I came to the US with plenty of extra space in my suitcase. On my return flight, that space will be taken up completely with books. This is the promised land of books, and they’re arriving by post these days, which is so, so exciting. The stacks are growing! Between classes and chapel and walks and socializing I’m gorging on books.

I overheard a conversation lately where one person was saying they don’t read, and if they do, it’s a discipline as in, “This month I will read one book.”

That’s ok for them, and they are very useful in God’s Kingdom, but not reading is the discipline for me.

I’m reading Oceans Bright With Stars, the second in a series by Rachel Devenish Ford, which is a compilation of her blogging while her family moved from California to Goa in West India. My life is nothing like hers, because she writes of she and her husband travelling with three children while she’s pregnant with her fourth, and she talks about how exhausting and bewildering and exhilarating her family and surroundings are.

The book keeps me up reading way too late because she’s so honest and refreshing like cool breezes. In a most inexplicable  way, even if our lives have little in common, I feel like she understands me. Her writing isn’t comedy, but it makes me laugh aloud because I get her humor and crazy metaphors and because I see so much of myself in her, especially in the way she mixes up her words like I do.

Then I just finished The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo, a beautiful little gem that made me smile and cry. It’s reminiscent of Bridge to Terebithia.  I love the writing that sparkles off the page and the way the story blends Blake’s Tiger poem in with it.

If you never read it, just try to be the kind of person that when someone tells you they saw a tiger in the woods, you don’t say they’re crazy, but ask “Where?”