The Wine-Dark Sea

It’s really late now, after the feast of the Presentation so the Christmas season is gone no matter how you stretch the definition. But I wanted to write a bit about the books the kids got for Christmas and Epiphany. Perhaps it’s just as well that I’m only getting to it now because I can fill in a little about which have been favorites.

[Sorry about the Amazon buttons. I really prefer the look of the images without the “buy now” buttons; but they take twice as long to cut and paste into the blog as the pre-made button. And yes, we do get a little bit of money for the Bettinelli book fund if you buy after clicking through from one of our links. Thank you for supporting our book addiction]

I’ve already packed away the Christmas books so I can’t remember all the new ones we got. I know we did enjoy these two:

The Donkey’s Dream—we didn’t get to read it more than a few times before the Christmas book were packed away; but I love the way the book delves into traditional Marian imagery. The kids might not understand it all; but boy did they get it.

Joy to the World Tomie de Paola, a great collection of some of his best Christmas stories. It duplicates a couple we already have but it’s nice to have them all in one volume. And Sophie really loved the story of Los Posadas, though it was the way that you love a roller coaster or a haunted house, a delicious scare with the devils paired with the reassurance of the familiar Biblical Nativity Story characters.

Georgia O’Keeffe by Georgia O’Keeffe This isn’t a children’s picture book, strictly speaking, but I believe in giving kids books with real art and it is entirely suitable for young children. We’d checked this one out from the library last fall and the girls loved it and I loved it. Even Ben liked looking at the pictures. Georgia O’Keeffe is one of my favorite painters so I love being able to share her with my children. I saw an exhibit of her work at the Dallas Museum of Art many years ago and I still treasure that experience among all my experiences of looking at paintings. There is something marvelous about Georgia.

What is truly wonderful about this book, which I didn’t realize the first time we had it, is that it is a book by Georgia and not one about her. Consider these notes from her Acknowledgements for the original edition:

I wish to thank William Einstein, a painter, who died some years ago, for urging me in the early thirties to write about my painting.

He went away and I forgot about it until Virgina Robertson found the writing a few years ago and encouraged me to continue.

Juan Hamilton has helped me with this book for the last three years and has taken care of many details, from collecting the paintings and arranging the photography to working with the color proofs and layout.

I love that the text is all Georgia’s own words about her art rather than some art critic’s explanation. It is a delightful window into her own thoughts about the paintings and is so fresh and vibrant. Bella loved when I read it to her. She wouldn’t let me stop but kept begging for more and more and more. She said the words helped her to see the pictures and to understand them.

It’s a big book, large full-color panels. Luscious. This copy is an ex-library copy with that nice durable library binding. I don’t feel so worried about the kids paging through it because it’s already stood up to quite a bit and it isn’t new and crisp.

Emily by Michael Bedard pictures by Barbara Cooney
This is a sweet little story about a girl who meets Emily Dickinson. Even though Bella has no previous acquaintance with Dickinson, she loves this picture book. Of course, she’s already predisposed to love everything by Barbara Cooney. Reading this book along with A Snow Story has prompted Bella to begin asking, “What’s a poem?” She thought she knew but both of these books present very metaphorical definitions of poetry, which puzzle her because she is still a very concrete thinker in many ways. Some day soon I need to use this book as a launch pad to get us into more Dickinson. I think Bella would like that very much.

Emma by Wendy Kesselman illustrated by Barbara Cooney A story about a 72 year old grandmother who takes up painting when her family present her with a picture of her childhood village that doesn’t match up with her memory. I love the lesson that it is never too late to learn a new skill. Bella, Ben an Sophie, all seem to like this book. Recently they’ve been playing at being artists and I think this fits into that game nicely.

Joan of Arc: The Lily Maid by Margaret Hodges illustrated by Robert Rayevsky, a beautiful version of the story of a medieval saint. I love the medieval feel of the illustrations. It’s fun for us because I was able to point out that the girls’ beloved St Therese once dressed up as St Joan. So far she hasn’t become a part of Bella and Sophie’s playing; but I’m sure that day will come.

Saints Lives and Illuminations by Ruth Sanderson. This volume focuses on saints from the first centuries of the Church. (It does include Constantine, who is considered a saint by the Orthodox churches but not, I believe, by Catholics.) Many of these saints don’t make it into children’s saints books very often, so it’s a nice mix. Includes St Nicholas, St Lawrence, St Helen, St Ephraim, St Catherine of Alexandra, St Benedict and Scholastica, St Mary of Egypt, and many of the Irish saints. I love it. The illustrations are gorgeous and it’s a book worth lingering over. 

