Eight books.

When I saw the prompts for this week, I knew immediately which one I would choose.  Except as I'm prone to do, I changed it up just a bit to suit my purposes. The prompt reads:

List 8 books you've read that you think everyone should read in their lifetime.

See, the thing is,  I'm not entirely convinced that my eight books would be your eight books. Everybody has a different journey, and while these books have shaped mine in amazing ways, maybe you need something else entirely.  The best part of my job for nearly two decades revolved around matching readers with books, and I never met two people who needed exactly the same thing.  

Anyway, my list is the list for ME, but it might not be your list. Or maybe you can agree with and relate to some but not all of the books on my list. These books all came to me at just the right time and left me with just the right message.  Anyway, I love to share books and book recommendations with people, and narrowing it down to just eight was super hard (I could pretty easily list hundreds) but here it is, my list of the eight most important books I've ever read, in absolutely no order whatsoever. 

Little House on the Prairie series

I read the entire series for the first time when I was seven or so, borrowing them from my elementary school library.  I re-read them dozens and dozens of times over my childhood, memorizing entire pages and in some cases, chapters.  However, somewhere around my third grade year, our school's copy of By the Shores of Silver Lakewent missing, so when I re-read the series this year, I remembered very little of that one, even though I could still quote passages from all the others.  That seems terribly tragic somehow, doesn't it?  Anyway, this was the first book series I read entirely by myself, the first characters I fell in love with, and I credit Half-Pint and her family for being just what I needed to start me on my journey to become a lifelong reader. 

The Grapes of Wrath

This book probably falls into the category of "too much information for an 11 year old" but that's the age I was the first time I read it.  Until then, my reading had been very limited to age appropriate children's books, and around the time my friends began sneaking a beat up copy of Flowers in the Atticback and forth to read after their parents had gone to sleep at night (SO scandalous!) I discovered the Joads.  I'm not sure I understood half of what I was reading, but I remember that the language was so beautiful and stark and I could - really for the first time - see the people and the scenes like they were right in front of me, and I knew right then that I wanted to write books like that some day.  I still do.

The Holy Bible

I grew up in a church that encouraged memorization of bible verses and studying the scriptures, and I had read the Bible from one end to the other by the time I was a teenager.  I read it again (cover to cover) as an adult, and I believe that it really shouldn't matter if you're religious or not, this is a really valuable book that everyone should read.   The Bible is arguably the most influential book in western culture, and no matter what your religious affiliation, it's an important piece of literature and one of the most thorough accounts of some eras of history that is still available.  I would highly recommend reading The Bible as Historyto get some background as well.  

The Sound and the Fury

The first Faulkner book I read was Light in Augustand I thought it was beautiful.  I still remember some of the symbolism and all the characters and the story like I read it yesterday.  Then in college I read The Sound and the Fury and from the very opening line I found it stunning.  Breathtaking.  So good it was painful almost.  Sure, it was dense in spots and difficult to follow occasionally, but I read and re-read and re-read until I was sure I understood every single word.  

To Kill a Mockingbird

This book speaks to me in a dozen different ways.  In once sense it's just a coming of age story about Scout, a little girl growing up during the Great Depression, but there are so many other layers to it that it really defies categorization.  For me though, the real star always has been Atticus.  He is wise and fair and good and real, and some of the things he says in the book have always stayed with me.  I even made a full-out campaign to name our first born son Atticus, but I lost that battle.  I'm still bitter about it.

A Time to Kill

 The truth is, when I started working in a bookstore for the first time at the tender age of 20,  I was a HUGE book snob.  I read good literary works, as did my coworkers, and we secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) and snidely made fun of our customers' reading tastes behind their backs, because clearly my stack of obscure Russian literature made me superior to the romance series reading set.  Then one day I picked up a free to me copy of A Time to Kill, and for the first time I realized just how good current popular fiction could be.  From there I read all of Grisham, and Michael Crichton, and Sidney Sheldon, and James Patterson and dozens more popular authors, and while not all of them hit it out of the park every time, I realized there is worthwhile reading to be done off the bestseller list.  It changed my whole attitude toward reading.

Traveling Mercies

I came across Anne Lamott for the first time when I read Rosiewhich is a sweet and funny work of fiction, then I followed it up a few years later with Bird by Birdwhich remains - nearly 15 years later - the best book I have ever read on the craft of writing.  Then I picked up a copy of Traveling Mercies based solely on the fact that I loved the author, even though I wasn't sure I was all that interested in the subject matter, and it changed my entire outlook on life, on God, and on religion.  It was powerful and it was EXACTLY what I needed to read at that point in my life.

Pillars of the Earth

Historical fiction from this era isn't usually my thing, but this book is so stunningly beautiful that I don't even know how to describe it properly.  It revolves around the building of a great cathedral, but the people and their oh so compelling stories are what really set it apart from anything else I have ever read.

