Several years ago I joined a men’s book group, an activity I’d never tried before. I should have done so much sooner! It’s been a rewarding experience for many reasons, one being my introduction to books I was unlikely to encounter on my own. Our current book falls into this category: Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of …
I have just finished reading J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone . This series follows the life of Harry Potter, a boy who lost his parents at a very young age to a wizard named Voldemort who went as bad as you could go. Raised by the worst muggles (non-magic folk) imaginable, Harry …
On my Kindle (something I first tried by borrowing one from the H-L Library), I’ve just finished American Grace by Robert Putnam (a Harvard prof) and David Campbell (a Notre Dame prof). It’s a fascinating book that examines religion in America with all our diversity, tolerance, or lack thereof. Based on extensive surveys and research, …
Continue reading “Heather Hietala, Director of Stewardship Programs”
This is a book about the true story of a psychiatrist who helps a woman with severe anxiety problems via past-life therapy but the book is so much more than that. If you have ever lost someone, it is a must read, it changed my outlook on life and death dramatically. It is one of …
In Left To Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, Immaculee Ilibagiza recounts her survival of the Rwandan Genocide in a bathroom with seven other women for 91 days. Through all the hardships she experienced, Ilibagiza was able to do what rarely anyone can: forgive. Throughout the book, we see Ilibagiza’s spiritual journey in order …
I’m just finishing Nobel laureate Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. For years now I‘ve been aware that I missed reading this book in it’s feminist heyday and so finally came to it as a way of revisiting a period I lived through as a student some fifty years ago; it does feel like a historical …
I have been reading Life, the autobiography of Keith Richards, the leader of the Rolling Stones. On the cover Keith says: “This is the life. Believe it or not I haven’t forgotten any of it.” I have enjoyed this book for two reasons. On the one hand, it speaks to me very personally: Keith and …
I’m reading book 19 of a series of 24 . The book title is Wisconsin!. It is the Wagon’s West Series by Dana Fuller Ross from 1987. It is fiction. The book is about how people struggled leaving the east and going by wagon train to the west and setting up there to start new …
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions for Writing and Life by Anne Lamott is a wonderful book that enveloped me quickly in Lamott’s comforting, yet realistic, advice, and sharp, unassuming tone. As the title suggests, Lamott shares a lot of shrewd opinions about the writing process and both heart-wrenching and humorous experiences she’s had as a …
The Monster of Florence: A True Story by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi has to be one of the most riveting books I have ever read. Douglas Preston is a successful crime novel writer, but this book is a very real account of Preston’s first hand experiences while researching a string of unsolved murder stretching …