Psalms for Young Children by Marie-Hélène Delval. I was of two minds about this book. On the one hand I know from personal experience that children are able to appreciate the beauty and grandeur of the psalms without any need to translate them into simpler language. My children do listen as I pray the psalms and I can tell that the psalms speak to them. They speak to their hearts even if they don’t understand all the words. On the other hand, I do like the simple paraphrases of one or two main ideas from each psalm. They choose verses that speak to children’s various needs in prayer and I think provide a nice entryway for children into making their prayer into a real conversation with God, expressing their fears and desires, vocalizing their praise and petitions, in short the full range of human emotion and experience. So I would say that this book is not a substitute for introducing children to the richness of the book of psalms, the Church’s universal prayer; but a good supplement to such an introduction. Just as when teaching Shakespeare, I might have children read a simplified prose version first before diving into Shakespearian language, I see these versions as a way to highlight some of the main themes of the psalms in a plain, everyday language any child can understand.

The Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen illustrated by Kevin Hawkes A sweet story about a lion who loves story time at the library. Indirectly it’s also a story about rules, especially about the times when it is necessary to break the rules. Also about admitting you are wrong and seeing the good in people who are different. The pictures are magical, reminiscent of Robert McClosky’s Make Way for Ducklings. Ben, Sophie, and Bella all love it and request it; but it seems to especially speak to Ben.

Little Blue Truck, this book was one I picked up at Target on a whim to fill out the gift roster for Ben and Anthony but we have all come to love it. One of those rare books that has a rhyme and rhythm that is delicious to read, with plenty of fun animal sounds. It’s the story of two trucks: a friendly little blue truck who befriends all of the animals, and a too-busy, stuck-up dump truck. The dump gets stuck in the mud and Blue gets stuck while trying to help get him out. Then all the animals who couldn’t be bothered to help the rude Dump come to Blue’s aid. Despite their collaborative effort, the animals can’t budge the trucks until the little green toad saves the day. A perfect book for my truck-crazy boy.

Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed board book by Eileen Christelow. Ben loves to jump on my bed while chanting, “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” So this board book was a no-brainer.

Shark vs. Train I’m not a huge fan; but I seem to be the exception. Ben and Sophie and Bella all seem to like this one. Ben and Sophie more so than Bella.

Rose of Lima by Mary Fabyan Windeatt

Actually not a picture book but a chapter book. Rose is my confirmation saint; but sadly this is the first book I’ve ever read about her. Bella and I loved it and it gave us much to talk about and think about. Today Bella was pretending to make a stations of the cross int he back yard just as Rose used to do in her garden. It has fired Bella’s imagination and that is the best sign of a book that has done it’s job. I’ve been inspired to dust off a full-length biography of Rose that has been on my shelf for years. It was interesting too how much Rose’s life was an imitation of St Catherine of Siena. I’m still slowly nibbling away at Sigrid Undset’s biography of Catherine and so was able to appreciate that aspect of Rose’s story even more. I’m finally really seeing the influence of my patron saint in my life, though it took having daughters who name their toy camels Rose and Lima before I really appreciated the first canonized saint of the new world.

Back in October I wrote about Amy Welborn’s new memoir, Wish You Were Here. I was very privileged to get an advanced reading copy. Now Amy announces that the book is finally available. Amy has created a new travel blog and is posting pictures of Sicily to go with each chapter.

Here’s what I said about the book in October. (I meant to write more but life happens. Right now I don’t seem to be able to grab much writing time. I’m hopeful that as everyone mends things will look up; but right now things are still a bit crazy.)

Wish You Were Here: Travels Through Loss and Hope by Amy Welborn

I feel like nothing I can say will do justice to this book. It is so intense so personal, so that at times—most of the time—it feels like eavesdropping. But it is beautiful, a treasure I am so profoundly grateful that Amy was wiling to share this journey with us.

The book is very easy to pick up and put down, which is good because it’s a book I want to nibble at rather than gulp. To swallow it all too quickly, to wolf it down as is too often my wont, would be a terrible shame. This is a journey to savor slowly. Partly because sometimes, sometimes it’s a little bitter. Mostly, though, because it is so beautiful and rich.

The short sections, each one like a cut facet on a gem, sharp and focused, jump back and forth. Now you are in Sicily, now on the other side of the Atlantic back at home. Now you are in the “present” on a curious journey through an ancient land, full of sun and shadow, sparkling ocean, vivid architecture, curiosities and personalities at every turn. Now you are wandering through the halls of grief, startled to find death just over your shoulder. Faith is everywhere, elusive, beguiling, always the end of the journey, glimpsed at every turn.

Here’s what I wrote in the comments over at Reading for Believers (which Betty Duffy elevated into it’s own post):

I’m trying not to be all gushy and fangirl about Wish You Were Here. Amy’s was one of the first ever blogs I read and I’ve always felt she was sort of a kindred spirit. And I remember reading what she wrote at the time of Michael’s death and her blog posts about Sicily so I sort of feel like I’m approaching the book with a very strong predisposition to love it. And maybe there are funny echoes in it for me in that I’ve never really wanted to go to Sicily very much until I married a man who is half Sicilian and then we discussed it as our dream honeymoon but couldn’t actually afford to go. So there is that layer of the emotions from my own marriage weaving throughout.

