The Flight: A Monthly Book Sampler (September 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.
Hello, friends. It’s been a while! This unplanned 5-month break has been good and necessary, but I’ve missed telling you about the books I’m reading. In order to make The Flight more sustainable, my fellow book nerd and Rise board member, Holly Dowell, is going to become a regular contributor. We haven’t worked out the exact cadence yet, but I’m very excited for her to join me in celebrating wonderful books in this space. Plus, we have different tastes in books, so you’ll get to read about books that aren’t necessarily on my radar.
Since I’ve been gone for so long and it would be completely ridiculous for me to try to tell you about every single book I’ve read since the end of April - with a lot of pandemic-related closures and restrictions still in effect here, four of the last five months have been double-digit book months - I’m going to try to pick my top ten of the last few months and just tell you a little bit about each one.
First up is This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks Into Our Darkness by Sarah Clarkson. I’ve been following 3 of the 4 Clarkson siblings on social media for years (and I recently started following the 4th). They’re some of my favourite follows and I’ve been deeply touched by each of their work. Earlier this year, I started referring to them as 21st century mystics - perhaps not entirely accurate, but it gives you an idea of what their work is like. After reading This Beautiful Truth, I think I’m going to need to add a new life rule: read everything they write. Sarah Clarkson comes alongside her reader and gently lifts their chin, pulling their gaze from the depths up to the light. In her gentle but fervent way, Clarkson reminds us of the power of beauty, of its Source, and of our need for it. This is the kind of book that you reread every year, struck afresh by the goodness and encouragement crammed into its pages. I was already crying at the first chapter. I sent multiple screenshots to friends. I was a little mad when I got to the end because I didn’t actually want it to be over.
Second is Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by the author, and I think it may be the richer experience. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and an environmental scholar. The book weaves together both Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing and understanding the world and it’s really quite extraordinary.
Third on my list is Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength by Kat Armas. I loved this book. The way Armas has interwoven her own story and the stories of her abuela and other marginalized women with the stories of women in Scripture is enlightening and eye-opening. Abuelita Faith reminds us, especially those of us who are white in the West, that theology is being done on the ground in communities all around us and it's just as true and just as powerful (and sometimes more so) as the theology being done in the academy or from the pulpits of our churches. It points us to the need to widen our perspective, to decolonize our ways of thinking about the world and our faith. Armas has given her reader a powerful exploration of the absolutely vital fact that if the Gospel we're preaching isn't actually good news for those on the margins, for the poor single mother, for the widow, for the struggling immigrant, then it's not truly the Gospel.
Fourth is Wintering:The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. I don’t actually remember hearing about this book or placing a hold on my library’s copy, but then one day in July, I got an email that my hold was ready for pickup. I’m so very glad that I decided my past self must’ve known what she was doing and picked it up. It’s an incredibly honest, frank, beautiful, and poignant memoir. The publisher’s blurb for the book says, “A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.” Even though I read it in the middle of summer, I was feeling so overwhelmed by the pandemic and everything that’s come with it, that I was desperately feeling the need to rest and this really was a perfectly timed read.
The fifth book on my summer list is The Bright and Breaking Sea by Chloe Neill. I read it in just a couple days & I absolutely loved it. Great characters, a fast-moving plot, fast ships, fierce and flawed women, arrogant men being put in their place, and just a bit of magic. It’s set in an alternate timeline in, essentially, the Napoleonic era, which is always a fun period to play in. This may be my favourite novel so far this year. I’m really looking forward to the sequel, A Swift and Savage Tide, which comes out at the end of November.
Book number six is On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, and the Gifts of Neurodiversity by Daniel Bowman, Jr. I'm very grateful to him for writing this book, for offering his reader these glimpses into what his life is like as an autistic man. For painting a picture of how his autism impacts his roles as father, husband, professor, friend, and Christian. The honesty and vulnerability that he demonstrates are extremely generous. There's so much here to learn, especially for those who don't have friends or family members that are autistic. I can't think of a priest or pastor who wouldn't benefit from careful consideration of "Community, Worship, and Service", the section on autism and church and faith. I'd love to see Bowman Jr. expand "The Insidious Nature of Bad Christian Stories", my favourite essay, into a full-length book. I very much appreciated his insights and hope he revisits the topic in the future. He references Katherine May and her work a couple times over the course of the book and having just finished Wintering, I was delighted to see her name crop up. The two authors had a fascinating conversation hosted by Image Journal to celebrate the release of On the Spectrum and you can watch it here.
Seventh is A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle. It’s the first of the four Crosswicks Journals written at her home, Crosswicks, in upstate New York. It’s been on my TBR and my Kindle app for years, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it yet, despite my love of L’Engle and the numerous books of hers that I’ve read. Then Joy Clarkson (sister to the aforementioned Sarah) chose it as the book for her Patreon summer book club and I was delighted. I was even more delighted once I got into the book. First published in 1971, it was written over the course of a summer that L’Engle spent at Crosswicks with multiple generations of her family and it’s a fascinating stream-of-consciousness memoir-ish look into what she had on her mind at the time. I read it over 8 weeks and it’s definitely the sort of book that lends itself to that slower pace.
Book number eight is another one that’s both been on my TBR for ages and which I kicked myself for not reading sooner, Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers. It’s the first in her Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries, set in England after the First World War. Much to my chagrin, I’d only read snippets of Sayers prior to this, despite basically her entire corpus being on that dang TBR. (I kid you not, I did the math at some point in the last couple years and it would take a decade to get through everything on it.) But I loved Whose Body? and Lord Peter and the feigned flippancy and charm that he hides behind. And, as ought to be readily apparent at this point, there’s very little I love more than a good mystery novel. I ended up buying an omnibus edition of all the remaining novels and short stories in the series.
Ninth on the list is Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle by Danté Stewart. What an extraordinary book. Stewart has gifted his readers with a beautifully written, painfully honest examination of what it's like to be Black, Christian, and American all at the same time. This is the sort of book that is not written for or to white people, but which white people would do well to read, really sit with, and learn from. It's not an easy book to read, but it's well worth every bit of effort. I’ve followed Stewart for a while on Twitter and I'm continually grateful for his voice and I’m thrilled that it will now reach a wider audience. The book will be published on October 12th and I can’t recommend strongly enough that you grab a copy for yourself.
Last, but not least, book number ten is The Curse of Morton Abbey by Clarissa Harwood. This was an ARC that I requested from NetGalley on a whim and I wish all my whims turned out so well. It's a fantastic novel. Very early on, I decided the author had thrown a melodramatic Gothic tale of the windswept and occasionally treacherous Yorkshire moors and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett in a blender and had fun with the results. Since The Secret Garden has always been a favourite and my dad’s originally from Yorkshire, I loved it. Then I got to the acknowledgements and, sure enough, the author says that the inspiration for the novel struck when she wondered, "What if the child protagonists of Burnett's novel were adults? What would they be like?" The plot has just the right number of odd twists, the characters feel both fresh and familiar, and Harwood strikes the perfect eerie tone when she wants to.
