A Few Good Books: January

In an effort to continue the good reading habits I got into last year, I’m trying to regularly post with Modern Mrs. Darcy’s Quick Lit linkups this year.  I’ll share all the books I read each month and talk a bit more in depth about the best two or three.  And so, without further ado-January in books:

What I read:

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bolton

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Very Good Gospel by Lisa Sharon Harper

Space at the Table by Brad and Drew Harper

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

The very best thing I read this month was The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.  It was on every best of book list last year and won a ton of awards and I understand why.  It imagines the underground railroad as an actual railroad system with conductors and station masters but that actually isn’t what the book is about.  It follows a slave on her escape from the deep south up north.  It was fascinating and eye opening and made me realize how much I don’t know about slavery.  We learn the sanitized version in elementary school and that’s usually it.  I want to find some more books on the topic this year.  Also, it was interesting to me to get a better understanding of just how hard it was to oppose slavery in the deep south.  I could write a whole separate post about this but it was sobering to realize that it wasn’t until they got further up north that I could recognize myself in the allies and abolitionists.  To be so in the deep south required more bravery than I may have possessed.  It’s easy to say I would have been the kind of person to help slaves to safety through the underground railroad, but this book opened my eyes to exactly what that kind of risk demanded.  It was harder than our elementary school teachers made it seem.  This will likely go on my list of lifetime required reading.

Space at the Table by father and son Brad and Drew Harper surprised and captivated me.  I heard it mentioned in passing on a podcast I was listening to while en route to the library.  On a whim I looked to see if they had it and they did, so I picked it up while I was there.  It is a conversation between a conservative Evangelical Christian father and his gay son.  They shared their story of Drew’s childhood, coming out and young adulthood, along the way humbly and vulnerably giving the reader a glimpse into the mistakes they made along the way as they grappled with what this truth about Drew and the ways it conflicted with some core Evangelical beliefs meant for their family.  I didn’t always agree with some of the beliefs the father, Brad, held, but I could not deny the deep love, respect and grace they had for and with each other.  They had found a beautiful peace with each other and themselves, and I very much appreciated the hard won truths they shared about a way forward.  It was honest and grace-filled and I was thankful to have picked it up on a whim

Hatching Twitter is the story of the creation of Twitter.  It was engrossing, eye-opening and entertaining.  I had no idea there was so much drama involved in the hatching of that little blue bird.  In The Very Good Gospel Harper rethinks how we define the Gospel and widens the scope to a Gospel that is good for everyone.  And A Fatal Grace is the second in the Inspector Gamache series which I’m slowly making my way through.  I placed an accurate bet on the murderer early on, but Penny still managed to surprise me by the end.

So that’s January in books.  I’m loving what I’ve read in February so far, so I’ll have some good stuff to share next month.  What’s the best thing you read last month??