Tom & Alissa

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
I was at Angela’s place on New Year’s Day and saw this on the shelf and decided it was high time I finally read it. It really is rather good, though it didn’t shatter my world as I expected it to. It may have if I’d read it ten years ago. Still, a great portrayal of disordered thinking. [4/5]

Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews - George Plimpton (ed.)
A collection of Paris Review interviews with various female writers, including (but not limited to) Eudora Welty, Katherine Ann Porter, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Parker, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, and a bunch of other hard-working, successful women. I’d actually read only a few of them before, but now I want to read them all. They have lots to say about work, writing, family, culture, and life. [5/5]

On the Road - Jack Kerouac
To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But Kerouac’s writing is so wonderfully full of life and craziness that even if I hadn’t know the historical significance of the book, I would have enjoyed it. Its fiftieth anniversary was last year. [4/5]

River Grace - Makoto Fujimura
It doesn’t appear that you can buy this online yet. Mako is a friend and mentor of ours, and my review of this book should be popping up sometime soon. But it’s lovely and elegant and lyrical and so insightful. An account of his growth as a painter, a husband, and a man of faith.[5/5]

Crowded Skies: Letters to Manhattan - Tara Leigh Cobble
(Psst, Tara Leigh: why is this not on Amazon yet?) Tara Leigh Cobble, an independent singer/songwriter, Christian, newly minted New Yorker, and friend wrote Letters to Manhattan as a follow-up to her first book, Here’s to Hindsight. It’s funny and friendly and basically a lot like TLC herself. (Oh, and Tom and I show up early on at a party!) My review should be popping up of this one as well. [4/5]

Chasing Francis - Ian Morgan Cron
I’d been hearing about this book for a long time and just finally read it. It’s a fictional account of a pastor of a fairly standard large evangelical church in Connecticut who experiences a crisis of faith in the pulpit and ends up on a forced sabbatical in Italy with his uncle, a Franciscan monk. While he’s there, and with the help of other monks and a lot of discovery about Francis of Assisi, he begins to understand the ways that his tradition has rejected the communal and compassionate Christian lifestyle that Francis preached from the life of Jesus. Really wonderful and so inspiring. I’m still challenged by it. [5/5]

I am in the midst of Eat This Book by Eugene Peterson still (hey, I’m taking it slowly, it’s not a long book), and I’m also reading the Slow Food book. And I have about five or six books to plow through before February 20 for a RELEVANT article, several about which I’m very excited. Right now I’m working on Ron Hansen’s upcoming book, Exiles, which is sort of about the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. This guy can write.