For the speed readers out there, feel free to consider this the 2019 edition of the Lenten Reading List. For the rest of us…let’s just be grateful that there are 50 days of Eastertide for us to contemplate (and read about) the mystery of life, death, and resurrection! Deep in our bookish hearts, we here at Church Drunk love to find God between the pages of a favorite story, and the long, dark season of Lent yearns to be accompanied by a good book or two. So we’ve made it a bit of a tradition to put together a short list of good reads for Lent. If nothing here tickles your fancy, take a look at the 2017 and 2018 editions of the list, or just hit us up in the comments to let us know what you’re reading on the long road to Good Friday!
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis – Is this a bit of a cheesy pick for Lent? Yes, yes it is. Is it a bad pick? Absolutely not. Because Aslan is a badass and will always be a badass, and Edmund is a pissy little Judas and will always be a pissy little Judas. And some stories are timeless, and can be read over and over again, and we should thank C.S. Lewis for giving us several of those very stories. And maybe (just maybe) enough time has passed since this wonderful BOOK was turned into a perfectly okay movie, and we can now officially pull it off of the DVD rack of the one remaining Blockbuster in America and we can put it back where it belongs – on a bookshelf. Where we can read it. With our eyes and brains and imaginations. That is all.
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green – If you’re a nerd (I don’t want to jump toconclusions, but come on – you’re reading the Church Drunk Lenten Reading List!), then you may know Hank Green from his internet video series SciShow, or the Crash Course videos that he produces with his brother, John. Well, now Hank has written a book, and it turns out that he is also very good at that! Remarkable Thing is about aliens (kind of) and humans (very much) and internet famousness and how to keep faith in humanity, or really faith in anything at all, in the face of the constant screaming that masquerades as today’s cultural dialogue. So, yeah. Read it!
Noir by Christopher Moore – You didn’t think we could make it through a Church Drunk reading list without a little Chris Moore, did you? He’s a local favorite here in our little corner of the interwebs, and his latest is just about the perfect book for Lent. Set in postwar San Francisco, this is a novel where every night is dark and stormy and every dame that walks through the door looks like trouble. The book was practically written with a pen dipped in a well of pure guilt, but nobody knows how to make us love a deadbeat quite like Christopher Moore. A great addition to the many Lent-ish classics provided by a truly hilarious author. Speaking of Lent-ish classics by Chris Moore, if you haven’t yet read Lamb, stop reading this stupid blog right now and go remedy that gravest of all sins!
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon – This book is just so incredibly slap-you-in-the-face good. You read it, and immediately ask yourself “why did I not read this book sooner?” It’s a book about comic books, and Hitler. It’s a book about the golem, and Harry Houdini. It’s a book about finding oneself and then having a good, hard think about how much you like what you’ve found. It is, much like all of Chabon’s books, a tremendously deep and insightful book that wraps you in a warm, cozy blanket of prose and keeps you turning page after page. Also, it won a Pulitzer Prize. So there’s that.
Between the Dark and the Daylight by Joan Chittister – This is what Dizzy & Ges are reading for Lent. It’s a book about the paradoxes and contradictions that make up life and faith and the spaces in between the two. So, you know, Lent! Join us for a good read about how to move from harried to hopeful (not that we know what it is to be harried, or frustrated, or righteously enraged by the utter futility of even trying at anything anymore…so far, Sister Joan has told us that all of these things are illusory. So, you know, Lent!)
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