Love Looks Like This – this beautiful post by Sarah Bessey brought tears to my eyes. Such perfect timing for our Here Year theme this month. Sarah writes that “lifelong love is actually most built throughout the hours of the day, all twenty four of them, in the ordinary moments of our humanity.” Oh, yes. Lifelong love isn’t what we imagined it would be, at least not for me. It’s so much more multifaceted, complicated, and beautiful.
I read Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable
Embarking on a Voyage – Barnstorming is one of my favorite blogs, and this post is a great example of why. The future is a murky mess. We can only navigate by our wits and by what we can hear in the fog. This short piece is so beautiful.
Matt and I watched The Affair over the holiday break. I don’t watch much TV, but that’s changing lately because the qualify of shows such as The Affair have really captured my attention (I also love Homeland and House of Cards). I was riveted by the Affair despite finding the two central protagonists quite unlikeable. I’m particularly fascinated by the notion of what we remember and why, and about how our recollections of an experience as filtered through our own subjectivity (and thus may differ from those of others).
I write these Things I Love Lately posts approximately monthly. You can find all of the previous ones here.
, and am reading my friend Rebecca Pacheco’s 
, which comes out this spring. I look forward to reviewing closer to the release date but suffice it to say that I love this book.
by Anthony Doerr, 
by Lily King, and 
by Emily St. John Mandel.
(Tara Mohr): I devoured Tara’s book, underlining madly because so much of what she said made so much sense to me. Playing Big is a call to action, a reminder of all that women leave on the table when we don’t speak up, and a careful diagnosis of the ways in which we sideline ourselves without even realizing it. In every chapter Tara unfolded an insight that I’d never seen that particular way before, and I frequently gasped as I read. “This book was born out of a frustration and a hope,” says Tara in the introduction, and Playing Big helped me both understand my frustration at certain constructs in the world and allowed a new hope about what might someday be to bloom.
(Carla Naumburg): “Mindful parenting is about remembering that in any moment we have a choice about how we engage with, and respond to, the details of our lives.” I love this quote so much that 
(Marilynne Robinson): This was one of my most-anticipated books this year, and the honest truth is that when I first read it I was slightly disapppointed. I found the narrative, which cuts back and forth between history and the present day, a little bit confusing. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the story, and that tells me that Robinson’s book is another masterpiece. Like Gilead, Lila‘s pace is deliberate, and reading the novel felt like attending a sermon or praying. And yet for all the parallels between the books, Robinson beautifully differentiates Lila’s voice from John’s. This is a powerful tale of redemption and grace, and reminds me of what religion, at its best, can be. I loved it.
by Rainbow Rowell, which I’d heard such wonderful things about. I loved it as much as I hoped I would. I couldn’t put down the funny/sad story about belonging and connection and adolescence. I highly recommend!