All that said, I do think its a magical (I’ve not read Didion’s book; but I can already tell you this is completely different) sort of mash up of travel memoir and a very Catholic exploration of grief. She does both genres so well but the way she slips seamlessly from one to the other is sort of breathtaking. (See, I’m gushing.) Just to do a reality check I read a chapter to my sister this evening while we were making dinner. Oh even better than I thought. The prose is lyrical but down to earth. The imagery doesn’t beat you over the head but somehow the details of every tourist stop are marshaled so that you are constantly staring death in the face. Most of all what strikes me is how faith informs everything. It doesn’t make death and grief easy, doesn’t make it go away. Just that it is the medium in which they happen.

I’m still reading, still trying to get a handle on it. Hopefully a fuller review will follow. But I won’t make any promises because, well, life happens.

Karen Edmisten’s new book is shipping early! I got my copy yesterday on Tuesday (but then on Wednesday Anthony spiked a fever and I’ve been holding him almost non-stop while battling his ear infection ever since and so I was unable to finish this post.)  I am honored that Karen chose to include a short poem I wrote. Although I didn’t write it directly about my own miscarriage, that experience obviously informs the piece. I wrote it when I was asked to pray for a mother who had recently lost a child to SIDS. But at the time I felt funny about publishing it. It seemed too raw as a response to a stranger’s grief. Then I remembered it almost a year later when a dear friend had a miscarriage. I went back and re-read it and found that it was good. And true. So I published it. I have been told by many women that my little poem has brought them comfort. Now, nestled inside Karen’s gem of a book, I have hopes that it will reach many more than it could tucked away here in my blog’s archives.

But oh I was going to write about Karen’s book. Did I mention what a treasure it is? I thought I was done grieving our baby Francis but as I’ve perused these pages I have found my tears flowing again. In just three weeks the anniversary is coming—five years since that terrible day. And yet that date, February 25, lies just between two wonderful anniversaries that have since joined our family’s calendar of celebrations: February 20, Anthony’s birthday, and March 4, Sophie’s birthday. I think God knew what he was doing when Sophie was due almost a year to the day from the day I lost Baby Francis. This is the way the world is, death and life so intertwined you can’t pull them apart. Had Francis not died, I’d not have my Sophie. It is a grief and a joy both. And now Anthony. It is a miracle when you consider that after the miscarriage I was told I had cancer and was going to have a hysterectomy. I went through such a dark week, thinking Bella would be the only baby I’d get to hold. And then there was Sophie… and Ben… and Anthony.

Life after miscarriage. Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong in that sisterhood of grieving mothers because mine has been such an easy cross when I know so many mothers who struggle so under such a heavy weight. But I do know that whenever I hear of a mother—or father, let’s not forget the fathers—who has lost a baby, I know my heart now reaches out in a way I don’t think it could have before.

And then there were these words, that Colleen penned recently after losing yet another of her babies:

But I hold in my heart the greatest of all consolations, the hope of heaven.  For I realize, that even when my body is well past the age of bearing babies, even if I should live until I am 100, always, I will be an expectant mother, until the day I hold my babies for eternity.

I love that. I will always be an expectant mother. There is still that eagerly awaited little one, the one my arms ache to hold and that hope of a longed for meeting in heaven.

I hope that After Miscarriage finds its way into many hands, many homes, many hearts. The stories, poems, prayers and memories Karen shares are a beautiful balm for grieving parents because they are full of the healing love of Christ.

The Mole subsided forlornly on a tree-stump and tried to control himself, for he felt it surely coming. The sob he had fought with so long refused to be beaten. Up and up, it forced its way to the air, and then another and another, and others thick and fast; until poor Mole at last gave up the struggle and cried freely and helplessly and openly, now that he knew it was all over and he had lost what he could hardly be said to have found.

The Rat, astonished and dismayed at the violence of Mole’s paroxysm of grief, did not dare to speak for a while. At last he said, very quietly and sympathetically, “What it is, old fellow? Whatever can be the matter? Tell us your trouble, and let me see what I can do.”

Poor Mole found it so difficult to get any words out between the upheavals of his chest that followed one upon another so quickly and held back speech and choked it as it came.

[. . .]

Recollection brought fresh waves of sorrow, and sobs again took full charge of him, preventing further speech.

The Rat stared straight in front of him, saying nothing, only patting Mole gently on the shoulder. After a time he muttered gloomily, “I see it all now! What a pig U have been! A pig—that’s me! Just a pig—a plain pig!”

H waited till Mole’s sobs became gradually less stormy and more rhythmical; he waited until at least sniffs were frequent and sobs only intermittent. Then he rose from his seat, and remarking carelessly, “Well, now we’d really better be getting on, old chap! set off up the road again, over the toilsome way they had come.

While putting together my retrospective post for my blogiversary, I stumbled across a comment in an old blog post that recommended a parenting book,
Tears and Tantrums: What to Do When Babies and Children Cry by Althea Solter. For whatever reason—I was busy, distracted, overwhelmed with an already towering reading pile?—that recommendation didn’t really register on my consciousness at the time and I never followed up on it nor until I re-read the comment last week did I remember that it had been made. But now it caught my eye and I decided to get it from the library. And oh I am glad I did. Sometimes the right bit of information at the right time catches just right and suddenly the world shifts and everything realigns and you are able to see clearly for the first time a new path where before there had only been a close thicket. This was rather like that.

