How is it July already?
This month has quite literally FLOWN by! 2 trips, 2 family weddings, birthday celebrations and the beginning of Summer! Honestly I’m just grateful I read and wrote at all this month with everything going on!
READING UPDATE
Book #1
Drowning in Screen Time by David Murrow
“Sam likes to play table tennis, better known as ping-pong. He keeps his ping-pong balls in a glass fishbowl. One day, Sam notices that the balls are looking scuffed and dirty. So he fills a pitcher with water and pours it into the fish bowl. Two things happen.
- All the empty spaces between the balls are filled with water.
- Balls begin rising to the top and spilling out of the fishbowl.
The fishbowl represents your brains total capacity. And each ping pong ball represents a dream, thought, goal, emotion, your relationships, work, school, leisure activities, responsibilities, etc… Now back to ping-pong playing Sam. When he filled the fishbowl with water, what happened to that airspace between the balls? It was displaced, and the balls started popping out the top. In this parable, the water represents screen time. It’s filling every spare moment of our attention. Drowning out creativity. Pushing out thinking time. The water not only fills all the empty spaces between ping pong balls, it also pushes some balls out of the bowl altogether. Screen time is displacing things that are vitally important, leaving us with less time and energy to invest in the people and activities that make life worth living.”
Out of all the staggering statistics, real life stories, convicting bible verses and scientific data that “Drowning in Screen Time” includes, that one parable written at the beginning of the book was what really opened my eyes to the epidemic we are living in amid a world of screens.
This book is such a lifeline for our times. Pertinent, challenging, and eye opening, David Murrow shows what screens are doing to our families and relationships, why screen content is so addictive and how to find freedom and confidence in real life.
I would highly suggest this book to anyone who spends any time submerged in the screen world- even if you think that time is minimal!
Book #2
When the Ice Melts by Ashlyn Mckayla Ohm
“Forgiven?
Darius squinted in confusion. Hadn’t Terry heard what he’d said?
“Terry I can’t. That’s the horrible part. I can’t expect God to overlook a horrible choice that was all my own fault.”
“Overlook?” Certainly not.” Terry stared intently at Darius.
“I’m talking about forgive.”
I had the immense privilege of being an Arc reader for this incredible debut book by my Instagram friend, Ashlyn McKayla Ohm! If you’ve been around since last years, “Hope for the Holiday’s” series, you’ll remember that Ashlyn was a guest writer on my blog and wrote a beautiful post titled, “Strength for the Silent Season.”
As I expected, Ashlyn did not disappoint with this beautiful story about about identity, family and the power of redemptive love. When the Ice Melts features two sisters who share a dark past but are estranged due to choices that have torn them apart. After Addisyn, the younger sister, who is a competitive figure skater, loses the chance to compete in the Olympics, the soul crushing disappointment takes her on a journey that will reunite her with her sister and with her sister’s God-
El Shaddai, the God of the mountains.
You would never guess this book is the authors debut novel- it’s engaging, inspiring and incredibly thoughtful with deeply emotional characters and strong settings. Her descriptions of Whistler, Canada and Estes Park, Colorado made me feel like I was there and the successes and struggles her characters experience make them relatable and all the more lovable.
When the Ice Melts gets me excited to write, because it’s a story akin to the ones I want to share. Not only is it entertaining and engaging, but it will also draw you deeper to the God who loves each and every one of us and yearns to give us a second chance. I can’t wait to read what comes next from Ashlyn!
Book #3
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
“Dreams of escape- even through death- always lift toward the light.”
Ok, I won’t lie. I was influenced to read this book when I saw they were making it into a movie. I’d actually heard about it before, but was deterred from reading it due to a few people I knew who read it and didn’t care for it.
So it came as somewhat of a surprise, that this story and the authors writing really resonated and moved me. Where the Crawdads Sing isn’t just a story- it’s an experience, sweeping you into the strange, sad, entrancing world of the main character, Kya, who after being abandoned as a child in the marsh land of North Carolina, learns how to survive on her own, isolated from the world, more comfortable with the gulls and grass than people and their prejudice. The chapters alternate between Kya’s past and a future murder investigation which makes for a page turning read that is at the same time solemn and almost meditative. Given the many varying reviews on goodreads and amazon, I think it’s one of those books that a reader either loves or hates.
I felt like I should hate it, as the book delivers some very powerful punches and pictures into the shallow character of humanity without God, but for whatever reason, I loved this book. The authors writing is poetic, breathtaking and lyrical, like the rocking of the boat which Kya spends so much time in amid the marshland. Intertwined with poetry, it’s a story of resiliency, survival, prejudice, love, loss and loneliness. ‘Where the Crawdads Sing” is an ode to the natural world, but also a harrowing look into a life with nothing but it.
WRITING UPDATE:
I was definitely in more of a mindset to write this month, but unfortunately just didn’t have as many opportunities to since I was so busy! Even so, I’m happy to report that I worked on outlining the next section of my novel and finished editing and drafting a chapter that had been giving me a lot of problems.
I have a hard time writing without editing, so getting through the drafting process is taking me a lot longer than it does for some writers who do what’s called “word dumping”-writing out general ideas and dialogue as quickly as they can- to get through their outline, and then later go back when editing to add more details and descriptions.
Hopefully in the coming month I’ll have a little more time to continue drafting my novel. My goal is to finish writing through my next major plot point.
Thanks for reading my second monthly recap post!
I hope you have a very happy fourth!
Hi Em! Just read your monthly update and your (kindalike) book reviews. They were good and thought provoking in the sense of a challenge. Very thorough. I just bought a book yesterday called GET OUT NOW by Mary Rice Hasson and Teresa Farnan. A story about our public school system. There is 99 pages of references which tells me these two gals have done their research. It’s a fairly recent publication (2018) has a lot to say about who controls what, lgbq alphabet group, losing religion, powerless parents, etc. Thank your parents for choosing best for you long before all this junk started to happen. What would you say if I was to say that maybe, if the Lord tarries, there will be no public schools in 15 to 20 years? There may be a form of it but I honestly see and end to public schools soon because of outrageous costs (union demands and standarda). I’ll read the book first and we may talk sometime. You know me, I love to talk. Love GP Russ
Yes, very grateful for the sacrifices Mom and Dad made to give us a biblical and well rounded education. That sounds like a really interesting and important read for our times! I’d love to hear your thoughts after you finish it.