On Our Way To Crazy

I feel like I was writing up my 2009 book list about five minutes ago. And I remember thinking, “Man, I didn’t read very much this year. How weird. I will definitely do better in 2010.” Well, lookout, folks. I really knocked it out of the park this year, reading about HALF of what I read last year. And most of that reading was young adult series, apparently. I am awesome.

On the plus side, I really liked most of the reading I did this year. Lots of rereads, lots of classics, lots of youth ministry and faith books. The problem with those books is that they don’t draw me in the way novels do, so I don’t read them as quickly, and then I feel bad about reading something else instead so I get stuck on the same book for weeks.

But whatever! Books are fun! Here’s the 2010 list.

1. Jesus Girls – edited by Hannah Faith Notess
2. The Dive at Claussen’s Pier – Ann Packer
3. The Maytrees – Annie Dillard
4. Anne of Green Gables – LM Mongtomery
5. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years – Don Miller
6. Anne of Avonlea – LM Mongtomery
7. Anne of the Island – LM Mongtomery
8. Real Sex – Lauren Winner
9. Austenland – Shannon Hale
10. Anne of Windy Poplars – LM Mongtomery
11. Anne’s House of Dreams – LM Mongtomery
12. Anne of Ingleside – LM Mongtomery
13. Rainbow Valley – LM Mongtomery
14. Rilla of Ingleside – LM Mongtomery
15. A Separate Peace – John Knowles
16. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
17. Sustainable Youth Ministry – Mark Devries
18. Franny and Zooey – JD Salinger
19. A Room With a View – EM Forster
20. Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
21. The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
22. Catching Fire – Suzanne Collins
23. Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins
24. Going in Circles – Pamela Ribon
25. The Good Book – Peter Gomes
26. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – JK Rowling
27. Chasing Francis – Ian Cron
28. Super Sad True Love Story – Gary Shteyngart
29. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – JK Rowling
30. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – JK Rowling
31. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – JK Rowling
32. Angry Conversations with God – Susan Isaacs
33. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – JK Rowling
34. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – JK Rowling
35. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – JK Rowling
36. The Sacredness of Questioning Everything – David Dark
37. Relationships Unfiltered – Andrew Root
38. Everything Belongs – Richard Rohr
37. Soul Pancake – Rainn Wilson

I had a hard time when I first started going to church back in middle school. I blame my dad. If I learned anything from him, it was to think for myself. Don’t take anyone’s word for anything. If you believe something, BELIEVE it, because at the end of the day you have to answer to yourself, not anyone else.

As a 30-year-old person, that advice makes total sense. It is invaluable. It has helped make me who I am. But as a 14-year-old, those ideas made me crazy, especially when I found myself in Southern Baptist Youth Group Land. (I didn’t know that was A Place when I was there. But, oh, how I can see it now.) Everyone in SBYGL believed the same things and knew all the answers to all the questions. They had it down. I? Did not.

Youth group had a lot of things going for it: my friends were there, we did fun things, there were cute boys. But I zoned out when it got to the serious stuff. I think the biggest problem I had was how cut and dried everything was. The entire Bible was boiled down into a few bullet points that everyone understood and applied to their lives. There was a lot of talk about having a ‘relationship with God’, but I didn’t connect to that at all. I would get so frustrated because it seemed like the God everyone else was in relationship with was ignoring me. And there was a whole mess of stuff in the Bible that didn’t make sense or didn’t align with the bullet points, and I couldn’t figure out why no one was talking about that stuff.

I don’t say all of that to implicate my youth group. They very well could have been addressing all of those things when I wasn’t paying attention. (See above re: cute boys.) Being wrong and looking stupid are two things I am very self-conscious about, and it was even worse as a teenager. I certainly would have never spoken up or asked questions. I didn’t want to be the only one who didn’t get it, so I just rolled with it and played the part and wore the t-shirts. (I wish there hadn’t been t-shirts.)

That environment, coupled with my insecurity, led to a young adult faith that didn’t amount to much. God wasn’t personal to me. I didn’t feel connected to him. He felt like a guy in the sky who was really concerned with my behavior but not so much with who I was. I believed in God, for sure – I knew there was more to life than what I could see. But I didn’t appreciate the fact that he wasn’t all that interested in us knowing each other.

That’s why, when I read this passage in Susan Isaacs’ Angry Conversations With God: A Snarky But Authentic Spiritual Memoir (what a great title), I knew exactly how she felt.

