onehouse

Little Black Moons/Give-a-book 11 and 12

I have to make frequent trips to the post office. I divide my time between two of them, one at a 7-11 just north of the house and another one bus trip south at a small import shop in Chinatown. Canada Post has given me plenty of misery in my publishing and mailing lifetime but these two places are always helpful and friendly and good for a little conversation.

Most of my time is spent at the 7-11 post office to the north. I usually come in with a big batch of magazine envelopes, all different weights and destinations but the lady who greets me just plows right through them. She reminds me of one of those unflappable truck stop or diner waitresses complete with the flaming red hair and the "hon" thrown in at the end of my order. The other day she stopped to show me her nails, long, newly painted and very shiny. I looked down at my battered and ragged nails. "I've been gardening so I can't do that," I said. "I'm going away tomorrow so I took the risk of having these at work for one day," she replied, picking up my packages carefully between the palms of her hands, her nails reflecting the sunlight from the window.

Two kinds of light, I thought, remembering poet Luci Shaw describing her gardening hands:

All this spring, I've worn dirt
under my fingernails like a label--
little black moons.

from Inscriptions, The Green Earth

(The Green Earth is up for a giveaway should you like it. Also Voices in the Night: The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Both are hard covers and in great shape. I also have the bottom three CS Lewis books still available at this post.Don't be shy. There is no catch. Just send me an email.)

Update: Well, that was fast. Minutes after posting, The Green Earth is off to California.

Update to the Update: And the Bonhoeffer book is now gone too. Still got the Lewis books.

Give-a-book 6,7,8, 9 and 10

Here's the original giveaway post in case you are new to the site.

Someone wrote in too late for the L'Engle poetry book and I gave away some poetry by Luci Shaw. So that was Number 6.

Now we move to another section of the library. I really enjoy CS Lewis' writing and I revisit him on occasion. But I have spent quite a bit of time with him over the years. It all began when my Grade 4 teacher sat on her desk swinging her white stocking legs which boldly contrasted with her bright green mini-skirt, and opened up The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Lamposts and snow and the disappointing candy bar Turkish Delight have never been the same. I am grateful.

I don't anticipate I will be spending too much more time with dear Mr. Lewis. There are still a few works to visit but these ones can go. I will let amazon do the talking for some of these books as they were sent to me but I don't think I'll be reading them. I am also a little overloaded by pop culture religious references to Narnia and Mordor of late. Tolkien himself would probably be seen in a pipe puffing huff. He also did not like allegory and would be none too pleased with his stories stretched to the breaking point in order to make for a "relevant" Sunday morning service. Stories are more powerful when they are just let be without someone saying "See that? Hmmm? Did ya' see that?"

I will say that the Six by Lewis collection was bought on a trip to Ultrecht, Holland while I was living in the south of France when I was yet a foolish young lady. For that reason it has a bit of faded, thumbed through sentimental value. But I can let it go elsewhere. I'll always have Paris.

So here you go. Email if you want one.

Six by Lewis (My box set is more plain than the one pictured here. I prefer it over these flowers.)
Update: This one has been spoken for and will soon be on its way to BC.

The CS Lewis Readers Encyclopedia (more of a reference book for the serious Lewis reader.)

Tolkien: A Celebration (I enjoy my Lord of the Rings collection but I don't need to go any deeper.)

The Way to Narnia: A Reader's Guide (Same with Narnia.)

Clarification

I've received a couple of notes from people who are a little confused about which books I'm giving away and which books I am reading. If you see Giveaway in the title or in the category of the post, those are the books I am giving away. The other books I refer to are just ones that I am reading for my 52 books this year and they are either borrowed or going back into the Onehouse library.

Hope this helps. Enjoy.

Book 4 of 52: A Cry Like A Bell

Update: So sad. All the books are gone for this week. I must admit, being a no-comment blog, it is so fun to see different readers check in at the onehouse email to ask for some 3D mail.  Nice to meet some of you who drop by here on occasion. I'm not sure why you come to see me talk to myself. It could be a "Hey, look at the crazy lady." kind of thing but it's still good fun.

And Give-A-Book 3, 4 and 5

The painting of the office required some more sorting and stacking of books. The "Giveaway" box is now filled to overflowing.  I took a quick look through my poetry shelf and found two Madeleine L'Engle poetry books that I hadn't read in a while. I usually like to take poetry slowly, a few lines at a time. Poetry should be like food and wine and dark chocolate - a little of the good stuff is better for you in the long run than a lot of mushy processed fast writing. More spray cheese with your assembly line novel, sir?

