The Flight: A Monthly Book Sampler (February 2021)

Rise has its own Bookshop.org storefront! Whenever possible, the links in The Flight will now send you there. Purchases made via those links support independent bookstores and allow Rise to earn a small amount of money. All money earned will be invested back into Rise’s mission to connect, equip and empower people to build a Church where women thrive. 

This is going to sound completely preposterous to those of you who don’t read a ton, but I always try to be honest here: I’m struggling to read this year. I’m really struggling to read non-fiction. I started the year planning to read 100 books. I’ve revised that down to somewhere around 80. It may drop even lower. We’ll have to see. I do have two goals/rules that I am determined to stick to. The first is to clear out my NetGalley ARC backlog. There are books that have been sitting there for nearly three years and I can feel them judging me every time I request a new book. The other is to read (roughly) equal amounts of fiction and non-fiction. 

I read way more fiction than non-fiction in January and it’ll take me a bit to even things out at the rate I’m going right now. So this month’s list leans more heavily towards non-fiction. I’m also struggling with pandemic brain, so this is going to be a particularly succinct post this month. (See also: why this is just going up in the middle of March.)

First up, it felt appropriate, during Black History Month, to read The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone. It’s a hard read, not because it’s difficult to comprehend or overly dense, but because of the amount of pain it encompasses. But it’s a book that I’d encourage white people to read and sit with. To acknowledge that evil and wanton cruelty of lynching, in particular, and systemic racism, in general, and to examine the ways that our theology has been impacted by them is vital work.

I grabbed the audiobook of Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other Essays one day when it was on sale and I’m very glad I did. It’s narrated by the author and it’s powerful to listen to her read these essays that, among other things, recount her lived experiences as a Black woman. As a side note, if you haven’t read it yet, you should also check out her fantastic essay about Dolly Parton, “The Dolly Moment”.

One of those NetGalley backlog books that I finally read was The Ministry of Ordinary Places: Waking Up to God’s Goodness Around You by Shannan Martin. It’s a deeply challenging, encouraging book. I’ve subscribed to her newsletter for years, so I had a decent idea of what to expect going in, but Martin shares the truth of her experiences and then hands her reader a sledgehammer to deal the final blow to the preconceived notions of ministry, place, love, and security that she's rendered unsustainable.

I wrote about Living Brave: Lessons from Hurt, Lighting the Way to Hope by Shannon Dingle in January 2020 when I first read the initial manuscript. I got to read the final version, which comes out in July, and I loved it even more. As I said last year, Shannon is one of my dearest friends and one of the fiercest, bravest women I know. This book is an absolute gift from someone who has survived more trauma and hardship than any one person should ever have to and come out the other side. 

I also got to read an advanced copy of my friend Elizabeth Garn’s upcoming book Freedom to Flourish. She looks at the first few chapters of Genesis and closely examines what they actually say and what that means for us- for our purpose as image-bearers, in contrast with what so many women have been taught in church. I especially appreciated her repeated acknowledgement of the many ways that these chapters and the erroneous interpretations of them have been weaponized against single women and used to shame and belittle. It’s a welcome and encouraging corrective to those harmful teachings.

Princeps’ Fury, the fifth book of Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series wasn’t quite as much fun as the previous instalments, and while there was a lot of important character and plot development, in some ways, it felt like a bit of a filler or holder book to get everything and everyone in place for the events of the final book. I still really enjoyed it and I started the final book right away, but you’ll have to wait for the March edition of The Flight to read about that.

The amount of literal and figurative ground that Rachel Caine covered in Ash and Quill was astonishing. These poor characters have been through so much trauma and their world is so messed up! And this was only the third of five books. I did not see the ending coming and I’m a little afraid to pick up the next book and see how it plays out. 

The Centaur’s Wife by Amanda Leduc was unlike anything I’ve read before - beautiful and strange and wondrous. It's a post-apocalyptic dystopian fairy tale where nature is somehow the villain and it's a study in how grief can warp us. It's baffling and comforting and familiar in its oddness. Absorbing and confusing and yet, hopeful in the end. (I’m linking to Amazon for this one because the book appears to be weirdly hard to find outside of Canada.)