Books! The Best of 2022

This Christmas Hal and I gave each other books, as usual. (Doesn’t sound like downsizing, does it? But we intend to give away more than we add to the collection.) I gave him (us) the two volumes of Every Moment Holy by Douglas McKelvey, liturgical prayers to be read personally or in community. Beautiful and insightful. He gave me (us) a faith-gift, a guidebook to Oregon Hiking by Matt Wastradowski. This year, 2022, has been physically challenging to both of us, but we are trusting that we will be up and hiking again in beautiful Oregon in 2023.

I like to do a “Best Books List” at the end of every year. These are not books published in the current year, but books I read during the year, whenever they were published. They are not all the books I read; that list would be too long. But the best of the best, in my opinion. So, here they are. 

Fiction

Diane Akerman, The Zookeeper’s Wife (2007): Novel based on a true story of the zookeepers of the large Warsaw Zoo during World War 2 who provided a half-way house for Jews trying to escape the holocaust.

Pam Jenoff, The Lost Girls of Paris (2019): Another World War 2 novel based on the true story of two English girls who infiltrate French society as spies, to collect information on Nazi strategies.

Jacqueline Winspear: Various novels in her Maise Dobbs series about a detective in England. Reminds me of Alexander McCall’s novels about detective Mma Ramotswe in Botswana. Delightful.

Marie Benedict and Victoria Murray, The Personal Librarian (2021): Historical fiction based on the life of Belle Da Costa Greene, a black girl who passed as white and became personal librarian to J.P. Morgan.

Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things (2010): Story of a back nurse falsely accused of causing the death of a baby. About the pervasiveness of racism in our society.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016): About a man sentenced by the Soviet police to a life-time exile in a Moscow hotel. How he manages to make a meaningful life and eventually escape. Funny and poignant.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny State of Terror (2021): Couldn’t put it down. A setting of international terrorism and conspiracy, with some thinly veiled references to an inept real-life former presidency and the problems it raised that continue to plague the country.

Lynda Rutledge, West with Giraffes (2021): Another novel based on a true story, of two giraffes who miraculously escape a hurricane at sea and then slowly journey across the US to the San Diego Zoo. Loved the characterizations of the funny, crusty people who accompanied them. 

Non-fiction

Catherine Randall, Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2020): Fascinating biography of one of my favorite poets.

Christie Tate, How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life (2020): Memoir of a very disturbed young woman whose relationships with men were disastrous and her experience of healing through group therapy, something she violently resisted at times.

Pete Grieg, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People (2019): Simple, yes, but also profound, practical, and encouraging.

Sarah Ruhl, Smile: The Story of a Face (2021): Account of the author’s journey with Bell’s Palsy, her process to come to accept it, live with people’s reactions to her, and maintain hope for a cure.

Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad is Untrue (2020): Memoir of the author’s escape, with his family, from Iran at eight-years-old, their journey across the Middle East and Europe as immigrants trying to find a home, eventually landing in the US and facing resistance. Told with humor while facing hard situations. Helped me enter into complex situations I will never personally experience.

Carolyn Leaf, Switch on Your Brain (2013): While a little too formulaic, it gives a biblical affirmation to the science of neuroplasticity and hope for building healthy thought patterns.

Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (2021): Presents principles for keeping an open mind and changing perspectives according to the evidence. The best part for me was the concept of “confident humility.”

Gregory A. Boyd, Present Perfect: Finding God in the Now (2010) and Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty (2013): Boyd is becoming a favorite Christian author. Academically sound and spiritually profound.

Poetry

Mary Oliver, Devotions (2020): Selected poems from all her many previous books, from 1963-2015. Prolific poet with excellent poems scattered here and there, worth while searching for.

Douglas McKelvey, Every Moment Holy, Vol. 2: Death, Grief, and Hope (2021): Beautifully written liturgies for the hardest times of life. Very helpful in what proved to be a year of losses.

William Jolliff, At Rest in My Father’s House (2022): That I personally know the poet makes this book every more significant. Bill writes poems that come from his background in rural Ohio farmland. Both insightful and beautiful, I love this book. (The book is insightful and beautiful, not me. That was an ambiguous sentence.)

Drew Jackson, God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming (2021): The poet brings his own experience as a black man living in the US to these poetic responses to the first eight chapters of the Gospel according to Luke. Provocative and well worth meditating on. 

So, this is my list. I’d love to get the titles of some of your favorite books from 2022. One of the challenges of these later years is that of continuing to learn. Books help.

The cachi-wachi of Christmas

 A big part of retiring and moving to this retirement community was downsizing our stuff. I’ve written about this previously. This included all sorts of Christmas decorations: funny things the kids made, a collection of cross-stitched tree ornaments, gift ornaments from other countries, different creches, hangings, and so on. You know what I’m talking about. I actually managed to get it pared-down to one box of precious Christmas stuff. We’ve decided our small apartment won’t handle a Christmas tree, and that helped.

Marie Condo, the queen of de-clutter, to the rescue again, reminding us to only keep stuff that brings us joy. We have a word for that in the Aymara language of Bolivia. Cachi-wachi. Beloved stuff. So let me show you some of our precious Christmas cachi-wachi. This is part of the stuff we brought with us.

The first is a carved wooden creche made by an Aymara artisan in the small community of Juli, Peru. The shepherds are dressed as Aymara sheep herders, and the animals around the manger include two high altitude llamas. It reminds me that Jesus came as a baby to a culture similar to the Aymara people we served among for so many years.

