Wayward Bookshelf

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson Such a weird, moody, creepy (but still good!) book. Merricat Blackwood and her sister Constance live in their large family estate along with their invalid Uncle Julian. From the start the reader sees that Merricat has a very distinct voice, a unique perspective on the world, and a strong belief in her own power over it. For example, the book begins with: “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.” The sisters are mostly withdrawn from & unbothered by the world. Except of course on the

Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans This book was good for me to read, it was cathartic. I found myself getting unexpectedly emotional during it. So full disclosure, this review may get personal. You've been warned. Rachel opens the book with a mini-rant about how Christianity tends to laud early risers and sunrise devotional times, and how that doesn't leave many options for those of us who are not coherent in the morning hours - because obviously we're terrible. I knew this was one of my people, so I kept reading. Several times throughout the book, I felt my journey paralleled the author's a lot. Given the response to her blog, and this book, I'm sure I'm not alone in that. I grew up in a high-control church environment where I didn't feel I had space to ask questions, and after it was suggested to me by one of my leaders there that it may not have been a good fit for me anymore, I found a local college

Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much by Tony Crabbe This book is a bit of an outlier in my usual reading choices, but I don't call this blog the wayward bookshelf for nothing. I read where my interests follow.  So, I read this book as part of a professional development book club, and wasn’t sure what to expect going in. As it turned out, I really liked a lot of what Tony had to say, and some of the changes he recommends for improving our lives in a world that’s saturated with information. Some of my favorites are his push back on productivity & time management. These are business buzz words, and have been for a long time, but they don’t really work for us. Tony instead recommends managing attention and being strategic, and just in that reframing, there is already a loosening of long held ideas, a perspective that we can be effective and engage in our lives/careers in a different way. The tips presented are soundly based in psychological research, and well-documen

Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen Ok, this was the last of the Sarah Addison Allen books at my local library, so after this, I will go back to my regularly scheduled to-read list (- maybe, no promises). But hopefully some of you have been intrigued enough by how quickly I binged her books this summer to give one a try. Anyways, Lost Lake takes place in Louisiana, and follows Kate, a mom and recent widow who has just awoken from her grief to realize that her mother-in-law has been making a lot of decisions on her behalf while she was numb in her grief. She also realizes that these decisions may not be what she wants for her and her daughter Devin going forward. So when Devin finds an old postcard from Kate's Aunt Eby, the proprieter of a cabin campground called Lost Lake, she decides on a whim to take Devin there for a visit. Kate has fond memories of Lost Lake as the place she spent the happiest summer of her childhood, and hopes it will offer that to her daughter too. Upon a