When I think of the people whose character I admire, they’ve all walked through deserts or hells far worse than mine. And when they got to the other side–the ones who did get to the other side–they always said God got them through it. They have a peace and a friendship with God that I want. But the problem is, the man who’s stuck in the desert because God put him there looks exactly like the man who’s stuck in the desert because he’s lost. And I don’t know which one I am. I don’t know if I’m here to find friendship with God or if I’ve been left to die.

My ex used to get angry when I said that. He would say, “God isn’t personal. God isn’t good or bad. God is like science. God just is.” But even with science… Look at the stars. You see such beauty and order, and you sense the Thought that went into their making. But if that thoughtfulness is not extended to me, then all that order and beauty is merely cold and sterile space that mocks me because I’ve been excluded from it.

If God wants to burn up everything useless in my life, amen to that. But I want to know whether or not this sorrow has an end. Do these longings in my heart for love and purpose mean anything? I say yes. Is my need for God just misplaced longing that has no place to be satisfied? I say no. The body thirsts because it needs water and water exists. The soul longs for purpose because it needs it, and because it exists. And I wouldn’t long for God if he didn’t exist. I am taking this personally because I am personal. And I don’t think that an impersonal God could create humans to be personal. So I’m taking this personally from a personal God.

My life and my faith journey have brought me a long way from SBYGL. I do believe that God is a personal God. I don’t think I’ve been left in the desert to die, no matter how much it may seem like I have. I rarely feel it, but I’m learning that it’s not about feeling. I see God in my community, in the books I read, in conversations with junior high girls. The boundaries of my world are bigger, grayer, more forgiving. I believe that the thoughtfulness that brings beauty and order to the stars does the same for my life. And you can’t sum that up in bullet points.

It’s still pretty sad around this place, y’all. We’ve gotten a little more used to the quiet, to the empty house, to the lack of dog hair on every available surface. But sometimes we are watching football and Aaron is getting all worked up and yelling at the TV and I say, “Miles, will you please tell him to keep it down?” without even thinking about it.

Here’s something else that sucks about a house with no Miles in it: we have to clean up after ourselves. I did not realize how much we counted on that dog to eat all the food we drop around here. It’s so annoying when you throw an almost empty bag of chips at the trash, miss, and then have to sweep it up.

I miss him. A lot.

I don’t think I’ve written about this yet, but it’s been a pretty big deal around here so I guess I should make mention. Aaron has been fairly jobless since mid-July. He ended his relationship with the band and has been working to piece together some new management and consulting clients. Things are coming along slowly, and it can get really frustrating and scary, but WOW are we in a good place. When push came to shove we chose sanity over safety. And I know that was the right decision. And when we have to sell our house and live in a box on the street I will still believe that.

Did you guys watch Freaks and Geeks when it was on? We’ve been watching the reruns on IFC and I’m pretty sure it’s one of my favoritest shows ever. I love Sam Weir so much. I think there are only a few episodes left and it makes me so sad.

I have a bit of a shoulder situation. We were at a friend’s house last week, eating and playing games and hanging out. It was midnight-ish when we decided to go jump on the trampoline. We jumped for a few minutes, then laid around and talked for a long time, then jumped again. I was standing in the middle of the trampoline when my friend decided to try to do a flip. Or so I thought when I took a big step backwards to get out of her way. Turns out I was on the edge and I took a big step backwards right over the springs and fell three feet onto the wet grass. Super graceful and not embarrassing at all, right? Right.

Now my right shoulder is sore and twingy and achy and I can’t really raise my arm up. I am awesome at life.

Yesterday afternoon at the bookstore I bought four gift bibles and a David Sedaris book. I got up to the checkout and the guy said he was pretty sure I was the first person to buy that particular combination of items.

I did my first Sunday morning big church baptisms this morning. OH MY GOSH it stresses me out so much. It is such a joy to be a part of those kids’ lives and get to participate in such a big day with them. It is. But I get super angsty and anxious about doing real serious church business on stage in front of everyone. I don’t feel like I’m good at it. I can do relationships and small groups and games and serious discussions. And I can get on stage and do announcements like nobody’s business. But when I have to do something with more depth to it I panic. I truly thought I was going to have some kind of breakdown this morning.

It went fine, of course. Not great. It helps that I deal with kids, so no one thinks twice when one of them forgets to take his shoes off until the last minute and then they sit on stage for the whole service. I just can’t do eloquent and meaningful and professional very well.

