll be busy.)

Soul Food:

I've been following Glennon Doyle Melton for some time now on her blog Momastery. I find her voice appealing and honest. Her posts always seemed to sort of hit me where it counts. I can relate with her messy life, and I appreciate her ability to see her messiness as beautiful. I also appreciate her honesty. She shares her history of drug and alcohol abuse, her struggles with bulimia and mental illness, her spiritual confusion, her fractured marriage, her mistakes in parenting...all of it. All the parts we tend to hide, she puts right out there in the open. And she doesn't try to make it pretty. I like that. Her metaphorical, confessional style is like my own in some ways, though I'm still striving for the strength to be as brutally honest as she is in this book. My life mirrors it in many ways, so the fact that I can connect with her is also surely something that impacts my rating of the book. I love memoir. I love people's stories...every messy little detail. 

Year-long Reading:                                                                           

I intend to use this book as a morning meditation starter. I get up earlier than anyone in the house during the work week, just so I can have some quiet space. (Our house is small, which means all activity is loudly and invasively a part of my day.) This book is broken into 365 tiny entries with invitations to explore, journal, and question sprinkled throughout. It seems small and doable in my busy life. And it's focus on creating space seemed fitting for my year's goal for acceptance of what is and clearing out so that later, I might grow and flourish. 

I've read A Soulmate Experience a few times before. But it's good. And so I'm going to assume that The Soulmate Lover is, as well. I like how each is broken into 12 chapters that sort of mirror each other. Since working out my marriage issues is a focus for me this year, these books seems to strike right at the heart of what I'm looking for in my relationship. I don't want a perfect marriage. I want to feel connected to my husband's soul. And since I already know he's my soul mate...we'll learning how to be a better one might be a good idea.

Being a better parent has long been a goal of mine. My impatience and lack of maternal instinct or drive is painful to my soul. Feeling like a shitty parent is heart-breaking. And knowing that my family is central in my vision of happiness, reading a guide or two about how to make that happen (or at least how others made that happen) might help. These two books, through much thought, deliberation, and previewing, have floated to the surface of the hundreds of possibilities. One has been sitting on my shelf for years, and I've been following both women's blogs for just as long. So, what better time than now?