Bekah's Bookshelf: 2023 Reads So Far

 

As you might remember, I’m doing a reading challenge throughout this year. The proposed challenge calls for me to read 52 books, but I won’t have time to get through that many. Prior to this post, I had read nine books in 2023. Six were from the challenge and three were for work. Today I have two more to share with you.

            My next chosen book was a tough one for me and took longer to read than normal, but I powered through and finished it!

            Truthfully, I feel a little sheepish about sharing this one, because it feels almost mean, and I don’t want it to come across unkindly. The prompt was “Bottom of Your To-Read List.” Since I don’t have a literal TBR pile (like many readers do), I interpreted this one to mean a book I owned that I really didn’t feel like reading. At first, I didn’t feel like I had a book that fit that category, because if I own it, I want to read it! Then I remembered, I did have a book that fit this one.

            Years and years ago – when I was in my early 20s, our Sunday School class studied Anne Graham Lotz’s book Just Give Me Jesus. I loved it. It shaped my relationship with God so profoundly and shaped me as a writer, too. I underlined and wrote in the margins and loved everything about that book.

            I thought Anne would be my new favorite author, but along the way, she started to make me uneasy. It wasn’t that I felt she was teaching falsely. It was just her approach to teaching that started to feel abrasive to me. I desperately wanted her to be softer in her delivery, and I felt a bit overrun by her presentation.

            By that point, I’d purchased her book The Magnificent Obsession, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it, because I felt out of touch with her as an author. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the book because I wanted to give it a try – someday.

            The reading challenge provided my “someday.”

            I didn’t realize the book is an in-depth study of the life of Abraham, so once I got into it, I wished I would have read it in conjunction with my study of his life last year. I’m knee-deep in Moses’ life now, so it wasn’t the best timing fit.

            She explores how Abraham’s magnificent obsession was his relationship with the God that (to that point) most people on earth didn’t know intimately. The book was well-written and contained great stories from her own life as well as truths from Scripture. She also has a very poetic nature to her writing, which I also enjoy.

            I’m glad I finally read the book, but it wasn’t my favorite. I still don’t think I feel connected to Anne as an author anymore, and that prohibited me from fully loving the book like I wanted to – and like I might have at one point. But I don’t want to discourage you from reading it if it intrigues you. It’s a great study and contains powerful lessons. And if you’re studying Genesis or Abraham’s life, this would make a good companion to your study.

            In full disclosure, the next book is one I’m still in the middle of reading as far as the challenge is concerned, but it’s a book I’ve read before, so I’m able to comment on it. I felt like, after the tough read I just told you about, I wanted to read something cozy that would embrace my heart. So I picked the category Reread a favorite. It was an easy choice for me: Love Comes Softly by Janette Oke.

            I’ve blogged about this book before – many years ago – but I’ll tell you again why I chose this one. This book was published in 1979 and I read it for the first time in the 6^th grade. It was the first time I had read a book that wasn’t aimed at children or young adults, and it was the moment I fell in love with Christian fiction. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve read this book over the years, and now I’ve added one more.

            This book was the gate to my love of Christian fiction, and the characters within became actual friends to my tweenage mind. I told Ryan, the day I started this most recent trek through the book, “I know you won’t understand this, but this book is like coming home. These people are my friends, and I love them.”

            The book is set in the days of pioneers in the west and begins the legacy of a family that continued through a whole series of books that followed. (There are also movies for most of the books, but I remain partial to the books themselves.)

            Love Comes Softly tells the story of Marty Claridge, a young bride who has traveled west with her enthusiastic new husband. They are newly expecting their first baby, and as they arrive at the land that will be theirs, an accident claims her husband’s life. She’s left with nothing but a broken wagon and winter looms. The same day the local neighbors bury her husband on borrowed land, a man named Clark Davis approaches her with a marriage proposal. He’s a widower with a toddler, and his daughter needs a mother’s touch in her life. Clark offers Marty a place to live in exchange for help with his daughter – and he promises to pay her way back east in the spring if she wants to go back home.

            I love Clark and Marty. I love their personalities, their honesty, and their tenacity. I love all the neighbors that live around them and the land they tend with every part of their lives. I will plow through this book in about a day, because I know it by heart and love it so much. And even though I’ll move on to other books and authors for the challenge, I may just sail through the whole series of Love Comes Softly books just so I can revisit this sweet family I love so much.

            If you’ve never read it, give it a try!