Wednesday, January 05, 2022

Open Book - January 2022

 

I'm joining up with Carolyn Astfalk who hosts an #OpenBook Linkup on CatholicMom.com. Here's what I've been reading this past month. The dates indicate when I finished the book. As I read most of these in December, there are a number of Christmas books on the list. You might want to add them to your reading list for Christmas 2022!


12/7/21 The Christmas Promise - Richard Paul Evans - Each year in December I make a point of reading the new Richard Paul Evans Christmas book.  His stories are always interesting and heartfelt. This year's edition features a pediatric ICU nurse who is grieving the loss of both her father and her sister when a new love interest enters her life. He seems almost too perfect to be true and her friends warn her to be wary. He's not a criminal, but he does have secrets he is hiding, secrets that may change everything. 


 

12/7/21 Awakening at Lourdes: How an Unanswered Prayer Healed Our Family and Restored Our Faith - Christy Wilkens - Wilkens shares a powerful story of her family's experience of traveling to Lourdes on pilgrimage in the hopes of gaining healing for their young son Oscar. She shares her struggles with faith and surrender and coping when God says no to prayers. It also includes a study guide for individual or group use. 


 

12/14/21 A Mrs. Miracle Christmas - Debbie Macomber - This is a charming Christmas tale of an angel (Mrs. Miracle) who comes to help a woman take care of her grandmother who is suffering from dementia. Mrs. Miracle also brings tidings of a baby coming to the woman and her husband who have been longing for one for quite some time and had given up hope. 


 

12/18/21 The Dogs of Christmas - W. Bruce Cameron - My daughter and I have read a whole bunch of Cameron's middle-grade books about dogs so I decided to give one of his adult books a try.  Josh, a young man with a broken heart who has never owned a dog in his life, suddenly finds himself the owner of a very pregnant dog named Lucy. His whole life is about to be turned upside-down. The romance in this book seemed a bit forced, but I enjoy a good dog story so it had that going for it!


 

12/19/21 The Christmas Lights - The Catholic Teen Book Writers - This is a feel-good short story available on Kindle only that was collectively written by the The Catholic Teen Book writers. Each of them wrote one part of the story then passed it on to the next person so that only the last writer knew how it ended. It is a testament to their talent that this ended up being an amazing well-written Christmas story about a teen girl trying to get help for her family after they are injured driving off the road.


 

12/23/21 Life is Messy - Matthew Kelly - I've read a lot of Kelly's works over the years, but this one is very different.  It was written out of a place of pain with its key questions being "Can someone who has been broken be healed and become more beautiful and more lovable than ever before?" It is a series of short essays, each a reflection on a particular topic that Kelly has wrestled with. It offered a great deal to think about. 


 

12/23/21 The Spark of Love - Amanda Cabot - This is the 3rd book in a series set in 1850s Mesquite Springs, Texas. Alexandra Tarkington is a young heiress who has followed her father to Mesquite Springs in order to escape from a dangerous suitor as well as hoping to nurture a deeper relationship with her father. In the process, she falls in love with a man who has been sent to investigate her father. (Read for a book review publication)




 

12/25/21 There's Something About Christmas - Debbie Macomber - This romantic comedy focused on a young woman writing a set of articles about finalists in a fruitcake contest. Unfortunately, in order to travel to interview these contestants, she has to travel on a small plane she is terrified on flying on with its self-assured pilot!


 

12/25/21 The Christmas Sweater - Glenn Beck - This story about a 12 year old boy dealing with guilt and grief after the death of his parents had me ugly crying. This is a heartwrenching tale but is definitely worth reading. (As an aside, I've never read or listened to anything else by Glenn Beck. I picked this up wandering the library looking for Christmas stories.)

 

 

1/2/22 The Big Brain Book: How it Works and All its Quirks - Leanne Boucher Gill, Ph.D. - This is a book aimed at kids ages 10 and up, but I found it fascinating as an adult. It covers topics of brain anatomy, the connections between the brain and the body, and what happens when things go wrong with the brain. It also features some fun experiments to explore how the brain works. If you are interested in an introduction to brain science for you or your older children, this is a great book to check out.

 

Since spring of 2019, I have been making my way through the Great Books Curriculum of Thomas Aquinas College (I'm currently working on the readings for sophomore year).

12/28/21 Elements of Chemistry - Antoine Laurent Lavoisier - Lavoisier was a French chemist and nobleman who lived from 1743-1794. He recognized and named oxygen and hydrogen and discovered the role oxygen plays in combustion. He also wrote the first extensive list of elements. His wife, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, contributed a great deal to his work and was instrumental in the standardization of the scientific method. I certainly didn't understand everything in this work (science was never my best subject), but I found it fascinating how much progress had been made in understanding the elements. One could recognize modern chemistry in this book. I also found it interesting that Lavoisier discovered that water could be broken down further into two elements. What a discovery that was!  

1/2/22 Essay on a Manner of Determining the Relative Masses of the Elementary Molecules of Bodies, and the Proportions in which they Enter into these Compounds - Amedeo Avogadro - Avagadro (1776-1856) was an Italian scientist and Count of Quaregna and Cerreto. He is most famous for Avogadro's Law - that equal volumes of gasses under the same conditions of temperature and pressure will contain equal numbers of molecules. This relatively short essay (despite the long title!) explored the hypothesis that the number of integral molecules in any gas is always the same for equal volumes or always proportional to the volumes.

 

My eleven-year-old daughter has been enjoying a series of books about dogs by W. Bruce Cameron. This month, she and I read Max's Story, Toby's Story, and Bella's Story. I enjoy these stories as much as she does. Sadly, we have now read all of them.


This post contains Amazon affiliate links. Purchases made after clicking a link help support this site. Thank you!

3 comments:

Barb Szyszkiewicz said...

I received that Mrs. Miracle novel for Christmas. Normally I shy away from stories where characters have dementia, because we lived through that reality with my mother-in-law ... I'm glad to know that's what's in the book, so I can be ready for it. The Richard Paul Evans and Debbie Macomber novels look good - I will look for them! Thanks for sharing your recommendations!

Patrice Fagnant-MacArthur said...

Thank you for stopping by!

Carolyn Astfalk said...

I didn't get to do as much Christmas-themed reading as I'd hoped. I did read the Glenn Beck book years ago and enjoyed it (though I can't remember a darn thing about it now). Thanks for linking to An Open Book!

#OpenBook for March 2024

  Welcome to #OpenBook. I'm joining up with Carolyn Astfalk who hosts an #OpenBook Linkup on CatholicMom.com . Here's what I'v...