Okay great, I think this is month 5 of doing a monthly reading post. I like this. It motivates me to finish books and think about them for 30-seconds, instead of the usual, thank u next. AND I can tell the internet what I think about them instead of bothering people I work with. Win. Win.

In other news, I ran a 5k in 27:29 today. I had a stressful job when I first moved to this city and I gained some weight and got pretty out of shape. There was a lot going on. Gaining weight isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person, but for me it is usually a symptom of stress eating and not running and therefore not getting those necessary endorphin hits to regulate my emotions. Bad loops. So after getting a better job, I’ve lost some of the weight, and after cranking out 3.1 miles at an 8:40 pace, I feel like I’m back in shape and back myself again. So 10 points for Ravenclaw.

This month I finished Upon Silver Wings II: World-Record Adventure by CarolAnn Garratt about her flight around the world with Carol Foy. They raised money for ALS and broke the world record. The book reads like you are reading a sort of early 2000s email style journal written by the author – very conversational. There are a lot of pictures. Carol’s thoughts have kind of an ethereal quality about them. It isn’t in any way a guide to how to fly around the world or an in-depth study of the experience, just a description of the trip and the planning that went into it. The flight itself only took eight days, and if you’ve ever been in a small plane before, it’s a lot of kind of just being there an monitoring, so there is only so much you can say.

I also finished Dominion by Tom Holland. I’m glad I read this book and I should really take the time to develop better thoughts about it. The book describes Christianity as a cultural narrative and the book itself is, of course, a narrative. I think we miss so much how stories define our lives. There is a part of me that immediately rejects this idea of Chrisitanity-as-narrative; it’s like something a pastor would say or a Facebook post that would read “Christianity isn’t ‘just a story’, it’s real!” or “If it’s just a story, then what’s the point? So the Bible isn’t just a collection of stories! It’s science! And history!”. To be clear, I do believe Jesus rose from the dead, but I think that statements like that undermine the real power that narrative plays in our lives. I don’t know, maybe some people just exist without thinking about the whys, but I can’t do that. I need to be constantly putting pieces together. So anyways, I think this book did a good job for me of highlighting and stringing together a 2000-year cultural impact narrative. Good stuff.

Finally, I read Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defining the Birth Dearth by Catharine Pakaluk. In short, it’s a qualitative economic study of why college-educated women who have five or more kids are having five or more kids. It was honestly a good and quick read. The book has a lot of strengths: long quotes from interviews, a focus on number of children (instead of the usual fundie garbage that shows up), and interviews from women of varying racial, age, and faith backgrounds. The last chapter gets a little dicey (wrote more about it here), but for the most part it stuck to it’s mission. As the author suspected though, not everyone will agree with the conclusions the women she interviewed have drawn – I don’t – I don’t think having eight kids is my “calling” (maybe more on that some other time), but Dr. Pakaluk did a great job of relating their stories and highlighting the positives of their amazing lives.

Next month I’m picking up reading around the world again with Hour of the Wolf by Andrius Tapinas (Lithuania) and I’ve got a couple Boring-A engineering and water books on the list too. And of course, walking and listening to Dune. We also started watching 3 Body Problem on Netflix, so that will have to get into the Audible library soon too…

So many stories, so little time, but so much life. ❤