What I'm Reading and Tweeting (Sep 27, 2013)Novels, memoirs, articles about faith, disability, and culture, and what I listen to on my drive home from dropping the kids off at school... Amy Julia Becker
Where I live, we don't get consistent cell phone service. Every day, I drive my kids to school for twelve minutes, and we talk and listen to music and observe the changing leaves and babbling brook. For the twelve minutes back, I used to try to listen to NPR, though the signal was scratchy, or pray, but I would get distracted, or just think about things. Recently, I began an Audible subscription, so I've been listening to Eugene Peterson's The Message, a paraphrase of the New Testament. Twelve minutes five days a week of listening to stories about Jesus has been quite a gift.
I finished Me Before You this week. Though I still think the plot is somewhat contrived, I still recommend the book. It's the story of a young woman who takes a job caring for a man who has become a quadriplegic. It's a story about social class and dreams and life and death and bodies and love and what it's like to try to live a new life that you never asked for or wanted. It's a great book.
Some other books came my way this week–Quiet, by Susan Cain, about those of us who are introverts in an extroverted world. Sun Shine Down, by Gillian Marchenko, a memoir of her experience of giving birth to a child with Down syndrome in a foreign country. Writing in the Margins, by Lisa Nichols Hickman, about taking notes in the margins of the Bible. And the Jesus Storybook Bible elementary school curriculum, which I think we'll start using with our kids for our new family devotion times on Saturday mornings.
Then there were the articles I tweeted about this week:
Disability and Prenatal Testing related (with great thanks to Mark Leach for his coverage of prenatal testing info):