Days like today

Jeremiah 29:11

Apr. 18, 2006 - Days like today...
are nearly perfect!

A good book, a son who does all his 'stuff' for the day, the sky is a brilliant blue, the clouds are puffy and white, the air warm but the breeze is cool. Today, I read a book I wanted to read. It was nothing academic, nothing that took much from me, it was the kind of book that transports you into another world. A world that is different from the one I live in and sometimes need to be reminded can go on without me managing every waking moment. My friend Sarah in smallworld quoted Jill McCorkle in New Stories from the South as saying,

Pain, sorrow, grief--isn't that what we really want to see, to experience and learn from? Who wants to read a story where everything is perfect and nothing whatsoever happens? It would be like an endless pile of those holiday brag letters where no one tells of the year's misfortunes and losses but only of brilliance and success and good times. Who wants to read such? Give me something that will break my heart. Make me ache. Make me laugh and weep simultaneously. Make me feel and care. That is what a story should do, and oftentimes a story is as much about what has come before as the situation at hand. There is history and nostalgia. There are regrets and losses. There are joys that in hindsight take on a different level of pain. Read a story that really works and you will find that dark taproot.

Karen Kingsbury does that for me. She creates characters that I love, I want to know more about and for a couple of days after the book is finished, I mourn their passing! I've read almost everything she's read ... most of it before I started homeschooling because I could finish it in a weekend or over a break of some sort from work. It didn't interfere too much with my life. But I've found that I miss grown up books! I love what I read with AJ, but I want books that interfere with my life! I want to be consumed by something other than curriculum decisions and science projects. Not everyday, but every once in while!