Summer Reads

Ah, you've got to love summer reading. Our days have been a little less busy and a little more relaxed.

Okay, I wrote that last sentence at the beginning of the summer and now that we've come to the end, it was anything but relaxing. I'm beginning to suspect that all my summers will be more than a little crazy the older my kids get. I certainly didn't read like I wanted to even though I had good intentions. But here's a synopsis of what I did read.

The Book Thief. This will go down as one of my favorites. Truly a book about love and friendship and survival, it is set in Germany during WWII as a young girl Liesel Meminger and her foster family hide a Jew in their basement.

"When the elderly Jew climbed to his feet for the last time and continued on, he looked briefly back. he took a last sad glance at the man who was kneeling now himself, whose back was burning with four lines of fire, whose knees were aching on the road. If nothing else, the old man would die like a human. Or at least with the thought that he was a human."

Ella Minnow Pea. A delightfully entertaining book. The setting for this book was based on the fictitious island off the Carolina coast called Nollop, home to Nevin Nollop, the supposed creator of the sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The residents reverence this man by posting the sentence on his statue. Eventually the tiled letters begin to fall, and as they fall the town council believes it is Nollop speaking from his grave that those particular letters are not to be used again, thereby banning their use in written or oral form. For the first offense a warning is given, the second is a lashing or stocks, and the third is banishment from the island. By the end of the book nearly everyone has been banished or left of their own accord. The book is made up of correspondence sent between various characters and as the book progresses to the end, the author chooses to leave the banned letters out making the book harder phonetically to read and and more challenging to decipher the creative spelling. The council eventually decides to allow the remaining residents to create their own pangram that is shorter than Nollop's and still uses all 26 letters in the alphabet, which they do thus restoring all 26 letters.

1776. A historical book that left me in awe that America won the Revolutionary War.

"Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning -- how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference -- the outcome seemed little short of a miracle."

And, after reading this book, IT DID seem little short of miracle. General George Washington's volunteer army was nothing more than your untrained, everyday farmer -- many who were too sick to fight or those who simply went home when their enlistment was up. The British landed in New York with a "well-armed, well-equipped, trained force" of 32,000 men, "more numerous than the entire population of New York or even Philadelphia." In one particular battle, the Americans needed to make a quick retreat across the East River and the decision was made to do this in the middle of the night and catch the British by surprise. Due to heavy mud, the exodus was not moving quickly enough and time was running out.

"Incredibly, yet again, circumstances -- fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often -- intervened. Just at daybreak a heavy fog settled in over the whole of Brooklyn, concealing everything no less than had the nigh. It was a fog so thick, remembered one soldier, that one 'could scarcely discern a man at six yard distance.' Even with the sun up, the fog remained as dense as ever, while over on the New York side of the river there was no fog at all. . . In a single night, 9,000 troops had escaped across the river. Not a life was lost."

This country should in all respects be under British rule. They were bigger, stronger, had more resources, more money, more power. BUT this is one nation UNDER GOD and He clearly had a hand in every American's independence.

Well, that was my summer reading. I wish it were more, but I sure enjoyed the books I did read.