Lonesome Dove 

This book portrays relationships better than anything I had read before, or have since.  It's not "just a western."  It's a book about creating your own family under the harshest of circumstances, and the characters are the most authentic I have ever read. McMurtry is the absolute best at dialogue, and it makes you feel like you're a fly on the wall, listening to Gus and Call bicker and argue.  

So there you have my eight books.  I have a short list of about a dozen more that ALMOST made the cut, but I did manage to narrow it down.  It was pretty painful though.   Now it's your turn - 

What are some of your eight books?  Do any of mine make your list? 

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On friendships.

I don't make friends easily.

A healthy dose of skepticism and general distrust of strangers combined with an extremely introverted personality and an unapproachable demeanor make me really, really hard to get to know.

People have to really work hard to be my friend.  

Having said that, I think I'm totally worth it.  Once I'm in your corner and I'm convinced you are in mine, I will go to the ends of the earth and back for you, and then go there again just to make sure.   Most of the people I consider friends have been in my life for years - decades even - and as such, I'm fairly out of practice in the art of making new friends or getting used to new people in my life.

Now that Zachary is getting older, he is starting to form real bonds and friendships with people, and I'm so clueless about it that I don't know how to help him along. 

When he was a toddler and then a preschooler, I was totally in charge of choosing his friends, therefore, his friends were ALWAYS the children, neighbors, cousins, grandchildren and friends of MY friends, and of course they were all kids I liked.

When he started kindergarten, any time I was around his class for volunteer duty I was so pleased to see that the kids - for the most part - all played together without grouping off much.  Or if they did group off, it was really fluid with people coming and going whenever they felt like it and it was all fine and good with everyone else.

Now he's nearly eight, though, and things are starting to change.

He's a loving, open kid, and he just wants to play his games and ride his bike and have fun.  And he really likes to be around other people ALL. THE. TIME, which is a huge drain on me and my limited social resources.  I really love that he seems so open to all different kinds of people and situations, but for the first time, he is developing actual friendships with other kids who have similar interests to him.  Some of these kids are people I know and love and welcome into my house and my son's life, and some... are not.

 It's really difficult for me - control freak that I am - to step back and let him choose friends that I personally don't like.  And maybe it's wrong of me to so harshly judge these kids, but I do.  

I've had to have conversations with Zachary recently about how real friends always have each other's back, and about how real friends don't threaten to withdraw friendships when something doesn't go their way, and about how real friends would never use their words to hurt you.  He seems to understand and grasp these things, but it doesn't stop him from wanting to play with the kids (ok, it's really mostly ONE kid) who do them.  While I certainly do not allow the kid(s) to act this way when I'm around, the truth is I send Zachary away from me for the biggest part of the day and I have zero ability to access what he's doing during this time.

I didn't expect to be having meaningful conversations about friendships with my second grader. 

He's trying to learn how to navigate these tricky waters of forming bonds with others, and all I want to do is draw him back into me and protect him so he doesn't ever have to be in a position to get his feelings hurt.

He's learning how to make friends, and I'm so bad at it that I feel like I often do more harm than good when I try to help him along.  My instincts scream one thing, but my more rational brain tells me to leave it alone.  He has to be allowed to choose his own friends and I may have to just suck it up and deal with it, even if I'm not thrilled with all his choices.

What do you do when your kids choose friends that you don't like? 

Dressed for success.

I've mentioned time and again that I'm not so much a fan of shopping for clothes, and that I'm certainly no fashionista.  I like jeans, t-shirts with superheroes on them, and my running shoes.  It's comfortable, practical, and that's that.

Zachary tends toward comfort over fashion, too, and his preferred outfit is nylon running pants, a stained white t-shirt and no footwear of any kind.  He also has a prolific selection of sleeveless shirts that he would like to wear all winter long.  My one and only ongoing battle with him is that I will not allow him to wear ripped up sweatpants to school, which apparently puts me in the "meanie" category.  

He also really prefers to wear things that are several sizes too large for him.  He says they are more comfortable, and honestly, the kid has a point.  

 And then, well, then there's Cooper.

Cooper likes to dress like this:

And like this:

And this:

Or like any of these:

And to be quite honest, I'm so baffled by this that I don't even know how to react most of the time when he insists on wearing a bow tie to go Krogering. 

I let him, by the way.  

Just the other day he asked me "Mama, do these shoes look better with this outfit, or should I wear my cowboy boots?"  

Now, I don't know much about fashion AT ALL, but I feel certain that cowboy boots win every single time.

I learn something every day parenting my kids, but I never really thought I would be in the position to need to know the latest fashion trends for a four year old.

Maybe soon enough he can give me some pointers.