Books read in 2021

 Covid continues to boost the amount of reading I do, or perhaps it's aging and and being more sedentary year by year. By and large this was an excellent list, and most I would read again, with the exception of those listed at the bottom of this post.  

In My Time - Cheney
The Saint Monica Club - Second Reading - Green
Decision Points - Bush
Into the Deep - An Unlikely Catholic Conversion - Favale
Boots on the Ground - Marciano
A Prayer for Owen Meany - Irving
War and Peace - Tolstoy
Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell - Manis
John James Audubon: The Making of an American - Rhodes
The Saint Monica Club - Green
The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion - Wright
Atonement - Stump
Where Nobody Knows your Name - Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball - Feinstein
By What Authority - An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition - Shea
11-22-63 - King
Shoe Dog - Knight
The Count of Monte Christo - Dumas
Holy Bible - RSV - with Apocrypha
How to be a Grandfather - Hugo
Of Plymouth Plantation - William Bradford
The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus - Whiston translation
The Dreaded Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry - Storie
Les Miserables - Hugo
Moby Dick - Melville
Untitled Draft of a Novel - Jones

Worst of the bunch - would not read again

Moby Dick - Herman Melville, My expectations were too high. I was expecting it to be a book about hunting for a great white whale, which was about 10% of the book. See my previous post. Quite boring. 

How to be a Grandfather - Hugo. The author wrote one of my favorite books, Les Miserables. This book of "poems", has nothing to do with being a Grandfather and little to do with his grandchildren. A collection of bad poems written by a grumpy old man who hated the Catholic Church and thought people reading this book would want to know that. I will pray for your soul, Victor

Eucharistic Adoration

Before the blessed sacrament. 

The mystery. The blessing. How do we stay away? Why is it that I allow so much time to pass before attending. How much time will pass before I am here again. 

Things you forget about snow in Summer

 We just had the first major snow of the season. Schools were let out early, or cancelled altogether. When we first moved here in 2003, schools rarely closed for snow. Now they do so with a regularity similar to the schools of St. Louis, where we moved from. We are becoming a less snow-tough people, but that is a topic for another time.

As I shoveled the porch and front steps I thought of the things I had not called to mind since last winter. 

How different the weight of snow can be from one storm to the next. You can tell without picking up a shovel, just by stepping on it. At times it is like shoveling feathers, other times like shoveling lasagna. 

What wind does. Five inches of snow usually means 18 inches in the vortex by the shed and an inch in parts of the front yard. 

What sun does. The fact a sunny day can melt snow and ice when the air temp is in the teens, is one of those pleasant little surprises of nature. 

The beauty of hoarfrost, diamond dust and snowdogs. 

The camaraderie of neighbors as we dig out. We wake up on a Saturday morning all facing the same problem, getting this stuff off the driveway, navigating the snowbanks left by the city plows.  

That squirrels may attempt to seek shelter somewhere in my house. A nook, a crease, a forgotten opening. The scratching sound in a wall is never good news, and was heard around 11pm last night for the first time in a few years. 

The beauty of this land when it is only two colors, White and shades of brown.