Let me start out this post with a book/movie review of "Julie/Julia: The Year of Cooking Dangerously" by Julie Powell. I liked the book but MY favorite parts of J/J were the snippets about Julia Child rewritten by Powell from Child's 2008 book, "My Life in France". So as soon as I finished Julie/Julie, I began reading "My Life in France". I absolutely LOVED this book. Of course it covers much more than a year and we are certainly more familiar with Child than Powell, but it is a charming, romantic Cinderella story set just after WWII.
A week later I the movie, one of the best I've seen this year--worth the price of a ticket and then some.
Hope you find time to read "My Life in France" AND see the movie, too! You'll be glad you did.
So inspired by Julie Powell's decision to give her life meaning by setting the goal of cooking all the 522 recopies in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and blogging about her experience, I've chosen my own experiment to see how my life is impacted. It is MUCH less formidable, but I don't think I'm feeling quite as lost as Ms Powell was feeling when she began to cook. And being lazy, I NOT going to cook but instead, I think I'll read! It's less fattening that way, too.
For the next year I'm going to read only books written that espouse the values Jesus Christ came to instill in us. Exactly what this means, I'm not sure, but that's part of the experiment. To read well written, life-affirming, redemptive literature and record my thoughts (reviews, I hope) and any insights that come.
This is not a science. I don't have a number goal in mind of how many books to read. I will read fiction, non-fiction, "Christian", non-"Christian" authors, and I'm inviting any and all suggestions for reading.
Since I began this post in August and it's now Sept, I'll backtrack a bit and fill in the books I've read since I began this quest.
The first book in the "Year of Reading Gloriously" was Atonement Child by Francine Rivers (review will follow in next post).
Happy reading to you.
