Someone else should have a turn feeling guilty about not reading Finnegans Wake.
reading habits
Walking together through Sussex and To The Lighthouse.
In a course on contemplative prayer, I assigned just six books—and we read them each twice.
Words and wilderness
When I go backpacking, I pack light—no laptop, no phone, and especially no books. But reading Belden Lane, I’m tempted to begin toting a tome or two.
Recently my wife and I moved, and the time came to decide which books I could live without. I dreaded it.
One of the reasons I was drawn to Jimmy Carter, first as an emerging national politician in the mid-1970s and then as a biographical subject decades later, was the similarity of our backgrounds. Both of us were reared in evangelical households, he in rural southwest Georgia and I in Nebraska, Minnesota, Michigan, and Iowa. We are both the oldest in our families: Carter had three younger siblings, and I have four younger brothers. We had “born-again” experiences at an early age, Carter at age 11 and me initially at, well, three years old—but that is another story.
The Century asked Thomas G. Long, Barbara Brown Taylor, Scott Cairns and Kathleen Norris to describe their daily routines with the written word.