The author’s thesis is simple: that tears and tantrums are the natural, healthy way of relieving stress and that when children are allowed to cry the recover from stress and from psychological traumas, both big and small, more readily. When crying is suppressed or denied children will find ways to cope, of course, but there will be repercussions in other ways as the stress is bottled up.

In general her theory makes sense to me, although I’m a bit leery of her theories about birth trauma and rebirthing. It’s the kind of thing that takes a truth I already know—that crying is a stress relief—and shows me how that truth can change how I approach certain moments in parenting. I think that keeping this truth in mind, that crying and tantrums help children resolve stress, will help me to be more patient with tears. Whereas before I was seeing them as something I need to fix, now instead of seeing my job as keeping them from crying, it is so much less of a burden to have my job be to merely be with them as they cry, so that they are not alone as they work through whatever emotions are overwhelming them.

But what is truly revolutionary is how it’s changed the whole matter of putting the baby down to sleep. I have been uncomfortable with nursing the baby to sleep, knowing that it is a poor soothing tool because when the baby wakes up he wants to nurse again, to recreate the situation in which he fell asleep. But the only alternative I knew f was the method of letting a baby cry it out, and that appealed to me even less. So there I was nursing Anthony to sleep and then nursing him down again and again for an ever increasing number of night wake ups. I didn’t like it but I didn’t know how to get him to sleep otherwise without abandoning him to cry alone in the dark. Solter’s solution is so simple and obvious I feel rather foolish for never thinking of it. She advocates that once the baby’s needs for food and dry diaper have been met, that you should simply hold the tired baby and letting him cry himself into a deep sleep. Oh! I can do that. In fact, Dom had already been doing that on the occasions when I couldn’t get Anthony to nurse to sleep. It’s just that Dom has less patience for screaming babies and so we never thought of it as a real solution to the bedtime dilemma. It makes sense too because often Anthony cries himself to sleep in his carseat while we are out and about. It isn’t very loud crying, just a soft kind of creaky moan that he seems to need to do to release tension and fall asleep. We’d already labeled that particular sound as Anthony’s sleepy creak and noted that Ben had done the same thing.

So for the last few nights I’ve nursed Anthony as we say prayers and read bedtime stories. Then after the other kids are tucked into bed I have taken Anthony to our room and held him in my lap while sitting on our bed. Every single night he has cried and writhed around for about five or ten minutes and then eventually found a comfy position, either on my lap or on the bed right next to me and gone to sleep. Every time his cries were not loud angry cries or hungry cries, they were most definitely the sleepy moaning cry that I’ve heard from the car seat so many times. I knew as soon as I heard that cry the first night that we were on the right track. Sure enough it takes less time for him to cry himself to sleep than it did for him to nurse himself to sleep. I sit with him until he’s deeply asleep and then move him to his bed. He’s been sleeping for hours every night and then waking up only twice in the night. I have been nursing him back to sleep at those wake ups because it is easier than letting him cry and he does seem to go back to sleep pretty deeply and let me put him back into his bed after the first middle of the night waking. After the second one he’s been staying in our bed until morning. This is a huge improvement over his previous pattern where he woke at least once before I was ready to go to bed and then woke again shortly after I went to bed and then almost always spent the rest of the night in our bed, nursing several times.

I really wish I’d read this book a long time ago when Bella was a baby. It would have changed my approach to so many things and I think would have helped me be more patient during various tantrums and fussy stages. It’s funny because nothing in it is really completely new to me but the way it introduces the topics was exactly the paradigm shift that I needed.

The bit about Mole and Rat seemed too perfect when I read it to Bella this afternoon not to include. My aim is to be able to be as sympathetic as Rat is and as willing to acknowledge when I have been piggish and failed to listen and to be compassionate to a poor sad little one who has as hard a time as Mole at expressing a need.

Sometimes you read a book and immediately want to tell everyone all about it. It’s that good. Fortunately I have a blog.

I just read the most marvelous book that we got from the library last week, A Snow Story by Melvin J. Leavitt, illustrated by Jo Ellen McAllister Stammen. After we came home from the library it was dumped into the book basket and forgotten until I excavated it at Ben’s nap time today. I’d pulled it off the shelf because the title seemed seasonally appropriate and the cover intrigued me. Then when I peeked inside and saw something about Granddad writing poems in the snow with his boots I suspected this might be a book for us. Oh and it was. I kept having to pause because my voice kept catching. I may have even had to wipe away a few tears.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be in print anymore, though Amazon did have a few copies. I’ve already ordered one for us because it was that lovely. The illustrations are soft and wonderful and compliment the text perfectly. But oh it was the story that grabbed me. It’s about a dreamy boy named Johnny growing up on a farm with practical parents. Sometimes in January or February on the day after a big storm he goes out to the frozen lake and walks back and forth. When his mother asks what he was doing, he explains that he was writing a poem, “In the snow. With my boots.” The pattern continues with his wife and then his children and then his grandchildren asking what he is doing. His answer is the same every time. And then…. well, poems written in snow don’t last… or do they? I love the way this book speaks to the heart of what a poem is: a marvelous thing that sparks more wonders. Sometimes long after the words have faded, when you least expect it, the magic reappears and your heart leaps up.

