What I Read During My May Vacation

While I was on vacation, I said to my sister, "This may be the last time I can read for pleasure."  We had been talking about my seminary journey, so I didn't mean it to sound as apocalyptic as it sounds a week later when I type that sentence.

I still have the whole summer to read, and I'm aware that the MDiv program may not preclude pleasure reading the way that my PhD in English did.  But still, this last time at a resort by a different part of the Atlantic felt like the last time I will read for pleasure.

So, did I bring the kind of novel that I expect not to have time to read in the near future?  No, it didn't come to the library in time.  I had planned to read Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future.  It's 563 pages, and I often need a vacation time to tackle a book like that.  But maybe I can plan for a Memorial Day week-end reading fest.

Instead, I read a variety of books.  For my certificate in spiritual direction certificate program, I needed to finish The Enneagram:  A Christian Perspective by Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, so that work wove its way through the week.  My spouse showed some interest, and I wanted to know what Enneagram number(s) he would assign to himself and to me.  We had some interesting conversations.

I did read one work of fiction, but it didn't take me very long:  Jhumpa Lahiri's Whereabouts.  It's a book for which the word "spare" was invented.  I find my thoughts returning to it, even though as I zipped through it, I thought that I wasn't finding it very compelling.

I read another book that was similarly slender of pages, but deep in content:  Anne Lamott's Dusk Night Dawn:  On Revival and Courage.  I rarely buy her books anymore, since until this one, a lot of her later books seemed similar to me.  But even in their similarity, I enjoy visiting the books again.

This latest book of Lamott's feels different:  less angry, approaching the spiritual stuff from a different angle.  Perhaps that's because the book deals with the navigations that come with a new marriage--and this marriage is one between people who are not teenagers.

Here's one of my favorite parts of this book:  "Most of these prophets were introverts.  Jesus definitely was.  He's never really doing all that much, if you think about it.  He doesn't even tell His own stories.  He'd be fired from most churches today.  He's in a world of great fear, there's evil, violence, and need all around him, so He often finds He needs time along--in silence, in the desert, on the mountain, on the beach, beneath the stars--to get strong and patient enough to go back and face Peter's lame and endless questions for the tenth time:  'Is now when we get to be in charge?  Is now when we take over?'"

I was most thrilled to be able to get Mark Bittman's latest book from the library and relatively quickly.  A book with the title Animal, Vegetable, Junk:  A History of Food from Sustainable to Suicidal is not one that we might associate with vacation reading, but it was great.  In some ways, it didn't tell me much that I didn't already know on some level.  But it gave me depth and perspective.

It was less about the individual types of food we eat, but more about how the food is produced.  In other words, it wasn't a diet book or a nutrition book, but it was a deep dive into agriculture practices.  I realize that's not everyone's idea of a fun vacation read, but I enjoyed it thoroughly.

What I enjoyed most about my vacation reading is that I read more on paper, less on pixels.  I had the chance to do some deep reading in a way that I don't when I'm at home where there are so often chores to do and a variety of work for pay that needs doing.

And speaking of work for pay, it's time to get ready to return to the office.  I've been reading e-mails once or twice a day when I've been away; in some ways, it's easier than returning to the office to sort through so many e-mails with a rising sense of dread.