I may have mentioned this during my other blog posts about reading challenges and how I felt that I really didn’t savor the books I was reading because I was on such a deadline. I was constantly checking the progress percentage and felt rushed to get through one book so I could hop on to another.

So this year, I learned. I evolved. I made different arrangements.

Now I’m just recording the books as I read them within the calendar year of 2023. Smart, eh? I thought so! So if you’re curious what I’m reading, read on!

A Wrinkle in Time (Madeline L’Engle)

I’m fairly certain that I read this book in elementary school, but as usual, I’ve been revisiting books from my youth to see if there are any insights that may be different since I’ve matured. If the book was a school assignment, I likely read it only as deeply as I needed to so that I didn’t fail a quiz or enough to write a book report or answer a question in class. So this book, I’m happy to say, was a nice throwback. I’d been reading a lot of bummer stories and so I wanted another palate cleanser. This fit the bill. I am fairly certain I never saw any Christian undertones when I read the book originally, but I sure saw them this time around! I mean, when your author quotes the Bible, it’s a dead giveaway. So that was refreshing! And it was a very creative and provocative story. (Can I just say, I’m also really glad I haven’t watched the recent movie? Fairly certain whatever spiritual values imparted in the book were in some way woke-ified in the movie.)

Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)

Unsure how this one fell into my thinking, but it just crawled in there as something I wanted to re-read. Same reasons as above. Had I changed at all since I’d read it before? I’m probably wiser. More appreciative of a good relationship story. And, yes, I was thinking about the ending the whole time because while I’d forgotten many other pieces of the story, the ending was crystal clear many years later.

Tell the Bees That I Have Gone (Diana Gabaldon)