There’s something magical about reading a book when you know absolutely nothing about it except that it’s been recommended by someone you trust. You dive into a mysterious place with no expectations for the journey, just the knowledge that a real adventure is hidden between the covers. (It’s similar with a movie that you know nothing about too, when it’s a good film and not just a blockbuster entertainment; but right now I’m talking about books.)

When I picked up the intriguingly named Italian Shoes by Swedish writer Henning Mankell, I knew absolutely nothing about the book or the author and the recommender is a friendly acquaintance rather than a close friend, someone I’ve only met briefly a couple of times and talked to a handful of times more on the phone. And yet I trusted her recommendation enough to pick up the book from the library. As often happens when I get unknown books from the library I was a little wary; but I decided to take the plunge. And then stayed up far too late several nights in a row because this is one of those books. The kind that grabs you and won’t let go.

So if you like that kind of plunge, stop reading now and go get the book. Then you’ll approach it with nothing more than I had going in. And maybe it will be magical for you too. If you need a bit more convincing, though, read on.

It’s not that the protagonist is a likable man. He’s not really. But he’s intriguing, an enigma, a stranger to everyone around him and most of all to himself. What was the mysterious catastrophe in his past? Why has he exiled himself on an island with a dog and a cat and no human contact except the occasional visits from the hypochondriac postman? Why is he so soul-dead that he must take a daily plunge into a hole cut into the ice to remind himself that he is still alive? And then who is this mysterious woman from his past who shows up one day walking across the ice with a walker? I suppose it’s not a surprise to find out that Mankell is best known for his mystery novels. This novel isn’t a mystery; but it does have much of the same flavor and structure.

I always feel more lonely when it’s cold. The book should have seemed cold and foreboding and yet there was a spark of life in the midst of this cold, frozen land. Something calling to the sleeper to awake? The ice is here to stay. The narrator wants to deny even the possibility of change. He has spent so much of his life running away from life, refusing to engage. He’s lonely, miserable, a snoop and a sneak. But for some reason I found myself rooting for him. I wanted the ice to thaw. I wanted to see what could possibly happen to wrench him back into the land of the living. And I wanted to know how he’d got to where he was. And what’s up with the title? How do Italian shoes fit into this grim ice-locked landscape?

Now if you’ve read this far you already know considerably more about the book than I did when I began to read. And I so want to preserve the mysteries to let you discover them for yourself. But I’m also dying to talk about it and don’t know anyone else who’s read it. I want to write about it because writing is how I process. So here’s the deal. I’m going to use a feature I don’t use very often and continue writing all my spoilers after the jump. If you want to read them, click “more”. If you want to just go get the book and read it with most of the mysteries intact, then stop here.

Continue reading...

1. Lessons at Blackberry Inn: Adventures with the Gentle Art of Learning by Karen Andreola
This novel is the sequel to Andreola’s Pocketful of Pinecones, which I received for my birthday last year but i don’t think I ever wrote a review..

This is the continuing story of a Carol, a homeschooling mother in the 1930’s. In Lessons at Blackberry Inn the family are living with Emma, a friend and grandmother figure, in her house, which is also an Inn. The family have various adventures that show learning both in formal lessons and life learning such as their hard work helping to run the inn, and their encounter with a hobo who they befriend, helping him to find meaningful work and seeking to reconnect him with his family. Carol substitutes for the village schoolteacher, applying Charlotte Mason’s methods to her lessons, showing how the same educational principles can be adapted to different sized groups, different situations, and different learners.

Although this novel might not be high literature, it was motivational. I enjoyed it for the same reasons I enjoy reading homeschooling blogs. I like to see how educational principles are carried out in daily life.

2. The Pope & The CEO: John Paul II’s Leadership Lessons to a Young Swiss Guard by Andreas Widmer

This book is above all a portrait of two fascinating men: our beloved former pope, Blessed John Paul II and Andreas Widmer, a former Swiss Guard who came to know JPII during his time of service and who later applied the lessons he had learned from observing and interacting with the pope to his business life as a CEO and entrepreneur.

This book is first and foremost about Andreas’ spiritual journey, secondarily about how he sees those spiritual lessons applying to best business practices. I think it will be an inspirational read for everyone, not just guide for people in business but for anyone in leadership and more broadly for all Christians. I hope to follow up once I’m finished with a separate post highlighting some of my favorite parts of the book.

3. Wish You Were Here: Travels Through Loss and Hope by Amy Welborn

I forgot to note at first that I have a review copy of this book. Amazon says that it won’t be available until February. Bt if you pre-order from them they’ll ship it to you as soon as it’s released.

