Required Reading

It's Spring Break (finally!), and I have an overly ambitious reading list. To which I will permit myself to attend once my term grades are finished. At this rate - and now that I've trimmed it a little - I've got to read about a book per day - ambitious indeed! But I think I will plan to spend a couple days at the beach, which will make for good reading time.

Tea With Hezbollah, Ted Dekker

The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran

Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton

The Four Loves, CS Lewis

Miracles, CS Lewis

Up in the Air, Walter Kirn

Atonement, Ian McEwan

To Own a Dragon, Donald Miller

The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

I know I've poo-poohed CS Lewis and his fiction for so long, but now I want to read some of his apologetics. Some of these books have lingered on my to-read list for so long, others are first-in-first-outs. Such is the nature of my bookcase. And with the gigantor Alachua-County book sale coming up this month, I'd be doing well to get some of these read before I inevitably buy more.

I've been doing a lot of just-in-time reading lately. I'll pick up a book, read a few pages, and then have occasion touse what I read in conversation not a day or so later. Today, another interesting synchronicity. Almost two years ago, I heard a a reading at the wedding of two friends - part of which I made note in my notebook. I always intended to ask them what it was from but never did (and I see them all the time!), and my paraphrasing didn't help me google it. After an emphatic recommendation, I requested delivery of The Prophet from the library. It arrived today. I slipped it out of the envelope and opened it to casually flip through it, when right there, on the first page I open, in the middle of the page, is the very passage I noted at the wedding:

"And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course."