I made it though thirty years of life without knowing about the amazingness of Swedish Fish. How is that possible?

I read a lot when I was a kid. Babysitter’s Club, Sleepover Friends, Sweet Valley High, the Wayside School books. But somehow I missed the Anne of Green Gables series. I don’t know how, but I did. And I am kind of mad at everyone I knew in the 80′s for not giving it to me.

I’ve had a copy on my shelf for a while that I picked up at the library sale, an I finally read it a couple of weeks ago. Then I immediately ordered a box set of the first three books on Amazon. I finished those in about five seconds and ordered the rest of them. They are so wonderful. I wish so much that I had known Anne as a child.

I got to spend a few days last week at a youth pastor workshop in Georgia. It was totally free and totally last minute, and it was awesome. Three days at a beautiful retreat center with my own huge room, fancy bathroom, and hours in the evenings with no technology but lots of books. I sat with 40 other people (all guys, of course) who do the same thing I do every day and we talked programming, lesson writing, parent struggles and long-term planning. We ate delicious food and did not judge each other for taking seconds on the apple pie. It was a great, much much needed break and I am so thankful I got to go.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself on a ‘thank you’ kick. I sent notes to people who have gone out of their way for me or the kids recently, I emailed authors of books that touched me, I wrote to a guy who has been really helpful to Aaron lately. Responses have started to trickle in, and it totally makes my day every time. It’s amazing what paying a little attention will do for you.

I don’t want to go to Bonnaroo. I don’t. I know I would be miserable. But it’s hard to see that when I’m looking at a lineup that includes: The Avett Brothers, The Dead Weather, Conan (!), Weezer, Phoenix, LCD Soundsystem, Aziz Ansari, Brandi Carlile, The Punch Brothers, Miranda Lambert, OK Go and Kings of Leon. Seriously, y’all. SERIOUSLY.

Yesterday we took our kids to work on a neighborhood revitalization project near where a lot of them live. It was a really run down part of town that most of them didn’t even know existed. They got to meet the people who live there and do some construction work on a house for a family who is crammed into a one-bedroom apartment right now. They painted, scrubbed, sawed, crawled under the basement, sheetrocked and caulked. I was so impressed by them, as usual.

The other day I was talking to a group of people and I mentioned that, when I eat M&Ms or Skittles, I pour the whole bag out and separate them into colors. THEY FREAKED OUT. Is that really so weird? The separating part? I hadn’t even gotten to the part where I count them and make sure I have the same amount of each color, then eat the extras, then arrange them into some kind of aesthetically-pleasing pattern. I decided to spare them those details for fear they would never speak to me again.

I totally forgot to blog about this! Last month we got to go see Jennifer Knapp open for Todd Snider. JENNIFER KNAPP. TODD SNIDER. Are you familiar with Todd Snider? I had forgotten how awesome he is. It was a great show… he played for a couple of hours and I could have easily listened for a couple more. It was awesome.

After we finished our read-through of the Bible in my ordination class last month, we decided to take it easy for a while. Take a break from the insane pace and piles of studying we’d been doing for over two years and just spend some time talking. So, for the past several weeks, we’ve been taking turns telling our stories. Who we are, where we come from, how we got here. What we think. What we believe. It’s been such an interesting and enlightening exercise getting to know each other in such an intimate way.

I worked for days putting mine together. I wanted to hit all the important details, but also have a thread that tied the whole thing together. Part of what we were required to do was define a metaphor for our spiritual views… a picture of how we see the world and how our faith fits into that idea.

If I had been asked that question ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, it would have been easy. Something about spiritual discipline, exercise, how working hard will get you where you need to be, spiritually-speaking. But I’m not really that person anymore. My life, and my outlook, has a lot more grey than black and white.

I took my turn before I read this book, sadly. It would have made the process a lot easier. Or, if nothing else, reminded me that I’m not alone on this road.

Jesus Girls is a collection of essays about “growing up female and evangelical”. It’s a book of women, like me, who came of age in the church and have had something of a complicated relationship with it ever since. Some have reconciled, some have not, but they all have a story to tell. And not a black and white, right and wrong story. A real story.

Like this, from Anne Dayton, that I’m pretty sure she wrote while looking INTO MY BRAIN. She writes how it felt to get involved in church as a teenager with a family that didn’t find it as… appealing as she did. (It is taking all the self control I have not to type out the entire essay, just FYI.)

