Faith

Who’s in Need of Redeeming Love?

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

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

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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