I feel like nothing I can say will do justice to this book. It is so intense so personal, so that at times—most of the time—it feels like eavesdropping. But it is beautiful, a treasure I am so profoundly grateful that Amy was wiling to share this journey with us.

The book is very easy to pick up and put down, which is good because it’s a book I want to nibble at rather than gulp. To swallow it all too quickly, to wolf it down as is too often my wont, would be a terrible shame. This is a journey to savor slowly. Partly because sometimes, sometimes it’s a little bitter. Mostly, though, because it is so beautiful and rich.

The short sections, each one like a cut facet on a gem, sharp and focused, jump back and forth. Now you are in Sicily, now on the other side of the Atlantic back at home. Now you are in the “present” on a curious journey through an ancient land, full of sun and shadow, sparkling ocean, vivid architecture, curiosities and personalities at every turn. Now you are wandering through the halls of grief, startled to find death just over your shoulder. Faith is everywhere, elusive, beguiling, always the end of the journey, glimpsed at every turn.

Here’s what I wrote in the comments over at Reading for Believers (which Betty Duffy elevated into it’s own post):

I’m trying not to be all gushy and fangirl about Wish You Were Here. Amy’s was one of the first ever blogs I read and I’ve always felt she was sort of a kindred spirit. And I remember reading what she wrote at the time of Michael’s death and her blog posts about Sicily so I sort of feel like I’m approaching the book with a very strong predisposition to love it. And maybe there are funny echoes in it for me in that I’ve never really wanted to go to Sicily very much until I married a man who is half Sicilian and then we discussed it as our dream honeymoon but couldn’t actually afford to go. So there is that layer of the emotions from my own marriage weaving throughout.

All that said, I do think its a magical (I’ve not read Didion’s book; but I can already tell you this is completely different) sort of mash up of travel memoir and a very Catholic exploration of grief. She does both genres so well but the way she slips seamlessly from one to the other is sort of breathtaking. (See, I’m gushing.) Just to do a reality check I read a chapter to my sister this evening while we were making dinner. Oh even better than I thought. The prose is lyrical but down to earth. The imagery doesn’t beat you over the head but somehow the details of every tourist stop are marshaled so that you are constantly staring death in the face. Most of all what strikes me is how faith informs everything. It doesn’t make death and grief easy, doesn’t make it go away. Just that it is the medium in which they happen.

I’m still reading, still trying to get a handle on it. Hopefully a fuller review will follow. But I won’t make any promises because, well, life happens.

4. Trees of New England: A Natural History by Charles Fergus

This is not a guide book to trees but is meant to be a companion to a guidebook. It picks up where a guidebook leaves off. Once you have identified a tree, a guidebook might have some little additional information. Fergus, on the other hand, is a treasure trove of knowledge. His natural history explains where the tree grows, describes its life cycle in detail, from flower to seed to seedling to full growth. He details the various uses each tree has for animals and birds and insects as well as for man. You get a historical sense of how a tree’s range has changed due to human influence, how it has been used at various times in history. Native American uses, colonial uses, modern uses, and so forth. 

This would definitely fall into Charlotte Mason’s category of “living books”, a narrative by a single author whose writing clearly conveys his passion for his subject. Fergus, who lives in a farmhouse in Vermont on 108 acres of mostly forested land, clearly loves his subject. He doesn’t stick to science and history, his appreciation for his subject leads him to poetic descriptions as he ponders the beauty of a tree as well as its usefulness.

For example, I’ve been reading up on the various species of maples. This passage in particular from the section where he discusses human uses for red maple caught my eye and seems worthy of note:

A craftsman friend of mine builds award winning rocking chairs. He makes the frame, rockers, armrests, headboard, and seat out of red maple, which he buys from mills under the designation soft maple (as opposed to hard maple, which is sugar maple). He shaves the back-cushioning ribs from black walnut. The contrast between the two woods is stunning: the walnut a deep, lustrous brown, the maple pale gold to nearly bone white. My friend picks through boards to find ones with a tiger-striped grain pattern. I see such figuring from time to time in red maple I split for the woodstove; usually I set those billets aside to enjoy for a while, picking them up and turning the wood back and forth to catch the light, so that the grain winks light and dark like flames dancing.

I checked this book out from the library after stumbling across the title while looking for something else on Amazon. It’s definitely one I will add to our home library. While it’s not really a book I’d read from cover to cover, it’s one I want to have on hand to browse, to read to the children when we discover new species or want to deepen our knowledge of familiar friends.

5. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

I picked this up from the library because it was highly recommended by Emily of Back Bay View. My initial impression was not highly favorable. I didn’t like the device of having Death as the narrator and I didn’t very much like the text layout, interrupted with frequent headline news flashes in bold type. By the end of the book I’d accepted that Death was the narrator that the story demanded. It wasn’t a gimmick after all and it worked. Mostly. I still don’t like the odd typographical layout stuff, though it seemed less intrusive as I got further into the story.

Emily wrote a nice synopsis so I won’t bother to repeat it. No novel about the holocaust can be happy and feel good. When Death is the narrator you pretty much know where you are going to end up. But what’s interesting is the way you get there I suppose. Perhaps I could make some connections between this and Amy’s book. Both exploring death and beauty, love and loss and regret and the connections that last after death has pulled us apart.

