Books

Stopping beside my bookcase this morning as I finished fixing the bed, I decided that definitely it was time to rearrange the books. I styled it my way.

I get a kick out of stacks and rows ordered by size or color. Old books with their broken, tattered spines turned backwards. I smile when by arranging a stack of eight red-colored books together, Edith Schaffer’s Tapestry, Stocking Up, (how-to about canning and harvesting and butchering), and Little Women end up in the same stack.

No doubt, Jan Karon and Jane Kirkpatrick wouldn’t mind so much their books creating a tidy row of paper backs together. But Elizabeth Elliot’s A Chance To Die arranged in the same group as John Beargrease’s biography is somehow ludicrous. Then again, both Amy Carmichael and John Beargrease were faithful workers in their worlds. Amy carried the Good News as a missionary to India and John delivered the mail up and down the North shore of lake Superior with dogs and sled or canoe in all weathers. Is that too much a stretch?

During internet church today, Amber mentioned Liz having “gotten her ticket” as explanation for victory over an addiction. Those who have read Corrie ten Booms books understood what Amber was implying. Corrie and her father, Casper ten Boom, will always be among my favorite heroes.

Today though, I finished a book and placed it in the trash can. (Correction on authors here, Thanks Dawn. The cover has been gone for so long…I can still recommend the Richmond books then. Read Mother sometime.) So back to the correct author. Gene Stratton Porter writes some nice stories and I’ve enjoyed them often over the years, but Her Father’s Daughter has lost it charm for me. White supremacy is purported in this book as a proper ideology. I am horrified. How have I missed this before?

So during these wonderful safer@home days; I am re-reading from my library. Maybe it is just as well that I reconsider what’s in my library. I wonder sometimes, what is the best kind of story? What makes for the properest kind of “classic”, if you will? Harold Bell Wright and Grace Livingston Hill wrote books to teach a moral or an ideal. They “yarned” on soapboxes. Which is fine and dandy but it only lasts as long as the ideal they had is popular or of need, unless they wove a gripping tale in the process. I enjoyed these books for their tales often. But now, please give me a documented, well-written biography and allow me as the reader to draw my own conclusions. Which is my own personal soapbox. If I can’t write it, trusting my reader to get it; I shouldn’t try fixing it by telling the reader what to think, as well.