Which Books Have Encouraged You?

November wasn’t easy. It started off with two deaths in the family, a nasty cold that turned out to be Covid, then approximately 480 hours of quarantine purgatory with my children.

But as the old adage goes, when life hands you lemons . . . well, set them aside with a confused smile and pick up a good book instead. Which is what I did several times this past month.

Starting with Riverbend Gap by Denise Hunter. 

Somehow, during the midst of fresh grief and feeling the crummiest I’ve felt in years, I still managed to experience one of the most peaceful Saturdays of my life because of this book. 

Was there anything particularly mind-blowing or life-changing about this book? No. Not at all. But you know how Hallmark cranks out a billion movies every Christmas season, and watching them feels a bit like consuming a billion store-bought cookies that all taste the same, but then every once in a great while you hit on a movie that stands out like your grandma’s homemade chocolate chip cookies that you’ve never been able to replicate? 

Well, that’s what reading this book (and not leaving the recliner while my cat napped on me for an entire Saturday afternoon and evening) felt like. My grandma’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. (And if none of that makes sense, I’m pretty sure I lost a few brain cells to Covid, so you’ll just have to trust it makes perfect sense to me and move on.)  

Next up, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

If your kids can’t attend their actual school, might as well take them to Hogwarts, right? Quarantine seemed like the perfect time to embark on this book series with my kids, and my nine-year-old daughter couldn’t agree more. “Yes! Now I’ll finally know what everybody’s talking about.” My seven-year-old son took a little longer to join the Potter bandwagon. He spent the first half of the book rolling across the floor, moaning “Why does every chapter have to be so long?” Thankfully his interest perked up once Harry made the Quidditch team. “Finally. A chapter that was good.” 

Then there’s A Walk In The Woods by Bill Bryson.

When we discovered, after completing a ten day stretch of keeping the kids quarantined, that we had to begin another ten day stretch of keeping the kids quarantined, I might have cried in my pancakes. But thankfully my mother-in-law had dropped off this book from the library a week earlier because she thought I could use a good laugh. Though I had doubts about how much a middle-aged man hiking the Appalachian Trail could make me laugh, I gave it a try. A few pages in I found myself smiling. A few pages more I heard myself chuckling. By chapter four I was tracking my husband down on a regular basis to say, “Listen to this . . .”

In addition to these books, I’ve spent time in 1920s Pittsburgh thanks to Rachel Scott McDaniel’s The Mobster’s Daughter. I’ve traveled to a wintery 1950s Oxford, England via Patti Callahan’s Once Upon A Wardrobe. I’ve hung out in a couple of Texas food trucks with Betsy St. Amant’s Tacos For Two. And I’ve explored another one of Jody Hedlund’s fabulous medieval worlds in Enamored. 

I’ve always viewed books as a way to escape from life. It wasn’t until recently I heard someone suggest a great story shouldn’t help you escape from life so much as it should help you navigate through life.

And you know what? It’s true. None of the books above helped me escape the sorrow of losing two people I love. But page by page, story by story, they did help encourage me another step forward through this beautiful, wonderful, heartbreaking, hopeful journey called life. Which is exactly what I pray my books do someday for others—especially since I’m nowhere close to mastering my grandma’s chocolate chip cookie recipe.