But I’m too tired to do the book justice. And I don’t want to drag out posting this. I may come back with more thoughts later. Or I may not. I seem to be saying that about all of the books I read these days. It is so much easier to just read than it is to read and then digest it and synthesize what I’ve read in a coherent way. My brain feels rusty these days.

Some time ago someone asked me for a list of some of our favorite saints books and I keep remembering and feeling bad that I’ve never got around to writing it up. I was thinking of that request again today both because of today’s feast and because I checked a lovely saints book out from the library last week that I’d love to add to our personal collection. (Not by design that picking it up from the library. A happy coincidence—or shall we say a nudge by an angel?—led me to spot the book on the shelf and to remember I’d enjoyed it the last time I checked it out. I didn’t remember at the time that All Saints was fast approaching.)

But as it turns out I’m too tired to even attempt anything like an exhaustive list.

So I’ll just mention the library book and give you a rain check on other saints books:

The book was More Saints: Lives and Illuminations, which is obviously a sequel to Saints: Lives & Illuminations.

The main reason to get this book is that it has beautiful pictures. Really lovely artwork wins my heart every time and will almost lead me to overlook slightly less beautiful text. Fortunately in this case that is not an issue.  There is a nice solid page of text for each saint, not just a few sentences, and it manages to do what almost all children’s compendium saints books like this fail to do: it tells interesting, engaging stories that make these saints into real people not just cardboard cutouts. There’s a really nice selection of saints who are old favorites and some that are new to us.

These are books I really should add to the Christmas gift list because even though it’s available from the library, we won’t check it out every time and this is a volume worth having at my finger tips.

Well, there you go. I’m trying very hard not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I wanted to give you a nice fat list of all the saints books we have; but Anthony needed me more this evening. So instead I’ve given you just two that we don’t have. Still, it’s more than you maybe had before.

Now tell me, what are your favorite saints picture books?

Melissa Wiley recently blogged about this book and I just knew I’d have to get it because, like Lissa, I have a truck-crazy two year-old boy. But it’s not just Ben who has been asking for this book to be read since we brought it home from the library. The girls are just as crazy about it as Ben is.

One night recently after donning her pajamas Bella put her dirty clothes on her back and pretended to be a dump truck as she carried them to the laundry room. Soon she had recruited Sophie and Ben and they were all cleaning up the living room, pretending to be dump trucks and bulldozers and excavators. All with no prompting from either me or Dom. It was a minor miracle.

This has become our new go-to trick for nights when the tired children balk at cleaning up their toys at the end of the day. It’‘s not infallible; but it has worked on a few different occasions. There are few things that make me happier than watching a little crew of children using their imaginations to help them perform an unwelcome chore.

I suppose our kids have had a long love affair with construction equipment. I recall that both Bella and Sophie were captivated by the construction equipment when they replaced the water mains in front of our house two years ago. At that time I went to the library looking for books to teach us the names of all the big trucks we saw. They gobbled those books up and everything I’ve found since. But I’ve never found anything that really charmed my eyes and ears among all those boring factual books. (Although The Lot At the End of My Block has won the hearts of my crew, I get a bit tired of all the repetition.)

In any case Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site is a perfect bedtime story for children who love construction equipment. There is the sweet rhyming text that falls into the perfect rhythm as each truck goes through its paces and then settles in for the night. And then there are the simply dreamy pictures, that give each truck a lot of character. They are dynamic and yet also soft and dreamy. (My favorite is the crane who goes to sleep with a teddy bear and a star hung from the end of his hook.)

Yes this one is definitely a winner. Shhh…. don’t tell but I think someone may be getting it for Christmas.

This week I read Still Alice, a book about a Harvard psychology professor who discovers that she has early onset Alzheimer’s disease. I always enjoy reading books set in places I know and the slices of Cambridge alone would have led me to pick it up. It was a very moving story about a terrible disease, and it was in turns both sad and uplifting. But it was also troubling in one subplot and that was the bit I couldn’t get out of my head this morning at Mass while Father preached a homily on respect for life.

Alice’s oldest daughter, Anna is married and is trying to get pregnant. When they have trouble conceiving they turn to IVF. When Alice discovers that her Alzheimer’s is genetically linked he daughter decides to get genetic testing and finds that she too has the marker. She will also have early-onset Alzheimers and has a fifty percent chance of passing the gene on to each of her children. They decide to have the embryos screened and to discard any that have the marker. The novel ends with the daughter giving birth to twins and declaring to her mother that they are positive that the twins do not carry the Alzheimer’s gene.

“Anna, you had your babies,” said Alice.
“Yes, Mom, you’re holding your granddaughter, Allison Anne,” said Anna.
“She’s perfect. I love her.”
My granddaughter. She looked at the baby with the blue ribbon in John’s arms. My grandson.
“And they won’t get Alzheimer’s like I did? asked Alice.
“No, Mom, they won’t.”
Alice inhaled deeply, breathing in the scrumptious smell of her beautiful granddaughter, filling herself with a sense of relief and peace she hadn’t known in a long time.

