Book Club this month

One. If you aren't coming to book club, you should consider it. We have a blast and it is a great mind improvement activity. You know, if you're into that sort of thing.

Two. Read Hannah Coulter. Seriously. I loved it. And I read it in three days. (And I have a 3 year old, a 22 month old and a 1 month old, so you can read it.)


Have you ever read a book written as if by a woman narrator and the author is a MAN, but you wonder. Hmmm. How did he peg womanhood so spot on? How can HE know that?

Wendell Berry talks about the membership of the small town where this book takes place. Membership is like community, but we don't have many (or any?) instances of this in our present time. Or place. Is this something that can only occur in a country or rural setting? Where everyone has needs? Or do we urbanites also have needs? Think about your own independence and what it does to community. Port William was a place of Knowledge. Love. Compassion. Imagination.

"Kindness kept us alive. It made us think of each other. I could think of myself, of course, with no trouble at all. Justly enough, I could feel sorry for myself. I was a young wife who had been married going on four years, and I had not yet lived a full year with my husband. And now perhaps, possibly, very likely, almost certainly, my husband was dead. Perhaps, possibly, very likely, almost certainly, I was a widow with child by a man now dead, and this child of my love living inside me had become half an orphan before it could be born. . . .
Love held us. Kindness held us. We were suffering what we were living by."

Marriage. Hannah talks about how her marriage was long enough to have the troubles that the vows foresaw. That often their own sense of loneliness drove them into arguments. For it was better to at least be talking mad than not talking at all. And do husbands really think, if you can't get her hot, get her mad? It reminds me of God talking to His people and telling us to be either hot or cold, but don't be lukewarm. Apathy is the surest killer of faith and marriage. And possibly many other things.