Tag: Reading

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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Reading

Same House, Different Worlds: A Mother-Daughter Reading Story

Rebekah Matt2 Comments

Shared interests are one of the best things about having kids.

At some point, Lord willing, they will begin to love something that you love: Hunting or fishing. Gardening or cooking. Baseball, running, or golf. Cars, trains, or motorcycles. Concerts, movies, or video games. Dogs, cats, or babies. Crocheting or carving wood. Those times when you bond with one of your offspring over a shared love of [whatever] are some of the priceless payoff moments of having children, for sure.

My mother and I both loved to read—we bonded over books we discovered together, books we gave to each other, books we couldn’t wait to discuss, books that inspired us, puzzled us, and made us swoon. My mom and I didn’t have much in common, but from my childhood through my mid-forties when she passed away, books were our common ground. 

So naturally when I had a daughter of my own, I eagerly anticipated sharing books together, reading in tandem, and the wonderful discussions that would follow. (I just assumed she’d be a reader; the possibility of two book-loving parents having a child who did not even like to read never once entered my head back then.)

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Reading

Three Books for Two Weeks of Sickness

Rebekah Matt2 Comments

I had high hopes that my first “what I’m reading” post would be something really special … an impressive title that showed my discerning taste in reading material (I’m joking—I’m a fairly nondiscriminatory reader and always have been). But instead, my entire household got hit with our first case of COVID and my reading for the past two weeks was whatever I could manage while dealing with frequent fatigue and occasional brain fog.

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Reading

This Reading Life

Rebekah Matt8 Comments

My life with books goes so far back that I actually can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read.

My entire childhood was spent with my “nose in a book,” as my grandfather often said. Books were my comfort, my friends, my treasures, my security, my escape, and my joy. Children who have insecure and disrupted family lives often find solace in something they can control, and my solace was found in books.

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Faith

Who’s in Need of Redeeming Love?

Rebekah Matt4 Comments

The reviews are in on “Redeeming Love,” and redemption is not what our culture thinks it is.

I can’t begin to estimate how many female Christian friends have urged me to read Francine Rivers’ 1991 bestselling book Redeeming Love over the years (so many!), and I finally got around to it last year. Now, romantic fiction, Christian or not, is not my cup of tea, and I’ve read very little of it. So I’m a poor judge of books in this genre. I would have a hard time reviewing something in a particular category that I’m mostly unfamiliar with … other than that it’s a book, and I’ve read plenty of books.

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Reading

5 Things I Learned From a Year of Pandemic Reading

Rebekah Matt12 Comments

If you’re an avid reader, no doubt you’ve broken some personal reading records between March 2020 and March 2021. A year of a global pandemic will do that to a person. Maybe you also  binged on Disney+, learned to bake bread, did jigsaw puzzles, took countless walks, put in a home garden, cleaned and organized, or remodeled your house. But seriously, not if any of those things cut into your reading time, right?

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Reading · Schooling

The “How to Raise a Reader” Myth

Rebekah Matt6 Comments

I’m an avid reader. I own a couple of thousand books, I read almost every day (for fun), and I’ve been like this my whole life. When I was a little girl, I spent breakfast time reading every box and bag in the kitchen, I read during recess at school, and I was often admonished to “take my nose out of a book” to look at the scenery on car trips.

I married a man who reads almost as much as I do and owns even more books. When we had children, they were all raised in a house full of books, used literature-based learning for school, saw their parents reading often, and were read aloud to until they were teens every single school day. We read really good books, too—fun and interesting books that everybody liked. So naturally, they all grew up to be readers, right?

Wrong.

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