The second manger scene is one I made from a pattern found in a woman’s magazine over 30 years ago. The figures are felt, glued onto an Aymara awayo, the cloth the women use to bundle their babies and carry them on their backs. I’ve made and gifted dozens of copies of this hanging.

The creche below comes from Rwanda, Africa, where our son and his family served for many years. It’s made of some kind of straw, hangs from the ceiling, and twirls around in a breeze. The angels seem like weird alien insects and they always make me laugh. If the real thing was anything like this, I understand why the shepherds were “sore afraid.”

The next "ornament" came as a gift a few months ago. I knew that the Christmas cactus sometimes blooms, but this one didn’t give any hints of being anything other than a nice succulent taking up space in our window. It surprised me. It probably shouldn’t have. The name itself is a clue. But it’s Christmas time and this plant opens up a new pink blossom every day. Soon it will be covered. I like to just sit, look at it, and smile. Like that baby born so many years ago, it stirs up hope from a deep place.

I love Christmas. I’d love it even without the cachi-wachi, but the stuff helps me celebrate. It’s all touchable. These things occupy space and brighten up the room with their colorful materiality. And isn’t that what this time of year is all about? God put on materiality. He became a baby and occupied space in a real place. We call it incarnation. God made flesh. Human. Real and touchable.

It's a miracle beyond my understanding. But not beyond my celebrating.

"Step on a crack...

and break your mother’s back,” we sang
as we hopped down the sidewalks of Ramona,
carefully positioning our toes
so as to do no harm.
But I stepped on cracks all through childhood,
most of them not on sidewalks
but on rules and expectations, such as …
    --stealing penny candy from Pike’s Market,
    --writing spelling words on my arm before the test,
    --reading trashy stories from “True Confessions”
            magazine at my friend Sheila’s house,
    --passing notes during church.

I was reasonably sure that “what my mother didn’t know
couldn’t hurt her” (another wise childhood saying).
In spite of my prevarications, I broke her—if not literally
her back—in all sorts of inward parts of her anatomy,
up until the time she died. Kids do that to their parents.

I remember her last year, bed-ridden,
she looked at me once, smiled, and said,
“Nancy, I’m so proud of you.” She meant it.
She’s whole now, nothing broken.
And she now knows all my silly secrets.
Sometimes I sense her presence. She still smiles.
Still the same message. “Nancy, I’m so proud of you.”

Cracks and all. 

What I learned from the hurricane giraffes

Recently my book club discussed a marvelous novel entitled West with Giraffes (2021) by Lynda Rutledge. This novel is based on the true story of two giraffes at sea on their way to New York. The Great Hurricane of 1938 strikes, but the giraffes miraculously survive. As the protagonist, young Woody Nikel, reflects, “I never thought I’d see a bigger eyeful than that hurricane as long as I lived. But I was wrong. Because the last thing you think you’re going to see in the middle of flipped boats and buildings afire and bodies dangling and sirens wailing is a couple of giraffes.”

The giraffes, whose crates had been bolted on the deck of a freighter, made it through, a bit banged up, but alive. After a time resting and being attended to, the animals board the back of an old truck for a trek across the United States, headed for the San Diego Zoo. Woody and a “giraffe whisperer” Woody calls “Old Man” drive the truck and care for the giraffes (a true part of the story). It’s a two-week trip full of natural and human disasters, near catastrophes, and a bit of romance with a photographer named Red.

The giraffes are the stars of this story. The giraffes and the relationships that can develop between animals and humans. As the book jacket notes, this book “explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals.” While the book is full of disasters, the hurricane being only one of them, it is also full of natural wonders, the giraffes being the chief example.

But what I want to write about in this blog on aging is the frame-tale that surrounds the story. Woody Nikel is now 105 years-old and living in a nursing home he doesn’t particularly like. His friends are all dead and all his memories are in the far past. But the memory of his trek with the giraffes, Old Man, and Red persists and he finds himself thinking about them more and more. But he has long stopped trying to tell the story, thinking it matters to no one but himself.

And then he remembers Red’s baby, a woman now, who knows little about this part of her mother’s life. It’s like a revelation. He reflects,

“It’s you.

“That’s when I know I’d been a foolish and selfish man.

“It is a foolish man who thinks stories do not matter—when in the end, they may be all that matter and all the forever we’ll ever know. So, shouldn’t you hear our story? Shouldn’t you know how two darling giraffes saved me, you, and your mother, a woman I loved? And it is a selfish man who takes stories to the grave that aren’t his and his alone. Shouldn’t you know your mother’s brave heart and daring dreams? And shouldn’t you know your friends, even though we’re gone?

“I knew, then, there was something else an old man could do. I found a pencil and I began to write.”

During the first year of the pandemic when I was especially missing contact with my family, I began thinking of all the stories of my life that I hadn’t yet told my kids or grandkids. What if I never got the chance? Would all those stories just disappear?

So—I found a pencil and I began to write. Well, actually, a computer. But I spent the better part of that year in isolation writing down the stories, starting with the ancestors, writing a chapter on my parents, then telling stories about my growing up years, then life as a wife and mother, as a missionary, and as a writer. Seventeen exciting (to me) chapters. I’m leaving open the last chapter on growing older. After all, my story’s not over.

I’m not famous and I don’t think many people will be interested in this book. And to be honest, at this point my kids aren’t very interested either. I’m hoping that someday some curious granddaughter will start wondering about that funny old lady. Maybe someone (or two or three someones) will read and love the stories, knowing a little more about where they came from.

Maybe. Maybe not. But the stories will not die when I do. And I get a great deal of satisfaction just knowing that.