Diary of a (Book)worm

My title for this entry was inspired by the children’s book at left. (Children and books… that’s basically the summary of my life right there. ) If you’ve been reading Hope Road for longer than two minutes, you’ve probably noticed that I like to read – and that would be a slight understatement.

However, I think something happened to me when I moved the tassel from the left side to the right (or was it the right side to the left? I can never be sure). Maybe I did too much reading in those last few crazy months. Maybe I just plain read too much throughout my lifetime! Because this summer, I have read far fewer books than usual.

What’s even stranger is that I keep starting books and then not finishing them. Being the perfectionist that I am, I used to never do that. I felt committed to books when I started them, and I had to see them through, even if I didn’t like them. Part of the change was college, I think – teaching me to read assigned portions of a book instead of the whole thing.

I don’t want to abandon all of my intellectual faculties to a pile of littered, leftover childhood dreams. So I am trying to start reading consistently again – and not just picking up whatever I feel like rereading from my bookshelf, but something valuable that takes a little work to get through.

The point is, I started reading a couple of books recently, and I want to write about them so I will be committed to finishing them!

The first is a fiction book, The Old Helmet by Susan Warner. (I reviewed Queechy by the same author.) Although it’s a simplistic and stereotyped explanation, Susan Warner is kind of like a Christian Jane Austen. She wrote a couple of decades later, but her books have the same interest and insight into human character as Austen’s (with less romance), and the additions of Puritan-influenced theology and religious life. I have eight or ten of her books, and I love them. I haven’t read The Old Helmet for a few years, so I am looking forward to rereading it. It’s 434 pages long in very small type, and I’m not used to reading for long periods of time anymore, so it will take some discipline to get through!

The second is a nonfiction book, The Gospel and Personal Evangelism by Mark Dever. I’ve been reading this for a few weeks now. I got it back in April, I think, and have had it on my list to read since then. I’ve only read about a chapter and a half so far, but it’s really good, and it’s refreshing my perspective on this central element of the Christian faith. Mark Dever has such a mixture of brilliance and relatability (is that a word?); it’s a privilege to read what he writes.

So I really want to finish these books… I don’t know how fast, but I need to stay committed to reading them! I hope to have reviews posted by Christmas.