Favorites/Lists

Lists, Lists, Lists

June 2008: Oh, The Places We'll Go!
(Readers' Dream Destinations)

May 2008: Get Inspired! (Twenty-six Contest Entries)

April 2008: Let's Go to the Movies
(Twenty-Five Must-See American Films
Will devote another list to foreign films))

 March 2008: Here's to you, Ireland!
(Places to Visit on Lovely Erin)

 February 2008: Valentine's Day Memories

 January 2008: New Year's Resolutions Which Rocked My Socks Off 

December 2007: Most Popular Christmas Reads
Readers' Choice

(Listed in order of votes received)

 October/November 2007: Favorite Fall Memories 

• Crunching through fall leaves
• Buying new school supplies
• Starting a new Bible study 
• Bundling up for a high school or college football game
• Making potato and tortilla soups by scratch
• Hearing the rattle of seed pods on native grass plants
• Watching the geese return to our very underrated Midwestern blue skies

September 2007: Places Which Inspire You                        

• Turkey Run State Park, Indiana
• San Juan Island, Washington State   
• The Empire Builder route, Amtrak, U.S.A.
• Kiawah Island, South Carolina
• Na Pali Coast, Kauai, Hawaii
• Kalupapa Peninsula, Molokai, Hawaii
• Grindelwald, Switzerland
• Custer State Park, South Dakota
• Okefenokee Swamp, Florida
• Green Lake Conference Center, Green Lake, Wisconsin
• Maxwell Park, Normal, Illinois
• Acadia National Park, Maine
• Crested Butte, Colorado, and a fifty-mile circle around it
• The Old Taos Highway, New Mexico 
• Clare County, Ireland

August 2007: Old friends

July 2007: Summer loves!
Scour your favorite bookstores! Poll your friends!
Come up with at least five scintillating summer reads! 
Winner receives a $15 gift certificate to Borders Books & Music!
Please e-mail your selections to patti@pattilacy.com or
select "Contact Me" on this website and enter your list in the "Message" box.

Patti's Summer Loves 2007
(*Reviewed on the site button entitled Reviews)

Mine was an odd childhood, living in an athletic dormitory with two hundred sometime brothers, my father, the dorm director, and Mother. In May, after the sometimes brothers had ripped sheets from their bed, stuffed satchels and trunks with smelly clothes, and headed home for another summer, loneliness swept in like a Texas thunderstorm.

That first summer they all left, I was four years old, and Mother somehow knew how hard it would be for me to tell my sometime brothers good-bye. After all, there were no kids to play with on a college campus, and my full-time brothers hadn't been born yet.

"Let's find some summer loves!" Mother exclaimed, wiping my tears away as we waved to the last sometime brother.

"What are summer loves?" I asked.

"The best kind!" When she lifted her eyebrows in that funny way she had, her face took on the look of a circus clown's, and I knew fun was on its way. "They take you around the world, then bring you back. They never mess with your stuff, and they don't cost a dime!"

I didn't understand what was going on until we walked across campus, climbed the library steps, and tiptoed into the lobby, which back then was hush-hush even when all the students were around. That day, it was empty as Christ's tomb.

"Books?" I asked Mother, more than slightly disappointed. They child of two educators, I'd been knee deep in books for my whole life. They'd propped up the gimpy leg on my baby bed, been jerryrigged into a coffee table of sorts, preserved and pressed Mother's favorite flowers...but most of all, we read them, talked about them...lived them.

"Special ones. The ones that aren't assigned in school." She patted my head. "Of course, you don't know about that yet." Mother lowered her voice when the crabby librarian eyed her. "The ones you'd pay money for."

My breath caught in my throat. While my parents coveted books like others coveted gold, they'd sworn off buying them until Daddy's dissertation was finished. Our books were borrowed, gifted, traded, and perhaps even obtained under less admirable circumstances. "For real?" I asked.

Another look from Mrs. Crab didn't faze Mother. "For real," she insisted. She took my arm and led me to the study carrel under which I'd played solitaire while Daddy did research. "If they're yours, you can memorize your favorite parts, write in the margins, and read them over and over. They'll make you laugh...and cry, when you realize you're on the last chapter."

As the years went by, I learned just what Mother meant. I sampled Green Eggs and Ham with Seuss, survived a dreadful house fire with Beautiful Joe, solved mysteries with the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, and visited London and Paris and Narnia, which was such a wonderful place, I never wanted to come home...

Now I'm fifty-two, and I still eagerly reenact the summertime ritual my mother began back in Martin Hall even though now I go to Borders or Barnes & Noble or Berean and buy books instead of checking them out of the library, mainly so I can write in the margins of my summer friends' pages, like my parents loved to do. For weeks, sometimes months, I query my friends and read online reviews, compiling a semifinalist list. To choose the finalists, I scour the bookstores, scooping up an armful of the top ten or twenty, and let them spill onto one of those minuscule tables in the quietest corner of the bookstore's coffee bar, or in the case of Berean, the back corner of the store, by the bathrooms. Some are pretty young things, hot off the presses; others are so old, their authors are cold in their graves and have been for centuries. Be forewarned: just like in real-life relationships, some summer loves just don't work out. But I'll follow my Grandmother Hazel's advice on this type of matter: I won't talk about them if they won't talk about me. And if one summer love doesn't work out, I'll carefully replace it on the store's bookshelf and pull down another and another and another.  

                                                               June's genre: Christian fiction!

Up, Up, and Away--Twenty-Three Fiction Reads

                                                                  May's Genre: Christian Nonfiction
Tried and Trusted Old Friends: 20 Favorite Books of Christian Nonfiction