My So-Called Life as a Proverbs 31 Wife (2011) and My So-Called Life as a Submissive Wife (2013) by Sara Horn, Harvest House Publishers.
Try to ignore the dorky picture on the cover of the Proverbs 31 book. Really, the book isn’t like that at all.
I’m not sure how I ran across these books, but I think they popped up on an Amazon.com page when I was looking at something else.
Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown & Company, 2005.
There’s so much to say about this relatively short book that I’m going to have a hard time keeping this post to a reasonable length. If you find yourself interested in the book already, then maybe you should go out and get it and not bother reading about it.
Still with me? Okay. You may or may not be familiar with Gladwell, whose other books are well worth reading also. I will probably have a post later on about his newest one, David and Goliath. He can probably best be described as a social psychologist. The premise of Blink is that we are constantly making decisions and coming to conclusions that are intuitive and instantaneous, and that much of the time we’re correct when we do this but there are solid reasons why those instincts can lead us astray.
The Surrendered Wife: A Practical Guide to Finding Intimacy, Passion, and Peace with a Man by Laura Doyle, Simon and Schuster, 2001.
I’m going to have to rein myself in on this post because there is a lot to say about this book’s ideas. Where to begin? I guess with a description of my initial reading of it, more than ten years ago. A woman I greatly admired and respected mentioned it, saying that her husband had suggested she read it. “How come?” she’d asked him. “I don’t boss you around!” And he’d said, “Well . . . ” She seemed to think that it had indeed had something to say to her. So I got it, and read it, and was indeed quite struck with it myself. I wish I’d paid a little more attention to it at the time, but I guess it’s never too late to learn.
Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman by Anne Ortlund, originally published by Word Books, 1977, available in many other formats and editions.
Well! After the Great Book Cleanout of several weeks ago, I couldn’t find my copy of this book and was very distressed to think that I might have thrown it out. I do go back and re-read it periodically, and it means a great deal to me, so I was greatly relieved when it turned up.
I quoted Anne in the “eliminate and concentrate” post last week. She was a tremendously talented and energetic woman who was a pastor’s wife, author, composer, and speaker. I’m sorry that I never got to hear her speak in person, but reading this book is almost as good. I would strongly urge you, if you’ve never done so, to get hold of a copy. It’s quite short, only 132 pages in my edition, so you don’t have to make a major investment of time to read it.
You can’t accuse me of a boring consistency in the books I write about on this blog. Last week’s book had a gun on the cover and talked about the logistics of killing someone; this week’s tells you why you should dress, eat and indeed live like an elegant Frenchwoman. (Note to guys reading this: the rest of February’s books are also going to be pretty female-centric. Fine with me if you want to read the blogs or the books themselves. I’m just a-sayin’.)
I can’t quite remember why or how I ran across this book, although I do know that I actually bought it, a rarity for me. It was enjoyable and, I thought at the time, pretty lightweight, one of many memoirs about Americans going to France and finding out what they’ve been missing.
JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy by John McAdams, Potomac Books, 2011.
Now folks, this is a somewhat weird book. I highly recommend it or I wouldn’t include it here, but there’s no question that Ms. Kondo has her own idiosyncratic view of how you should treat your possessions. Being one of her clients must be quite an experience, as she insists that things be done her way or else. (She has a three-month waiting list for her personal consultations, so people don’t seem to mind.) She has two central ideas. The first is the one that’s the most problematic for me: that you must do the tidying up of your surroundings all at once. If you do it gradually, she says, you’ll never finish. In an ideal world she’d probably be right, but most of us can’t really take a whole weekend to throw out stuff. If we have to do it that way, we’ll never do it at all.
. . . and he wanted people to take it and thank him for it” (I Timothy 4:3b Worldwide English trans.).
My husband is fond of quoting Martin Luther’s description of humankind as a drunkard on a horse: he goes down the road for awhile and then falls off and rolls into the ditch on the right. Then he staggers back up on the horse and stays on for awhile until he falls off again and this time rolls into the ditch on the left. He spends very little time in the saddle actually going down the middle of the road.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain, New York: Crown Publishers, 2012.
My mother used to say to me, “Don’t be self-conscious.” Other times she’d tell me not to be shy. This book tells me that she might as well have said, “Don’t have blue eyes” or “Don’t be good at spelling.” Introversion is an inherited trait.I got so tickled at Mimi Wilson, a Christian writer and speaker who was featured at a recent retreat I attended. She said she was such an extrovert that she’d have a hard time in Heaven if the mansions were all separated from each other; she was hoping they’d be more like apartments. But while I’ve become much more people-friendly since marrying Jim, I have to say that my idea and Mimi’s idea of Heaven don’t exactly coincide. While I do enjoy talking to people much more than I used to, at some point I have to have some alone time. My dear friend Cecelia said once that she drew energy from other people; for me, it’s the other way around in that people draw energy from me. I can take only so much togetherness!
Just Mercy: A story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, Spiegel & Grau, 2014.
Gideon picked this week’s book. We had both heard the author interviewed on NPR and thought he sounded fascinating, so I got his book. When this guy had the time to write it I do not know. He got involved in death penalty cases while he was still in law school, and this passion took over his life. You can listen to the NPR interview here and watch his TED talk here.
I found this to be a hard book to read because it’s so heartbreaking but also because there’s no resolution for most if not all of the crimes he discusses. The spine of the book concerns the case of Walter McMillian, a young black man who was tried and sentenced to death for the murder of a young woman and who always insisted that he was innocent.