We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Written by Karen Joy Fowler, this novel is not one of my favorites. Yet I had to read it in its entirety just to get the full story. It is informative, accomplished, and devastating. Rosemary Cooke is the narrator telling us of her family. Psychologist father, mother, brother Lowell, sister Fern. They live in a college town where her father conducts behavioral experiments with a steady stream of grad students. Then something awful happens and Rosemary's family is never the same. We enter the story in her college years as she looks back on the events that shattered their lives. Her father is now distant, her mother simply a shell of her former lively self, her brother wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. And Fern? Rosemary hasn't seen her since she was five and she is horrified to learn her fate.

The book is good; the subject matter serious. A lot of discussion of animal testing; mind your triggers.

The Sweetness of Forgetting

A novel by Kristen Harmel, this was an unexpectedly historically informative book and a run-of-the-mill romance at the same time. It has a Gallery Readers Group Guide: from the introduction;

"To say that Hope McKenna - Smith's life hasn't turned out quite the way she planned would be an understatement. At thirty-six, she's a law school dropout, a divorcee, the owner of a nearly - bankrupt bakery in a Cape Cod tourist town, and the caretaker of her beloved, Alzheimer's - stricken grandmother, Mamie. When Mamie suddenly presents Hope with a list of names and urges her to travel to Paris to find these mysterious strangers, Hope nearly dismisses the request as yet another one of her grandmother's delusions. But when she decides to take a chance on the unknown, Hope embarks on a trip of a lifetime; one that will take her both through Mamie's haunted past and through her own journey of self - discovery."

The book includes recipes. It also includes storylines referencing Alzheimer's disease and the Holocaust, so mind your triggers!

Spiritual Passages

The Psychology of Spiritual Development. By Benedict J. Groeschel, this is a fascinating, insightful work. The cover states it is "For Those Who Seek", and it is an excellent place to start that journey.

The first part of the book deals with the psychology of spirituality: the call of God and how Christian is one's spirituality? It then moves into understanding development: human, religious, and spiritual. Finally, there is a chapter on psychology and spirituality together.

Part two deals with a psychological understanding of the three ways of the spiritual life: purgation, illuminative, and unitive. Finally, there's a chapter on how to take the the next good step, no matter where you are in your spiritual life. An appendix is included about the history of the doctrine of the three ways.

I read this as part of my morning devotions: in chunks. I look forward to reading it again in regular flow with a highlighter in hand, and to look up some of the authors in Father Groeschel's extensive notes, especially on prayer. Illuminating work and hard work to get through. Not a light read. But if you want to understand yourself both psychologically and spiritually, this is the place to start.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

This delightful novel is written by Maria Semple. The format makes for easy reading; it is a jumble of emails and letters. Bernadette Fox was once a renowned architect, but disappeared with her husband to Seattle and hasn't created for twenty years. She is a curmudgeonly recluse, her husband is a workaholic for Microsoft, and their daughter Bee loves them both madly. Bee has made perfect grades at her school and for a prize she asks for a family trip to Antarctica. It's all downhill from there. Highly recommended for the importance of family and creativity in one's life.

The End of the Affair

A novel by Graham Greene, I have long wanted to read this. It did not disappoint. Maurice Bendrix is an author in war-torn England, conducting an adulterous love affair with Sarah Miles. After an especially close bomb blast that leaves Bendrix dead, Sarah makes a hasty vow to a God neither of them believe in.  Bendrix comes back to her and that is the end of the affair. He knows nothing of her vow; only that he loved and lost. He begins to hate her. Henry Miles, Sarah's husband, comes to him for advice one day. Sarah is acting strangely, could she be having an affair? (Henry is quite obtuse.) Bendrix's hate for both of them leads him to answer uncharitably. Henry has the name of a detective agency; he burns it, but later Bendrix follows up. God. He has lost Sarah to God. How do you compete with someone you don't believe in? But Sarah believes and that is enough. He begins to hate God.

Bendrix is the narrator and states near the beginning of the book, "So this is a record of hate far more than of love..." It is actually a record of struggle. Mankind's struggle against "the hound of Heaven". The only Lover who counts pursues us until, gasping, we stop running and realize He had only the best in mind for us after all. This is a record of hope. It is one of Greene's best.

Life After Life

Written by Kate Atkinson, I considered abandoning this novel several times before I finally struggled through it. It is not in my character to close a book mid-stream. This novel just didn't appeal to me, though it came recommended.

Ursula Todd is born on a snowy February night in 1910. She is born dead. Yet, she is born on that night crying loudly and long, soon the picture of health. And so it continues. Ursula meets her end in a variety of ways; returns to that snowy night of 1910, and begins again. She is troubled with a sense of deja vu; so much so that her parents take her to see a psychiatrist. She goes to extremes to preserve her life, though she doesn't know that is what she is doing. She only feels she must do something to decrease the intense dread and anxiety building up. However, each decision changes the malleable past and there's more to keep track of, to "plan" for in the next go-round.  It's not true reincarnation, and it's not true time travel; it's more like "Groundhog Day" on a grand scale. The book ends where it begins: February, 1910. We're not left with any hope that Ursula got off her cosmic merry-go-round. I generally despise books with no hope. The premise is interesting and Atkinson followed it well; perhaps converting Ursula to a religion would have stopped the eternal carousel and given us all some hope in closure.

No Trace of Christmas?

Discovering Advent in the Old Testament. This is a slim but packed book written in German by Christoph Dohmen and translated into English by Linda M. Maloney. Much of the imagery and many of the Biblical texts we associate with Advent and Christmas can only be understood in their full depth in the light of their Old Testament roots. I read this book as Advent reading this year; it was so thought - provoking that I slowed down and stretched it through the Christmas season. It is less than a hundred pages, yet delves deeply into the Old Testament to find the basis of Advent. St. Jerome once said, "Not to know Scripture is not to know Christ." He was not speaking of the New Testament. This little book is a good place to begin at the beginning of the Liturgical year.