I love to read. It’s that thing I do to help me unwind in the evening. What I do to soothe my soul. I think there is something undeniably special about reading. A connection you make with a story that is so much different than watching a movie or TV. And, I don’t just like reading books, I like talking about them.
I’ve loved to read ever since I was a little girl. I still remember the first book I read that made me fall in love with reading, around the time when I was six or seven years old. It was called Wednesday’s Witch by Ruth Chew (I still have the book in my home library) and I will never forget this first time I loved getting lost in a book. I was hooked.
Today, I’m an avid reader. I love fiction of any sort. I tend to lean towards a good, long book seeping with history, a cleverly written ‘who-done-it’, anything time travel, and of course, a good drama or love story (nothing too sappy, thank you very much). Being a student at heart, I tend to alternate my leisurely fiction reads with educational, non-fictional ones. My main go-to categories being health, anatomy, nutrition and/or fitness, spiritual, gardening, and recipe books.
One of my favourite recent fiction reads this year is The Book of Longings, a new book by Sue Monk Kidd (The Invention of Wings and The Secret Life of Bees). Have you ever come across a book that you want to read slowly because you want to savour it? Well for me, this is the book.
An ambitious historical novel set in the first century, Sue Monk Kidd’s fourth novel is daring in that it involves Jesus as the main character. In this imagined story, the life of a young woman, Ana, comes to meet young Jesus when he is eighteen years old. Ana is struggling with deep passions and longings of her own, struggling to find her voice in a time when women are meant to be silent. Then, she falls in love and becomes the wife of Jesus. Although this is strictly a fictional story, what I love so much about this book is how historically accurate it is. The author is able to bring forth, with such feeling, the human side of Jesus and what his life may have been like before he became the Messiah and the incarnation of God.
This is your inspiring book of the year.
