This year, I read all but one of the books on my Books to Read in 2017 list. Spiritual Letters by Dom John Chapman is in progress (so it doesn’t have its checkmark yet), but I didn’t read The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. for the second year in a row, so it’s coming off the list for this year.
Overall, I read 167 books (just over 50k pages) over 2017, a pretty high share of which were from my local library, thanks to my Library Extension plug-in, that checks if any book I look at on Amazon is in the library system, so I can put it on hold.
I’m also amused to report that Goodreads told me both which book I read that was the most commonly read by other people (A Wrinkle in Time) and which book was read by only me, in all of Goodreads: The Oxford Movement in America: Or, Glimpses of Life in an Anglican Seminary. I found it in a used book store in Staunton, Virginia (during a trip to the American Shakespeare Center).
I like making a to-read list every year, not as a set of tasks to be accomplished, but as a way of giving myself permission to prioritize these books, that I might otherwise put off as I tackle other things. So, without further ado, here’s my 2018 list:
- (√) C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences — Various
- (√) An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace — Tamar Adler
- (√) The Baron in the Trees — Italo Calvino
- Grant — Ron Chernow
- (√) Middlemarch — George Eliot
- Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined — Michael Frame and Amelia Urry
- (√) The Shadow of His Wings: The True Story of Fr. Gereon Goldmann, OFM — Gereon Goldmann
- (√) Athens, Arden, Jerusalem — Kate Havard & Paul T. Wilford
- Notre Dame de Paris/The Hunchback of Notre Dame — Victor Hugo
- (√) Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World — Steven Johnson
- (√) Thy Will Be Done: Letters to Persons in the World — St. Francis de Sales
- (√) Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings — Maria Skobtsova
- (√) The Light of Christ — Fr. Thomas Joseph White
- The Vision of the Soul — James Matthew Wilson
- Disagreeing Virtuously — Olli-Pekka Vainio
This year, I’d like to try doing some daily spiritual reading (and there’s certainly enough here to fill a year), which leaves me with one small problem. I’m vegetarian, so I don’t fast from meat on Fridays (and other food-based practices haven’t worked well for me). I’ve taken on a special time of spiritual reading, but, if I’m doing it everyday, it doesn’t work so well as a Friday practice. Any suggestions for what I might take on instead?
Perhaps you could choose a special way to feast on the non-fast days. Not necessarily with food, but with something like a special soap or candle. On fast days, you give up this feasting. That way your fasting is brought to completeness through feasting.
Re: the Friday discipline, I’m also vegetarian and have tried (a) “fasting” from reading for pleasure on Fridays, which meant no reading that wasn’t for school/work (inspired by Lauren Winner’s discussion of the time she gave up leisure reading for Lent in Girl Meets God); this may have been spiritually fruitful but was so demanding that I couldn’t sustain it (b) observing the Ash Wednesday/Good Friday fast every Friday (also too demanding for me to sustain) and (c) giving up sweets every Friday, which I find workable and am doing now. I was a bit reluctant to adopt (c) because it seemed too much like a health thing to provide myself with a worldly benefit rather than a sacrifice to God, but I have enough of a sweet tooth that I think it is a real sacrifice.
We don’t eat meat a lot so no-meat Friday is lost on us as a spiritual discipline. We don’t drink alcohol on Fridays and that can be a sacrifice. The other thing we sometimes do is pray Compline together on Friday nights. If you already pray that at night, maybe adding some prayer (the Rosary, Divine Mercy Chaplet, etc.) to pray with Alexi. I like using communal (family) prayer because I tend to focus a bit better.
I got Fr. TJW’s book for Christmas. Very excited to start it!
Let me know if you want to book club it up with Fr. TJW’s book and check in after particular chapters!
I would love that!
Substitute Friday penances are great. (Chocolate is always a surprisingly hard one for me.) Television? Fiction? Music? Secular music? Using the microwave? Jaywalking (again)? I’ll tweet you more as I think of them, if you like. I especially favor penances that are essentially a mortification of my will. So, for example, map out a few of these onto a numbered list and roll a die (of appropriate # of sides) so the decision each Friday is out of your hands.
Also, I might be interested in a book club (or even just a well-timed chat) about Disagreeing Virtuously. I read another book on the subject last year, for OTL, and realized how profoundly uncomfortable I find disagreement on important subjects (like most everyone else these days), and how thoroughly I believe (even though intellectually I deny this) that, if others only *understood* things better, they’d think as I do. I’m extremely nonconfrontational — partly out of natural disposition, partly out of awareness of the damage that’s been done by overly confrontational Christians — and I want to be able to be better at that, at having hard conversations and being ok with disagreements.
Oooh man, I do hate giving up jaywalking. Doing that + Gospel reading might be a really good call.
Do you want to plan a month to read Disagreeing Virtuously together?
may it all add up to a Very Happy New Year……
or keep adding chocolate
Thank you, Dorothy!
Yes! I would love to read it together. I just have no idea what month, except not January or February.
I’ll set a reminder to think of this in March then 🙂
Praying the stations of the cross might be a good Friday practice.
I’m curious about your vegetarianism. Is that something recent? What prompted to to give up meat entirely?
I’ve been a vegetarian since I was little (5 or 6). I’m a picky eater (particularly around textures) and I really hate eating meat. I’ve checked every now and then, and I still hate it. If I ever wanted to eat meat, I’d think more about the ethics of what to eat, but for me it’s irrelevant.
Oh. I feel the same way about the texture of coconut.
I’m shocked you’ve not read “The Intellectual Life” having spent so much time around the Dominicans and being such a voracious reader. It was probably *the* most formative book I read in college, and have a hard time imagining other people go longer in life without it. Hope it gets back on your list soon!
You must read the Intellectual Life
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A suggestion is to fast completely on fridays. Have you tried it?
I’m not inclined to, because I tend not to feel hungry (and thus need to work on remembering to eat) so skipping meals is more of a problem for me.
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[…] year was not a very good year for my “Books to Read in 2018” list, with five of my fifteen books unread. On the other hand, I got to read Middlemarch (for the […]