L'Engle's A Cry Like A Bell is a collection of poems giving voice to characters from the Bible. Balaam's Ass, Leah, Jacob, Moses and his son tell their stories. Abraham says:

Unlike the other gods
you are not satisfied with holocausts
and the sweet smell of smoke.
Unlike the other gods
you do not let us be
but come and pitch your tent
with ours and sniff out
all we do. You are not satisfied
to have us satisfied,
to leave well enough alone.

I'll keep this book and revisit it during some of the hours. Poetry fits well with listening. There is no filler, no skimming and skipping. You breathe in all the carefully placed words.

I have three L'Engle books to give away this week. You will have to pry my Wrinkle in Time from my cold dead hands but these books can visit another home if you have use for them:

The Weather of the Heart (1978) - poetry. I may be sorry I parted with this one. I copied out a few poems that I will post here later. My favorite is called Love Letter and it starts like this:

I hate you God.
Love, Madeleine

Walking On Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (1980) - just what the title says. A good book for those who are at the beginnings of thinking about art and the spiritual life.

Winter's Love (1957)- a novel. I've never read it and it has been sitting on my shelf for a while. Written in 1957, it predates Wrinkle in Time by five years or so. I should read it just to see L'Engle's writing evolve but I know I won't get to it and someone else should enjoy it. I think it may be out of print now although all these books are from the Wheaton Literary Series.

L'Engle turns 90 this year. If you've never read Wrinkle in Time,  kick your TV until it stops working and then take a walk through a truly wonderful story.

Madeleinelengle.com

Read a book/give a book 2

Update: This week's book has been spoken for and will soon be sunning itself in California. Lucky book.  I will try to tuck myself between page 36 and 37 so if you see something fall out and then run away to the Getty, you'll know it was me.

Here is book giveaway number two. I blogged about Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness here, here and here. Go ahead and send me your name and address and I'll happily send it along. It's new, it's hardcover and it's yours if you want it. This is an extra copy because I want a copy of this to stay on the Onehouse shelf. I think you will want one too.

"Karen Armstrong speaks to the troubling years following her decision to leave the life of a Roman Catholic nun and join the secular world in 1969. What makes this memoir especially fascinating is that Armstrong already wrote about this era once---only it was a disastrous book. It was too soon for her to understand how these dark, struggling years influenced her spiritual development, and she was too immature to protect herself from being be bullied by the publishing world. As a result, she agreed to portray herself only in as "positive and lively a light as possible"---a mandate that gave her permission to deny the truth of her pain and falsify her inner experience. The inspiration for this new approach comes from T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday, a series of six poems that speak to the process of spiritual recovery. Eliot metaphorically climbs a spiral staircase in these poems---turning again and again to what he does not want to see as he slowly makes progress toward the light. In revisiting her spiral climb out of her dark night of the soul, Armstrong gives readers a stunningly poignant account about the nature of spiritual growth. Upon leaving the convent, Armstrong grapples with the grief of her abandoned path and the uncertainty of her place in the world." --Gail Hudson, amazon.com

Read a book/give a book 1

Update: This week's book has been spoken for and it will be winging its way to Saskatchewan in short order. Check back after book number 2 for the next "read a book/give a book". You've got to get up pretty early to beat those people in Saskatchewan. Or is it "beat up" the people in Saskatchewan? I can never remember.

I have some books that I know that I will not be reading over the next few years or that I will not read again. They're not bad books. They're just things I wouldn't choose to move to another place because I don't plan on spending more time with them. And I love the presence of books but for the sake of freedom and simplicity, it's good to let a few walk out the door from time to time.

So here's my Read a book/give a book plan. If you think you'd like the book I place here every week, help yourself. Don't be shy. I'll update the post when the book is gone. I don't care how many books you take over time. If you're interested, early birds and worms and all that.

The first book that looks pretty interesting but probably won't get read is Ralph Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ Haunted South. I read the introduction and found some good things, but to be honest, I have so many other places to be for the next while. It's brand new and shiny and I'll send it to you if you like.

From the introduction:

No one understood both the promise and the failure  of the modern church better than Flannery O'Connor.

(snip)

She confessed that the church's feeble and often noxious witness causes Christians as much grief as does the world's mad plunge over the cliffs of self-destruction. The Catholic theologian Romano Guardini went even further: he described the church as the cross on which Christ was crucified. Unlike Nietzsche, O'Connor agreed with Guardini that the church contains the one Solution even as it constitutes a terrible part of the problem. For O'Connor, the church is the body of the risen and reigning Christ. As such, it cannot decay into final decrepitude and death, even if it remains scrofulous and sclerotic. Hence the frequent likening of the church to Noah's ark: only the storm without exceeds the stench within. Yet insofar as Christ remains its animating center, the church provides everlasting life amidst the all-encompassing death.