I was hooked. With the fervency of a new believer, I threw myself into youth group. I started coming every Wednesday night and promptly developed a crush on one of the boys. I soon felt very comfortable there, but no matter how many weekend retreats and campouts I went on, I knew almost instinctually that I could never quite fit in. I hadn’t been in Sunday school with them since nursery. They all seemed to have this vast and secret knowledge of song lyrics that I could never hope to acquire. They listened to the right music – Michael W. Smith and Stephen Curtis Chapman and Amy Grant, and later Audio Adrenaline and the Newsboys – not Mariah Carey and Nirvana and Weezer. In short, they had a carefully filtered world filled with positive influences and inspirational media that would lead them along the way everlasting. I had a family who watched PBS on Sunday mornings.

My family listened to America’s Country Countdown on Sunday mornings, but the rest of it sounds very familiar. It didn’t have anything to do with my family, or, really, with the youth group specifically. I just had such a desire to belong. There is nothing worse than being fifteen and feeling like an outsider.

I wanted someone to give me a True Love Waits ring. I craved one of those “Go Against the Flow” t-shirts.

But I never got any of those things. Mostly, I think, because I never bothered to ask. And to this day, I’m not really sure why. My parents are not selfish ogres, nor are they anti-church. They never denied me much.

I guess it somehow didn’t occur to me to ask my parents to buy these things for me. Part of my reticence was a shyness, a sense that religion was a private affair, and that talking about it was deeply revealing and embarrassing. Even in church, I couldn’t work up the courage to pray out loud; prayer was something I did in the quiet space of my mind. We rarely talked about God in my house. The one time my mom suggested I pray over a Thanksgiving dinner, I was so self-conscious I just shook my head and started eating.

I’m sure there was also a certain sense of guilt involved, as if embracing the Christian subculture was rejecting the mainstream world my family lived in, and thus, them.

In Kari’s review of the same book, she talks about the idea of testimony and how we were taught early on that ours needed to be compelling so as to win more people over to Christ. That was never an idea I was comfortable with, partially because I didn’t really feel like it was my job to convince people to believe, and partially because my story wasn’t all that interesting. I wasn’t a drug addict or a gang member or a prostitute before Jesus found a place in my life. He didn’t turn my life around, he came alongside me on the path I was already taking.

Instead, my story is about finding room at the table for everyone. I had the idea that Christians were all the same shape, and you better squeeze and contort yourself until you fit the mold. Now I understand that we are all who we are because that’s who we’re supposed to be, because we are made in the image of God and there’s a lot more to who he is than we can imagine. I understand that faith is personal, and unique, and that it has very little to do with listening to the right music or wearing the right clothes or having the right job.

But even though I was stuck with parents who drank wine with dinner and believed in science, they allowed me space to be who I wanted, and they tried to encourage a healthy balance between my “church things” an the rest of my world. In other words, they were always trying to get me to lighten up.

College is a time when you’re supposed to refocus your view of the world. My Christian friends were questioning the narrowness of the culture they had been brought up in, and many started rebelling against the parents who had sheltered them in the bubble of Christian pop culture. I, on the other hand, was looking at the choices I had made and wondering if maybe my parents might have been right all along.

And the reason I can understand those things is not because of the church, at least not the church as I knew it in high school and college. It’s because of the family I was born into, the one that taught me to love the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac and Sunday morning breakfast, and also how to think for myself and be independent and not let someone else dictate who I am.

They were teaching me the lessons that would later define both the faith I cling to and the way I teach the teenagers in the youth group I am now in charge of. I just didn’t see it at the time.

I really enjoyed my reading this year. I didn’t read as much as I would have liked, and I went long stretches without reading at all this year which is really unlike me. I don’t know why, really… this year was crazy stressful and usually reading helps me deal with that, but this year it was like I couldn’t add one more thing to my brain, even a book.

But! What I read was so, so good. My favorite of the year was Sin Boldly, by Cathleen Falsani, which I read in January and it stuck with me all year. Other highlights – the Julia Glass novels (must read more!), the Jonathon Keats book I read last week and the Hunger Games books, which kept me up til 4am TWICE. Wow.

Also, my ordination class read through the Bible finally wrapped up about a month ago. That was a great exercise, really difficult but really good for me. Getting to sit around a table with those people and discuss faith and theology and life is truly an honor.

