The 5×5 reading challenge was started by Mystie Winckler, part of the Schole Sisters. She said whenever she wanted to learn about something, her dad would tell her to get five books on that topic and read them. This reading challenge was the outflow of that practice. You choose five categories and read five books…
I am praying that 2026 is a year that I can focus on being fruitful. A focus on fruitfulness feels different than focusing on being productive. Fruitfulness helps get the focus off of me and what I accomplished (or didn’t) and focus more on God and what He had for me that day. So I’m…
As I was annotating the memoir of Susan Allibone, I came across a line from a hymn that Susan quoted in a letter to her friend. I was marking the references to verses and poems she often included in her letters, so I typed that unfamiliar line into Google and went down a lovely rabbit…
I finally have a new entry in my reading notebook! I just finished Reconnected by Carlos Whittaker and really enjoyed it. His writing style is authentic, easy to read and even had me laughing a few times–which is odd considering it is a book about what our phones are doing to us. I’m trying to…
I am working on my 2025 goals and will share them next week, but thought first we might need to catch up a bit. 2024 was a good but hard year and I was pretty quiet here on the blog. In January 2024 my father-in-law died and my mother-in-law was a widow for the second…
Marginalia: plural noun: notes or embellishments in the margin of a book. I’m still slowly reading through Susan Allibone’s memoir. This time through I’m color coding specific topics that she writes about (self-examination is purple). I absolutely love this excerpt in a letter to her dear friend and had to share it with you. Susan…
I recently finished a great biography about one of the first female missionaries from America to Burma, Ann Judson. As always, I’m interested in how great men and women of the Lord lived their daily lives. At about 16 years old, Ann wrote a prayer in her diary about how she wanted “to live wholly…
Here’s a list of the books I read in 2022. I have lists for non-fiction, fiction, poetry, post-apocalyptic fiction, and how-to books. Non-fiction Studies in the Sermon on the Mount . This, by far, has been the most influential book of the last three years (it took that long to go through it, chapter by…
For 2023 I’m going to alternate between weekly updates (goal check-ins, garden progress, notebook updates) and weekly “things shared” posts. These will be things I’ve shared with my friends that week (or things they’ve share with me) that impressed me, made me think, or made me laugh. So let’s give it a try. Here are…
I don’t have a lot of entries in my Reading Notebook for the summer because I am still plowing (slowly) through Don Quixote for my continuing education project. I’m following the advice given in The Well-Educated Mind and writing a brief summary at the end of each chapter. Then I’m adding the summaries in my…