Winter Reading List

Usually as summer approaches, there is quite a buzz about what folks are putting on their summer reading list. I wonder if the tradition stems from the days when it was much more popular to lay out in the sun all day to work on your tan. As a person who burns at the mere mention of the sun, that trend never caught on with me. For me, summers are more interactive, whether I am interacting with friends and family at a party, or interacting with store clerks as I browse up and down the block, or even interacting with a good movie. (Now there's a summer trend I like: the great movies).
Back to the approaching winter. Once the holidays are over we still need to get through January and February. Cuddling up with a good book might be as close to hibernation as we can get. Between the physical complications of mixing snow and ice with getting around on crutches, and the cold, decreased daylight, and my own decreased energy, I am hardly out and about during the winter.
Enter the winter reading list. It just so happens that right at the beginning of December my local library has a used book sale. Twenty dollars lands me more books than I can read in a year, let alone a season.
This year, I have quite a few classics on my list. Jane Austin, CS Lewis, maybe even some Tolstoy, or Dante's Inferno. I also hope to get to a few more contemporary pieces, Like Running with Scissors, The Year of Magical Thinking, and I Know This Much Is True.
What's on your winter reading list?

Changing Media

I use Google Reader to keep up with all the blogs I like to read on a regular basis. I love how easy it is even to catch up even when miss a few days. One of the things I've noticed is that it has drastically cut down on the number of comments I leave for my fellow bloggers. The extra click-throughs pull me away from my main reading page, and I always mean to get back to leaving the comments, I just never do. Obviously, I've yet to find a solution to this problem other than to stop being so lazy.
On another note, I recently heard that a few more Christian magazines are set to cease publication. Periodicals are fast disappearing from the market. They just can't compete with the Internet in terms of cost effectiveness and accessibility. I just can't help but think of the value that I'm losing though. I reference magazines all the time and reread material all the time. Even if articles are archived online, I'm hardly going to get out of bed to look it up when my evening devotional or book triggers an association. Disappointing.
As if I wasn't feeling old enough, this weekend I've been trying to decipher applications for Twitter and all the features of GIMP. I was part of the original computer generation, but I feel like I'm falling further and further behind.

Lost In Translation

I just finished the book The Princess Bride. Of course, I've seen the movie dozens of times. Normally, I like to read the book before I see the movie. But I started watching The Princess Bride in college when I didn't have much time to read for fun.
At any rate I was very impressed with how well the story translated between the two mediums. Even elements of the narrator's voice seemed to be portrayed to some extent both in the book and the movie. The humor, tone, and style did not suffer in either method of telling the story.
Contrast that with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Hilarious book. Mildly entertaining BBC TV depiction from what I saw. The movie released a couple of years ago was simply awful. It was just not funny. So much of what made the book work was the voice of the narrator and the movie version just wasn't able to convey the same nuances. Sure, they changed elements of the story but that wasn't the problem. It just didn't feel like the same story without the voice of the author.
Words convey information and tell stories. But it's more than that. Who is telling the words and in what context is important. How the words are shared is also important. Tone and style really make a difference in effective storytelling, and effective communication for that matter.

Assorted Thoughts

Normally when I come back from a conference I take a day or two to metabolize all the information that was presented. So that's why I did not post yesterday as I usually try to do on Mondays. I'm still pretty lost in my head, so this isn't going to be the organized reflection I was hoping to write. I toyed with the idea of just posting the word salad in my brain and asking you to make sense of it, but I decided to try to make it a little more put together than that.

• My brother says social networking applications are basically a big time sink. To some extent, I agree; but we all need a bit of something to sink our free time into now & again. Today I read an article on reasons to Twitter. Two reasons stuck out for me. One is that you are limited to posts of 140 characters. It forces you to write tightly. The other reason is it also forces you to think about what you do on a more "moment by moment" basis. Twittering puts your daily activities in a virtual fishbowl. So might the "time sink" actually lead to better choices for how to spend your time?
• A quote I heard at the conference this weekend "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist." This really resonates with me & I've shared it with a few people which has led to some great discussion. Maybe I'll post more about it later.
• I'm re-reading Walking On Water by Madeline L'Engle. If you follow this blog at all, you know it's one of my favorite books. Every time I read it, I get a new insight. Last night I read how artistic choices are choices of love. Both love and art are creational (is that a word?) and relational. And at times, confrontational. She says, "In a day when we are taught to look for easy solutions, it is not easy to hold on to that most difficult one of all, love." Later, she speaks of writing a novel as a risky venture many of us would step away from when it "demands a conscious falling through the window, a journey through the looking glass." Yes, I can see the connection between art and relationships.

Self Care

The topic of self care has come up a lot this week. Of course, when I hear the same theme pop up in various contexts, I start to pay attention. I guess that's a good thing because I've been having a bit of trouble in this area this week. Come to think of it, my usual rule is to pay attention when I hear something three times, and I've heard about self care at least three times three times this week!

Suggestions for managing stress have ranged from jumping off a building, to ignoring the stressors, to making an artist date for refilling the creative well. While I think I'll skip the first idea, I have come to the conclusion that intentionality is key in self care, no matter what route you take. It used to be that I could just unwind by vegging in front of the TV or putzing around at anything in general. It's not that easy anymore. When did relaxing start to be so much work?

Part of the problem is that I can't take much vacation these days, and as of late my time off is not as sacred to others as it is to me.

So on the one hand, intentionality takes more effort, especially since I really want my down time to be quality time. On the other hand, I've learned that intentionality can turn a lot of every day things into acts of self care. It's not that much more effort to take a bath than it is to take a shower, and catching up on emails is not so much a chore as it is a chance to communicate with friends. As I was telling some friends the other day, "We all have dinner pretty much every day. It's the candles and flowers that help turn it into a date."

If all that fails to work, buy books. Lots and lots of books.

FYI

About a year ago, I posted a Tuesday Top Ten of the current most played songs on my ipod. My hope was that in a few months, that would change. The bottom two songs on the list have been replaced by U2's Grace, and The Edge of Water by Jars of Clay. Otherwise the list remains entirely unchanged. This is probably not a good thing.
I made some changes to the playlist on my blog. Thanks to the addition of some Veggietales music, it's a little lighter than it was before. And I fixed it so it doesn't automatically play when someone logs into the blog.
I've also joined a meme with Christian Women Online. So look for my Thursday Thirteens on a range of topics. And please suggest some topics if you have any ideas.
Since I have Shelfari, I've stopped listing my current read and my current music. For the record, I want to say I just finished reading The Captive Princess by Wendy Lawton. Wendy has crafted a wonderful story and has managed to shake me out of a fairly significant reading slump. Thanks Wendy!

13 Books I Want To Read

1. The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
2. Inferno, Dante
3. Crime and Punishment, Feodor Dostoyevsky
4. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
7. Come Be My Light, Mother Teresa
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
11. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
12. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
13. Confessions, St Augustine