Summer Of Reads

After a year of heavy schooling in the sciences, I take the summer to return to my literary roots and read a LOT, and thus fill my mind with prose in a way that the school year does not allow. These are notes from my summer of reading.

[inwhichiread]

The length of a day - a turn from darkness to light and back again - fits our human capacity for taking stock, our ability to be in the present but also to take a larger, more reflective view of things.

Dorothy C. Bass, Receiving the Day

[inwhichiread]

Families are where you show up for supper, no matter how tired you are. Praying is the same ... It's where you show up, day after day, even when you don't think you have much to offer.

Dorothy C. Bass, Receiving the Day

[inwhichiread]

Frequent and regular acts of attention are anchors for the practice of receiving the day.

Dorothy C. Bass, Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time

[neat-space]

Hey anyone who reads, I have a poll for you!

When you read, do you prefer reading in past tense (he said,) or do you prefer reading in the present tense (he says)? Reblogs for sample size genuinely would help not for note grabs

Past Tense (he said)

Present Tense (he says)

Voting ended onJul 10, 2023

[inwhichiread]

We all need someone who sees our emergencies as their emergencies too.

Eve Tushnet, Gay and Catholic

[loveexpelrevolt]

He’s the one, Coach. If we’re gonna make an impact here, the first domino that needs to fall is right inside that man’s heart. 

+ bonus:

[inwhichiread]

I'm interested in everything ... but I want the scientists right now because they are the modern mystics, much more than the theologians.

A Ring of Endless Light, Chapter 6, Madeleine L’Engle

[inwhichiread]

Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected. When you feel nothingness and emptiness gnawing at your life, there is no need to despair. This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities.

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

[inwhichiread]

Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity.

Anam Cara, John O’Donohue

[inwhichiread]

The negative threatens us so powerfully precisely because it is an invitation to an art of compassion and self-enlargement that our small thinking utterly resists.

Anam Cara, John O’Donohue

[inwhichiread]

Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation.

Anam Cara, John O’Donohue

[inwhichiread]

Your body is your clay home; your body is the only home that you have in this universe. It is in and through your body that your soul becomes visible and real for you. Your body is the home of your soul on earth.

Anam Cara, John O’Donohue

[inwhichiread]

We all mess things up. It's what you do with the mess that matters.

The Field Guide to the North American Teenager, Ben Philippe

[inwhichiread]

A divorce wasn't the end of family, nor was someone moving away the end of a friendship. These things could be endings, but only if you decided to make them so. Otherwise, things just added up and continued forward, across the map, in new shapes and iterations.

The Field Guide to the North American Teenager, Ben Philippe

[inwhichiread]

It wasn't that he didn't know what to do at parties. He just found them viscerally boring: like getting dressed for a big night out and then spending your evening in an intermission lobby, bumping against people you vaguely recognize and fumbling to align conversation topics for brief windows of validation.

The Field Guide to the North American Teenager, Ben Philippe

[inwhichiread]

...a classic pitfall of (white) feminism: instead of inventing our own power structures and abolishing gender roles in a way that promotes true equality and compassion, we just coopt failed masculine structures and roles.

Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

[inwhichiread]

We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.

Tara Westover, Educated