Tag: favorite books

Faith · Reading

Favorite Books (and More!) for Advent

Rebekah Matt2 Comments

One of the most exciting and comforting aspects of the end of the calendar year is surely the celebration of Advent, when Christians remember the first coming of Christ and anticipate the second. This season awakens a childlike and reverent wonder that’s a welcome respite from the commercialization that surrounds us during November and December.

I’ve enjoyed Advent both with my family (husband and four children) and also in a more solitary way, with my own daily Advent devotions. I’ll share both kinds of books here. I also became a Christian at age 30, and had absolutely zero previous knowledge of what Advent was or why we ought to celebrate it—so I also want to provide a few details to help those who are fairly new to the concept of the Advent season.

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Five Favorite Epistolary Books

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What is it about books written in epistolary format (a series of letters) that I love so much? Not all epistolary novels are good, of course, but when they are, they seem to find their place more quickly onto my list of favorite books.

Here’s what I love about them:

  • They give you all of the advantages of a first-person narrator (personal insights and viewpoints in usually a more conversational or revealing tone)—but they are once-removed and multi-faceted. The narrator isn’t talking to you, the reader, but to someone else. The letters are sometimes to or from more than one person, as well.
  • They require you to pay attention to details like dates, locations, means of correspondence, and who the letter is to/from in order to follow what’s going on, both in the plot of the book and sometimes from your knowledge of the real world at the time.
  • They assume you can fill in the blanks. Depending on the author’s skill (and all of these books below have very skillful authors), you, the reader, will need to make inferences based on what is said, or not said, in the letters in order to connect the dots.
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My Year-End Favorite Book List – 2024

Rebekah Matt2 Comments

I love all of the “favorite books” lists that abound at the end of each year. I’ll look at lists from just about anyone, no matter how much our reading tastes might (or might not) overlap, just because it’s interesting to me what people like to read.

I read a total of 25 fiction and 16 nonfiction books this year, with five abandoned (DNF) and a couple I merely skimmed. I hope you can find some new reading ideas among these favorite books I read in 2024. All books are listed simply in the order I read them during the year.

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Favorite Books about Pioneer Women

Rebekah MattLeave a comment

“Hey, God, you should have made me born 100 years earlier!” —me, age 8

The first time I can ever remember telling God what he ought to have done in my life was while I was reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. I was given the complete boxed set for my birthday, and I devoured them one after the other, immersing myself in the world of late-19th century U.S. pioneer life. I felt deep in my heart that I ought to have been a child of the 1870s rather than the 1970s.

I trust God’s judgment and plan for my life more now than I did as a child, so I’m no longer upset about not being born into the 19th-century American west (which in the 1800s would have been anything west of the Appalachian mountains). But I still love reading about this time period, and more specifically, about women during this time period, especially pioneer women who traveled west and often stayed there to create a home.

So here’s a list of my personal favorite books in this area for those who, like me, are pioneers at heart—or who just like to read about them.

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Reading

My Year-End Favorite Book List – 2023

Rebekah Matt2 Comments

I love year-end “best of” reading lists. I love the ones from people whose reading tastes I mostly share (for obvious reasons), but I’m also interested in lists from people who I’m pretty sure I have very little in common with. Because a reader is a reader, and even if we are not alike in other ways, we both love books. If someone loves them enough to make public their honest year-end favorite book list, then more likely than not, I’m happy to look at it.

I only started keeping an actual “books I’ve read” list in 2018. Why it took me so long, I’ll never know. What I would give today if I had a list like this for every year of my life. If you’re not already keeping a list, I encourage you to start in 2024!

That said, here are my favorite books that I read in 2023:

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