For The Someday Book

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that I have posted reviews of all the books I read, which I haven’t done since May 2016. If you are a regular reader, you can also guess why that happened: in June 2016, I moved to London and got diagnosed with cancer. My normal reading pace (about a book a week) slowed dramatically, as a fog from the move and the treatments kept me from reading. But I have read a little bit, and I have been collecting all my books to somehow catalog and review.

I began writing book reviews in a notebook for myself in 2002, because I was reading so much so fast that I was forgetting most of it. I wanted to slow down and capture each book in my memory. I started sharing my reviews here in 2009. It has become an important part of my spiritual discipline and reading habit, a way of spending time with my literary companions.

I didn’t have the time or energy for reviews in the last 18 months. Yet each time I completed a book, I couldn’t bring myself to put it away. The ritual of shelving a completed book is one of my life’s great (though simple) pleasures, but nothing felt complete without offering a few words of reflection. I like talking about the books I read as much as I enjoy reading them.

That’s what caused this to happen on top of the bookcase in my bedroom.

The first stack, on the left, contains all the books I read in the remainder of 2016, from the time we moved to London until year’s end. It’s a mighty thin stack, because these were my months of chemotherapy. I could barely hold a book, and I couldn’t concentrate for more than a few pages at a time. Since birth, I can’t recall a season with so few books in my life.

However, these books were loving companions to me. Three of the five were written by clergy friends, people who were praying for me and encouraging me during my illness. One of them is even a fellow cancer survivor. In reading, I felt their prayers and love with me. Two were full of spiritual testimonies of courage and hope, one was a twisted prose poem about death and grief, the other two were practical and inspirational guides for church leadership. These were the books I chose for this hard season—the witness of other faithful folks who had overcome hardship and suffering; a lament to give voice to my own; and two professional reads to keep me grounded in my vocation, a source of great hope for me.

Starting in January, the chemotherapy was leaving my body, and I had surgery. The surgery left me home for three weeks, and I planned to catch up on my book reviews at that time. However, my incisions left me unable to type or sit at the computer comfortably. My days alternated between reading books, watching television and checking Facebook on my phone. The middle stack represents my reading for those first few weeks of 2017. As you can see, there was a lot of it. The upright tome, The Reformation, was one I started reading in January 2016, abandoned when the move to London got hectic, and returned to complete in my surgery recovery. I alternated between various novels and The Reformation for most of that three weeks of recovery.

My dad died on February 5, and I stopped reading again. The mountain of grief over all the year, combined with the lingering impact of chemo and radiation, again made it difficult to concentrate. Only since mid-summer have I slowly begun reading in a way that is more “normal” for me. The third stack, only slightly taller than the January one, represents the remaining eleven months of 2017. It is perhaps not as many books as previous years, but the balance of sacred and secular, the diverse categories and the tilt away from fiction much more closely resemble my normal patterns.

With the new year turned to 2018, it’s time to clear the shelf and start anew. Now that my health is restored and life in London has settled into a routine, I plan to return to my regular reading and reviews. Lest you be concerned, this last picture is my “to-be-read” shelf shelves, sitting right under these three completed piles. I’m hoping to read more and buy less in order to get them all fitting on one shelf by the time 2019 arrives. We’ll see.

Much like the year itself, with all its life-changing moments—much like my dad’s old snow hat in the picture, with all its attendant memories—I couldn’t let these books dissolve into the shelves without handling them one more time, marking their presence as companions through this year, and, yes, writing at least a little something about each one.

So, what will follow in the next couple of days will be two long posts, one fiction and one non-fiction, with mini-reviews of each book. (If you want to know more about any of the books pictured above, look there.)

After that, I hope I can happily place them in their appropriate places in my library. In the same way, after these book posts, I hope to start writing more regularly. I need to revisit so many episodes from this last year and write a little something about each one. It’s how I read and capture things in my memory —not just books, but my life.