Earlier this year, I finished an audiobook of Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff.

Overall, I loved this book. Doucleff details how various ancient cultures parent their children and how we in the western world can implement some of these ideas to raise well-behaved, helpful children. It was fascinating to dive into these cultures and their bents toward the “it takes a village” model of parenting. A lot of it is extremely helpful, especially the concept of including children in the family as productive, important members, even as babies. 

Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot was my favorite book from 2023. In a collection of letters Elliot wrote to her then newly-engaged daughter, Valerie, Elliot tackles the question “what is a woman?” What she means is, “who am I?” and to answer it, she first askes, “Whose am I?”

I’ve been listening to the Percy Jackson book series on audiobook and suddenly, I’m 14-year-old Kayley in love with 15-year-old Percy Jackson again.

This book list overview is very late - I got engaged in October of 2021 and in a lot of ways, life stilled as much as it picked up. In the chaos of the planning, I confess I lost my love of reading and writing there for a minute.

The Road is a deeply depressing book that still provides beacons of hope; the story bestows a heaviness that comes with a true understanding of brokenness. The burden is too much to bear.

Not having to read for school is wonderful.

I always forget this feeling until I have it again, and now that I’m finished with school for good (well, at least for the next few years...I’ve been floating the idea of seminary but I’m not fully sold just yet), the possibility of reading whatever I want, whenever I want, is both intoxicating and overwhelming. So. Much. To. Read.

A Short Review/Annotation of Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott

The only other book I’ve read by Anne Lamott was Bird by Bird, which is wonderful, but I had no idea how powerful, thought-provoking, and wonderful her fiction writing was.

Andrew Klavan is one of my favorite authors, speakers, and political commentators. I listen to his podcast, aptly named The Andrew Klavan Show, weekly (I used to listen daily, but he’s slowly retiring, and has switched his show to once a week). I stumbled upon his young adult novels as a teenager (and I’ve just recently started them again!), when I found them on the shelves of the only Christian book store my mom would let me buy books from. Years later when I first started dating Tucker, he suggested Klavan’s podcast, and I’m ashamed to admit that it took me a few months to connect the podcast host to one of my favorite author’s as a teenager. I think it’s the way he spells his name (that’s a Klavan-inside-joke for fellow fans).

As my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia, A Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis provides more insight into writing from the perspective of a child without losing profundity and power that I hadn’t realized until reading it for the nth time late last year. Lewis is a master at this endeavor in general, writing for all audiences in a way that neither panders nor overreaches.

I recently read My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul. As the first official biblio-memoir that I’ve read, I must say I’m inspired but not impressed.

My sister recently won $2,600 in her first trip to a casino with her boyfriend and his mom. His mom had given her $200 to play with, consenting to the possibility that it could all be gone within the hour. Having never gambled myself, reading Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler gave me new insight into something she told me about the experience.

I read 30 books in 2020, a large part in thanks to being quarantined for most of it, and here’s my list! Now I get to make a new one… :-)

A special thanks to all who helped me achieve this goal:

I’m only 9 books away from my 2020 goal of reading 30 books before the end of the year! I was going to write this little update when I had 10 left, because milestones make more sense in 5’s or 10’s, but I’m just an overachiever I guess (I’m not, that was sarcasm).

MFK Fisher’s Consider the Oyster is a collection of essays about, you guessed it, oysters. How to eat them, when to eat them, where to find them, what to eat them with - all things oyster, Fisher covers. The book as a whole wasn’t my favorite, especially because I am not a huge fan of oysters, but Fisher’s beautiful and surprising sentence structure kept me hooked.

Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being has been sitting atop my bookshelf for too long, so I was excited to finally read this book; she did not disappoint. I was inspired to take her writing methods and use them as revision exercises in my own writing.

I’ve never been much of a poetry reader - I find myself too insecure to dive into what I know is a wealth of beauty and wisdom. Strangely, the ambiguity of Emily Dickinson’s poetry gives me confidence to read it. She packs each line with multiple meanings, often contradictory meanings, and most of them tackle the concepts of God and the afterlife, two of the most ambiguous and strange topics I’ve had the pleasure of thinking about.

I’ve read a lot of books in the last few months – most amazing, some just eh, and I figured I’d write reviews on a few of my favorites. I read My Name is Asher Lev last fall and it remains pretty far up on my list of “highly recommended” books.