My Essential Summer Reading

Eighteen titles should not feel restrictive.

We’re moving in eleven days.

For a year now, I have noted the “lasts” for living in this house. Last Christmas here. Last time watching the schoolbuses squeak, sigh, and rumble past. Last softball game. Last time swimming in our neighbor’s pool.

Then there are the “lasts” I didn’t notice because they’d happened without any fanfare. My last visit to that one coffee shop (four months ago now; I have no free time!). The last time I pulled the weeds around the flowerbeds. Our last trip to the playground.

Yesterday was our last Sunday at our church, and it was a combination of the two. It seems that half of our acquaintance are on family vacations, so I guess I saw them for the last time two weeks ago. A few people came up to wish us goodbye in a quiet way, which helped me not cry. And a few more we’ll see over the next few days at barbecues and playdates.

There are a few more lasts to come. As I write this, the sun is setting over the mountains, and the first bats are out hunting mosquitoes. Only a few more nights of this rare, lovely view we’ve been so blessed to call ours for the past few years.

With each box I pack up, it’s a reminder of the things we won’t do here again. Here are the books I didn’t want to pack away for the summer.

My list includes three guided journals, two books I’m reading with family members, ten books I’ve been gifted but haven’t finished yet, two books I bought for myself but haven’t read, one book I’m reading for book club, two books I’m reading with family members, and one piece of pure comfort food that I re-read every couple of years (if you guess that last one correctly, you get a prize! but not a big prize. it’s pretty obvious).

This list has everything I’ve been meaning to get to. Wanting to get to! This is not a shame-based list; I am really excited about every title on it. I’m just a highly distractible reader (which is part of why I set reading goals for each year), and I suffer from technology-induced-goldfish-attention-span, or whatever you want to call it, as much as the next gal.

When I "only” have eighteen books to choose from, I should be able to focus. I’m also making a goal of powering down my phone every day this summer to help minimize distractions.

• The Writer’s Map by Huw Lewis-Jones

• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

• Triggers: Exchanging Parents’ Angry Reactions for Gentle Biblical Responses by Amber Lia & Wendy Speake

• The Next Right Thing Journal by Emily P. Freeman

• Little Plum by Rumer Godden

• Home Education by Charlotte Mason

• Learning the Good Life by Jessica Hooten Wilson

• A Sense of Wonder by Katherine Paterson

• The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford

• How the Heather Looks by Joan Bodger

• The Irrational Season by Madeleine L’Engle

• Two-Part Invention by Madeleine L’Engle

• In Defense of Women by H.L. Mencken

• Man and Woman in Christ by Stephen B. Clark

• From Mother and Daughter by Madeleine and Catherine des Roches

• Planet Narnia by Michael Ward

• Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington

• The Cloud of Witness: A Daily Sequence of Great Thoughts from Many Minds Following the Christian Seasons by the Hon. Mrs. Lyttelton Gell

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Not pictured but included in my summer reading:

• Tending the Heart of Virtue by Vigen Guroian