Back when I was on Facebook, I participated in an internet pyramid scheme where participants each sent a used copy of their favorite book to the person at the top of the list. Just like the chain letters of old, your name would keep getting bumped up the list as more people were invited to join in. When you reached the top of the list, you would get books in the mail from the other participants.
I hope the others who signed up did as well as I did. I received 7-10 books out of the deal. I was sent classics, nonfiction, and books I’d never heard of. I received a historical fiction novel I’d already read and loved. I am still working my way through the stash.
One of them migrated over to the Chaplain’s reading pile early on and I forgot about it. It floated to the top of his pile and I caught sight of it and asked him about it, not remembering where it came from. “Oh, I borrowed that from you,” he told me. I took it back and started reading.
When I was in college, I took an American Lit class with a new teacher. He had been hired upon the retirement of a beloved professor and I disliked him simply because he wasn’t his predecessor.
The only thing I remember from the class was the day our professor asked a white student to read a passage from a Flannery O’Connor book that contained the N-word. The room was tense, and a Black student in the back of the room (the only one?) walked out when our fellow student said the word.
We also had a Toni Morrison book assigned that semester.
This past spring, I learned there would be a Mindful Making Retreat about an hour away from me, co-taught by Katrina Rodabaugh and Meg McElwee. I’ve made a number of Meg’s patterns this spring and summer and have been gradually embracing the idea of slowing my sewing down and making it more of a practice than a drive.
That has been a process. My typical M.O. is to bring all my other responsibilities to a halt, let my children run feral, and whip up a top or a pair of shorts as quickly as possible.
As part of my goal to feature a title each month by a person of color, I just wrapped up Woman of Color, by LaTonya Yvette.
Part of me is embarrassed to feature this book – not because it wasn’t beautiful and well written. Instead, it’s because, even though Yvette doesn’t say so, I don’t completely feel like this book was for me, because while I’m a sister in womanhood, but I’m not a Sister.
It’s a theme, not feeling like I belong. It has everything to do with me and my own insecurities.
In that regard, this was the perfect book to read.
I started several times to write about Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, by Rachel Held Evans. I believe it belongs in its own post, even though I’ve already mentioned it in several other posts in passing.
But while I kept starting the post, I couldn’t get past the first few lines.
