I just got back from a fantastic dinner. Mary Kay, my wonderful pastor at Dumbarton, is on a mission to learn how to make fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy, like her mom does. By "learn how to" I mean she's figured out how to make it pretty damn well, and so my friends Heather and Jeff and I got to be her guinea pigs.
It was frikin' delicious.
So I was thinking of not giving up on fried chicken, which I'm not, but what I really want to talk about is how we had a great conversation after Mary Kay asked, "So, what are your favorite books?"
We talked about classics, and fantasy novels, and Heather read us beautiful Victor Hugo quotes.
I know books are sort of passe these days, and most of what I read on a given day (if it's not theology) is between the length of a tweet and a blog. But I just love books.
This is not where I go on a rant about e-readers. I don't mind them at all. But you can't loan them out, really. And there just something about being down in the basement of the library and being overwhelmed by that old book smell. And there's something home-like about the piles of books in my room, that I have to move back and forth to travel between desk and bed.
I can look up Bible passages at any time on my computer. But when I gave my Bible away, I wanted to get another one that I could carry around, that I could read on the bus and mark up and throw in my backpack and bend the cover of accidentally. I want to feast on the thing. You can look up pictures of food on your computer, but you can't feast.
This Lent, I'm not giving up on books.
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