So! Here’s the official 2009 reading list. It’s a good one.

1. New Moon – Stephanie Meyer
2. Eclipse – Stephanie Meyer
3. The GI Diet – Rick Gallop
4. Breaking Dawn – Stephanie Meyer
5. Jonah
6. Micah
7. Sin Boldly – Cathleen Falsani
8. Nahum
9. Love Is A Mixtape – Rob Sheffield
10. Habakkuk
11. Paper Towns – John Green
12. Zephaniah
13. The River Queen – Mary Morris
14. Local Girls – Alice Hoffman
15. Youth Ministry 3.0 – Mark Oestreicher
16. Zechariah
17. Malachi
18. Matthew
19. Mark
20. Luke
21. John
22. Love, Mom – Doree Shafrir and Jessica Grose
23. The Accidental – Ali Smith
24. Acts
25. Romans
26. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – JK Rowling
27. 1 Corinthians
28. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – JK Rowling
29. 2 Corinthians
30. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – JK Rowling
31. Galatians
32. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – JK Rowling
33. Ephesians
34. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – JK Rowling
35. Philippians
36. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – JK Rowling
37. Colossians
38. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – JK Rowling
39. 1 Thessalonians
40. American Wife – Curtis Sittenfeld
41. 2 Thessalonians
42. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
43. 1 Timothy
44. Love Walked In – Marisa de los Santos
45. 2 Timothy
46. Good to Great – Jim Collins
47. I Was Told There’d Be Cake – Sloane Crosley
48. Three Junes – Julia Glass
49. Titus
50. Philemon
51. Open House – Elizabeth Berg
52. Hebrews
53. James
54. Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt – Nick Hornby
55. 1 Peter
56. 2 Peter
57. 1 John
58. 2 John
59. 3 John
60. I See You Everywhere – Julia Glass
61. Jude
62. Revelation
63. The Know-It-All – AJ Jacobs
64. The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
65. Chasing Fire – Suzanne Collins
66. The Book of the Unknown – Jonathon Keats

Happy New Year’s Eve, friends! What are you doing tonight? Got big plans? We bailed on all party plans and are instead grilling fajitas and drinking both the champagne of beers and actual champagne. Should be a good time. I made guacamole.

Was 2009 good to you? Does anyone else feel like it was about three seconds long? We had a pretty good one. A lot happened. Lots of stress. Lots of fun. Lots of taco salads from Baja Burrito.

I was trying to decide what kind of post to write on the last day of the year – introspective? Celebratory? Thought-provoking? (Ha!) I had a whole mess of stuff I wanted to mention, so I decided to go with the old standby. The list.