I understand why this scene is supposed to be warm and comforting, but it left a bleak cold place in the center of my stomach. What about the granddaughters and grandsons who were created but never implanted? Were they not worthy of love because they had a defective gene? The book argues that the heroine has dignity and worth despite her mental defects, but this scene has a more sinister subtext.

No mention is made of the babies who were conceived who did carry the gene who were deemed unworthy of life and discarded. Alice envies Anna that she is able to protect her children from harm. But muses that the embryo that became Anna would have been discarded. Is that stray thought enough? It doesn’t state clearly enough that the embryonic Anna that would have been “discarded” was a human being in her own right regardless of her age and size.

I know that many in the world think those embryos were not people. They seem them only as potential people and believe nothing terrible happened when they were destroyed. But those of us who have eyes to see it see tragedy. Ironically, many people think the same of a person whose mind has been ravaged by Alzheimer’s so that they no longer have any self awareness.

In her speech before the Dementia Care Conference Alice pleads for more creative approaches to Alzheimer’s care:

“I encourage you to empower us, not limit us. If someone has a spinal cord injury, if someone has lost a limb, or has a functional disability from a stroke, families and professionals work hard to rehabilitate that person, to find ways to cope and manage despite those losses. Work with us. Help us develop tools to function around our losses in memory, language, and cognition. Encourage involvement in support groups. We can help each other, both people with dementia and their caregivers, navigate their way through this Dr Seuss land of neither here nor there.

“My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I’ll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I’ll forget it some tomorrow doesn’t mean that I didn’t live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.”

While this novel pleads for the dignity and worth of the Alzheimer’s patient, it ignores the dignity and worth of the small innocent child whose life was ended so summarily before the brain had time to think or feel. But if the lack of mental capacity does not mean lack of worth in the adult, it should not mean lack of worth in the child either. That child could have had so many todays that could have mattered. That child could have smiled and laughed and triumphed. Perhaps that child could have even found a cure for Alzheimer’s in the many years that child would have had before his brain began it’s inevitable failure.

This book made me so very, very sad. That on one hand it could make such a moving case for the worth of each individual day and then deny that those days would have meaning for a child who had yet to be born. First the novel defends the dignity of life and then on the other hand it treats life as disposable. 

This is why we plead and pray, so that some day all life will be seen as having inherent dignity. The embryo is valuable because like all of us it is also made in the image and likeness of God and is a unique human person.

There is one moment near the beginning of the book when Alice, who is still struggling to come to terms with her diagnosis, finds herself disoriented outside of a church. This is the only time God comes into the story. This is the other moment that haunts me.

She knew exactly where she was. She was on her way home, in front of All Saints’ Episcopal Church, only a few blocks from her house. She knew exactly where she was but had never felt more lost in her life. The bells of the church began to chime to a tune that reminded her of her grandparents’ clock. She turned the round, iron knob on the tomato red door and followed her impulse inside.

She was relieved to find no one there, because she hadn’t formulated a coherent story as to why she was. Her mother was Jewish, but her father had insisted that she and Anne be raised Catholic. So she went to mass every Sunday as a child, received communion, was confirmed, but because her mother never participated in any of this, Alice began questioning the validity of these beliefs at a young age. And without a satisfying answer from either her father or the Catholic Church, she never developed a true faith.

Light from the streetlamps outside streamed in through the Gothic stained-glass windows and provided almost enough illumination for her to see the entire church. In each of the stained-glass windows, Jesus, clad in robes of red and white, was pictured as performing a miracle. A banner to the right of the altar read GOD IS OUR REFUGE AND STRENGTH, A VERY PRESENT HELP IN TROUBLE.

She couldn’t be more in trouble and wanted so much to ask for help. But she felt like a trespasser, undeserving, unfaithful. Who was she to ask for help from a God she wasn’t sure she believed in, in a church she knew nothing about?

She closed her eyes, listened to the calming, oceanlike waves of distant traffic, and tried to open her mind. She couldn’t say how long she sat in the velvet-cushioned pew in that cold, darkened church, waiting for an answer. It didn’t come. She stayed longer, hoping a priest or parishioner would wander in and ask her why she was there. Now, she had her explanation. But no one came.

I want to rewrite that scene. My heart aches at the loneliness and heartache and longing and at the silence that meets them. I do not believe that scene. I do not believe there is no answer. I do not believe we are left alone in our times of trouble.

And yet I know that loneliness is also real. I know that too often no answer appears. Not because God refuses to answer but because we refuse to give voice to his answer. We refuse to show up in the church, we ignore the call and the waiting woman waits on, gives up, goes home unanswered.

I do not want it to be true but I know that it is. I know that the parishioner who was supposed to comfort Alice was too busy. That she heard a voice that told her to go to church and that she ignored it. I know that there are Alices out there who go unanswered because God calls and the ones he calls say no. And that other tragedy, the one of the discarded embryos, it is no greater than this.