Books and Reading

I never intended to quit blogging, but as I only posted twice during all of 2016, that seems to be what has happened. I blame Facebook, and I'm not even kidding. I firmly believe smartphones have NOT been a good thing for us as a culture, and me as an individual. I am germinating a blog post on that, so hopefully more thoughts on that sooner rather than later as I'm trying to break my addiction to that dumb thing and retrain myself to think and read in longer chunks like I used to be able to do. I never intended to become addicted to a tiny screen, either, and it's got to stop.

Now that the new year is two months along and no longer new, I've finally gotten my reading lists updated, moving 2016 into the archive list and starting the 2017 list. I did keep a list of the books I've been reading in the hopes I would ever get myself to the computer to put them into my sad little blog, and now I'm up to date.

Several of us were talking around my table on Saturday at the women's seminar we had at our church, and one of the young ladies happened to mention that she and several other ladies in our group are participating in Tim Challies's 2017 Reading Challenge. I had seen his post about it a while back and meant to check it out, but in the haze of the end of the year and the holidays and then getting back into the swing of things again in January, I never took the time to look into it, finally thinking that maybe my legalistic little self didn't need another artificial burden added. Then this conversation happened, and I decided I would at least look at it, though I figured I was probably too far behind at this point, but it turns out that several of the books I've already read will fit nicely into some of the categories and others can probably be tweaked into them, or not. The point being, I'm not actually too far behind to at least try some of it, and that's what I decided to do, so you'll see that noted if you want to look at my reading list.

I had thought about maybe starting a reading group over on Facebook and share reading ideas with friends. I used to be a part of one before that started out well until people began dropping off and all that was left was someone who kept posting about Amish romances (urg), so I let myself drop out, too. But then I thought part of the reason I haven't taken the time to write over here at my blog, something I very much enjoy, is that Facebook tends to sap time and thinking energy in a weird sort of way, so maybe I don't want another thing to tempt me to open it all the time. If there is anyone still reading this blog, feel free to share what you're reading sometimes. If I can make myself take this up again, hopefully once in a while I might blog about a book or two that I particularly enjoy or find interesting along the way. And yes, I do find it ironic that after all my words about Facebook, I'll be posting a link to this blog post there.

Here's what I'm reading currently:

Happy Reading!