A Few Good Books: October

Hellooooooo!  I’m linking up with Modern Mrs. Darcy again to share a few good books I’ve read in the last month or so.  This month is actually pretty stacked!  I’ve read eight books and six of them were share-worthy (and the other two probably would have been if it had been a different month)!  Yea for good books!

Here’s my two cents:

The Girls by Emma Cline

This was the book everyone was talking about this summer.  It’s a fictional story about a young girl in the sixties and her experience with a Charles Manson like cult.  I’d been warned by more than one person that the content matter was a little R rated.  I think maybe I’d been over-warned so that it was worse in my imagination.  I didn’t think it was that bad, but others might, so be aware.  Otherwise I thought it was a really intriguing story (which made me more interested in the real case that inspired it) and an overall good read.

Eligible by Curtis Sittinfeld

This modern day retelling of Pride and Prejudice came out this summer with a bit of fanfare.  I’ll admit that I’m not actually a huge Jane Austen fan (I know, I know, terrible).  But I LOVED this retelling.  It takes place in Cincinnati, involved a “Bachelor-esque” reality show and the Lizzy and Darcy of this story are just as endearing and delightful as Austen’s.  I loved this so much I sent it to a friend for her birthday.

Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton

I had been looking forward to this book for years, from when I first heard Glennon was writing a memoir about her marriage- the falling apart of it and the putting back together.  Melton is a writer I follow on social media and through her blog so I was interested in the full story behind the bits she’d shared in the past few years.  Plus, she’s one of my favorite teachers and so her wisdom on the topic of marriage seemed like a home run.  I was nervous when I found out, shortly before the book’s release, that her marriage had ended and she and Craig were separating.  I wondered if it would make whatever she shared in the book seem false, or not quite truthful.  Once I read the book though, the outcome of her marriage, a year or so after she finished writing, wasn’t actually relevant.  Melton goes there in this book- she’s more honest than she’s ever been- and this is a book about marriage and intimacy, porn, addiction and what happens when two really unhealthy people get married and then really deal with their unhealthiness.  I’m still thinking about this one and will be for quite a while.  It’s a book about marriage, but it’s really a book about what happens when you really and truly face your deepest junk and save yourself from it.  (Also, this is an Oprah book club pick, so it will be everywhere)

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

This needs to be required reading friends.  Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and works with people on death row.  This book is about a case Bryan worked with early on in his career, a man who had been wrongfully convicted of murder and subsequently placed on death row.  The injustice in this case caused my blood to boil and more than once I wondered how Bryan managed to keep his cool and continue to fight against what seemed like bold and outright injustice.  In between chapters on this case Bryan shares different aspects of injustice in our prison systems.  The section on mandatory life sentences for minors will have you outraged.  I can’t recommend it enough.  The writing is beautiful, Stevenson is so descriptive I kept thinking, this needs to be a screen play, someone has to turn this into a movie.  (Someone is and Michael B. Jordan is playing Stevenson.  Score.)

Very Married by Katherine Willis Pershey

I wasn’t trying to read a lot of books on marriage, it just sort of happened.  I’d heard some buzz about this book for a while now.  Pershey was on my radar as she’s a pastor of a church in the same town I once worked (in a church).  If Melton’s book is about the individual work that happens within a marriage, Pershey’s is much more a celebration about the work of togetherness that happens there.  I loved this memoir, deeply appreciated Pershey’s honestly and her voice.  I want very much to read more from her.

Honorable mentions this month: The Forgetting Time, Landline, and The Silkworm.  All were great, but this post has gotten too long for recaps of everything :).  I'm in the middle of the third book in the Cormoran Strike series, Career of Evil and I've got Hatching Twitter on deck.  What are you reading??

Lessons in Autumn

I wrote this essay two years ago now, the first fall after my dad's death.  For a variety of reasons I never published it.  Each year, as the season start to to change I think back on this essay and the little scraps of hope that came with it.  Today I noticed for the first time that the leaves on the parkway of our street were starting to turn yellow and red and I thought now might be the right time to share a lesson I learned a few years ago.  

I’m not a fall person.  I’m a summer girl.  I love everything about it.  The flip flops, the sundresses, the warmth, the sun, the general happiness in the air.  If I could live in summer year round I would do in a heart beat.  I don’t really get people who need seasons.  I’d be perfectly happy in San Diego.  Except that all my people are in the Midwest.

And in the Midwest we have fall.  And people here love fall for some reason.  I don’t get it, but without fail the Tuesday after Labor day brings out The Autumns.  The Autumns love fall, love Pumpkin Spice Lattes and boots, and most of all love reveling in the end of summer because it means fall is coming. 

And I don’t get it.

Once at a dinner party one of The Autumns started on about his excitement for fall and I kind of lost it.  “How can you like fall????  Fall is death.  Everyone goes on and on about how beautiful fall is but all those leaves are changing colors because they are dying!  Fall is just one slow death!” 

Later, he confessed to me that all fall he couldn’t look at the beautiful trees without thinking about death.

I felt kind of bad about that one.  I mean, I pretty much ruined an entire season for him.  It was not my finest moment.

This year, on this side of death, I anticipated feeling extra scroogey towards fall.  I’ve lived in the thick of winter for close to a year now and I didn’t need all those leaves changing color and reminding me of dying.  I have enough reminders.

But something funny happened this year.  I don’t know if it was because we had a particularly beautiful fall, or if it was precisely because I am on this side of death, having experienced it so intimately this year, but I found myself marveling at the beauty of fall these past few months.  I couldn’t help myself.  I’d be out walking with the kids and a tree would literally take my breath away.  Drives around town were fraught with  beautiful colors and trees in full bloom.  

I felt guilty at first.  I tried to shove down this acknowledgement of fall’s beauty.  But it kept coming.  I couldn’t stop marveling.   There was something about those beautiful trees.  It was like death wasn’t going down without a fight.  Yes, the leaves were dying and falling away, but they were going to die beautifully, damnit.  They weren’t going quietly.  They weren’t about to leave without bringing a final bit of beauty into the world.

Which of course made me think of my dad’s death.  When I looked, I saw the beauty in it.  His death was traumatic and shocking and so very painful.  But there was beauty, damnit.  There was beauty in the community of people who showed up and loved us immediately after his death and continued to care for us throughout this year.  There was beauty in the way it knit us closer.  And there was so much beauty in the tributes made to my dad.  For weeks after his death people told his stories, the stories of his beautiful life, the things that they loved about him and the ways that he had lived a good story.  It was death that wasn’t going down without a fight.  The beauty of his life wasn’t going away untold. 

And it’s in our love for him.  Our love for him and the ways we carry him with us and try to keep him alive bears witness to this notion of death not going down without a fight.  We speak his name and tell his stories so that in his death, his life still blooms boldly.  His legacy and his love is so deeply embedded in our hearts that he will not die quietly.  There is beauty and color in remembering him and what was so wonderful about his life.

And so maybe I’m changing my mind about fall.  Maybe I’m finding some beauty in the dying.  Or rather I respect the beauty in the dying.  We all die right?  But our legacies, our life’s work.  That’s not going down without a fight, without a final bloom of beautiful.