Things I Loved In 2009

• Twitter. Are you twittering? You should be twittering. It is the best, even though I’m pretty sure it’s to blame for my weak posting action this year. All the little thoughts I would usually try to stretch into an actual cohesive post are instead dumped into twitter where all my random friends can see them. Do they care? I don’t know. But I enjoy reading their little thoughts a lot. Also, Amazon mp3.
• Service projects with the kids. After a rough start, 2009 kicked into high gear for GPYG at MFuge. They spent the week working hard and serving people, and came back with a strong sense of purpose that it didn’t have to end there. Based on that, we started a program called Second Saturday, where we take the second Saturday of each month and use it to serve the community. This fall we packed thousands of food boxes, served food and washed mountains of dishes in a soup kitchen, helped 300 needy families find gifts for their kids and wrapped gifts for the angel tree. I am so proud that the spirit of service has become one of the defining characteristics of our group, and I can’t wait to see where they take it in 2010.
• Switchfoot’s Hello Hurricane. I mentioned this one yesterday in our best songs of 2009 list, but I want to make sure I am getting my feelings across here. THIS RECORD IS AMAZING. Easily the best Switchfoot record. It has a great mix of rock songs (like real actual rock songs, not the Christian music lite-rock version) and mellow ones, and lyrically they completely knock it out of the park. I could, and have, listen to it over and over and over again. I love it so much.
• Sin Boldly by Cathleen Falsani. I read this way back in January, and it stuck with me all year. I don’t do a lot of rereading (says the girl who read all of the Harry Potter books this year, AGAIN), but I think this one might be an annual read for me.
• Glee. The most fun TV show there is. I love Puck, I love Sue, I love Mr. Shue. But most of all, I love the way they portray the kids. It’s fantastical, sure, and you have to suspend pretty much all of your disbelief. But the kids nail it. You really care about them. And the singing is awesome. Plus, it’s influence brought us the Sing-off, and that brought me the Beelzebubs. And they are awesome. (Watch this. And this. And this.)
• My Blackberry. Don’t judge me, y’all. This stupid little thing changed my life. I had a smartphone before, but it totally sucked. The Blackberry doesn’t freeze up on me, the battery lasts forever, my church email pushes through onto it and it has GPS. I know you think your iphone is cooler, and you’re probably right. But my Blackberry keeps me from getting lost, keeps me from being chained to my computer and NEVER DIES.
• The Youth Room. 2008 ended up being kind of a tough one for my GPYG-ers. We lost our meeting space last August and worked really hard to hold ourselves together until we built our building, only to end up with no youth space then, either. At the end of the summer I talked the board into letting us take over part of the church office building so the kids could have ownership over something. It’s not ideal, but it’s ours. We took a boring brown conference room and youthed it up good, and now we have a space that is ours for the first time ever. It’s too small, it doesn’t have heat and if the weather is bad we are crammed in there tight, but our name is on the door. And that is good.
• Shows – Andrew Peterson, Waterdeep, Jennifer Knapp, Counting Crows, Ben Folds, Over the Rhine, Wicked, a ton of youth productions, a thousand Remedy Drive shows, Chris Thile, Andy and the Andys, and a million more I can’t even remember. It was a good year to buy a ticket and see a show.
• My girlfriends. This is kind of a new one for me. I’ve always had friends, and my job comes with kind of a built-in social circle. But I’ve never been that great at letting people in. This year was different, though. I had a lot going on, and I needed to talk about it. So I did. I let my walls down and really talked to my friends. And they talked to me. And we assured each other that the things we were saying weren’t crazy, and that we weren’t horrible people even though we really felt like we were, and that we could get through it and it was okay if we had to have the same conversation a million times. I would have gone crazy this year without them.

This year was a mixed bag for me, but overall, I think it was a success. The good outweighed the bad, and I am thankful.

(Sorry for the lack of capital letters in this list. I typed them in correctly, but they came out lowercase and I don’t know how to fix it. I promise I have better typing etiquette than that.)

“But it was enough for me, the way our family lived. Maybe that was wrong; maybe I should have wanted more. But I didn’t. I knew things were far from perfect, but I was content sitting outside with my coffee on spring mornings, admiring the daffodils Travis and I planted, thinking about what to make for dinner that night. I liked attending school conferences with David and listening to dressed up teachers talk abut our son. I liked going to the hardware store every Saturday, all of us in jeans and t-shirts; and I liked watching videos every Sunday night while we ate takeout Chinese from the cartons. I would actually wake up on Sunday mornings a little excited about doing it, even though we did it every week. Perhaps because we did it every week. It was enough, to light a fire in the winter so that we could all toast marshmallows, to look out the window in the summer at David mowing the lawn and Travis riding his bike around in self-absorbed circles, a half-moon of dirt above each elbow. When I got up in the morning and set the table for breakfast and smelled the first whiff of French roast and unrolled the newspaper to lay it flat on the kitchen table… that was enough for me. What is the matter with me, that this was enough?”

“I’m a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I’m scared they wouldn’t want to hang out with me if I stopped. (They’re interesting people, and they know a lot of interesting things. I would miss them.) I’m a writer, and I need to read, for inspiration and education and because I want to get better, and only books can teach me how. Sometimes, yes, I read to find things out – as I get older, I feel my ignorance weighing more heavily on me. I want to know what it’s like to be him or her, to live there or then. I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide – film can’t get in close enough.

But the most important reason of all, I think, is this. When I was nine years old, I spent a few unhappy months in a church choir. And two or three times a week, I had to sit through a sermon, delivered by an insufferable old windbag of a vicar. I thought it would last forever, and sometimes I thought it would kill me – that I would, quite literally, die of boredom. The only thing we were allowed for diversion was the hymnbook, and I even ended up reading it, sometimes. Books and comics had never seemed so necessary; even though I’d always enjoyed reading before then, I’d never understood it to be so desperately important for my sanity. I’ve never, ever gone anywhere without a book or magazine since. It’s taken me all this time to learn that it doesn’t have to be a boring one, whatever the reviews pages and our cultural commentators tell me.

Please, please: put it down. You’ll never finish it. Start something else.”