This year I’ve decided to be more intentional with tracking my reading … which means I’ve started logging everything on Goodreads. I read three books in September. Definitely my lightest reading month of the year … which makes sense given that we kicked off student small groups, I had two fall retreats, and I’ve been without an office for a while now while the church is in the middle of construction/remodeling. Here’s the list in order of when I finished them and my quick thoughts on each one:
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. This was recommended to me by one of the men in the Broken Beginnings ministry at our church. Powerful book, incredibly compelling. Between the different times I’ve sat in courtrooms with teens and my own brother’s history with incarceration, I’ve already been frustrated for years with just how broken our system is. Alexander has done readers a service with her research and the compelling arguments she makes for the racial undertones in our prison system. There is much that needs to change.
‘A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis. Lewis chronicles his grief after his wife’s death. There were moments where it almost felt like I was intruding places I should not be; his emotion came through loud. I don’t know that I would allow people to see me that vulnerable but it was incredible look into grief.
A Very Private School: A Memoir by Charles Spencer. I actually want to do a separate post on this one but I’m still processing all of my emotions. It was hard to read. Spencer writes about his five years in a British boarding school. At first glance he would seem as far removed from my experience as one can get; the younger brother of Princess Diana, he was wealthy, moved in world famous circles, including the Queen, and attended one of the most exclusive and expensive boarding schools. I was a missionary kid in a low income family attending a boarding school hours from the nearest city in Bolivia. And yet there is so much overlap. The rampant physical, sexual and verbal abuse. The bullying. The abandonment. The incredibly close relationships and friendships that last a lifetime. The conflicting emotions. His experience at boarding school is far too similar to many of my peers. I highly recommend his book.