God is real. And God is big. Those were my take-home messages from Heaven is for Real, things I daily need to be reminded of. Heaven is for Real is the true story of three-year-old Colton Burpo, who almost died when his appendix burst. While he was having surgery, he got a three-minute glimpse of heaven that included an awful lot of experiences. Over the next several years, he would casually drop some of these observations into conversations with his parents. His father, Todd Burpo, put these conversations on paper, and this book was born.

I read this book in one evening. It’s written simply and is easy to read. The story of Colton really pulled me in, and I was eager to see what he would describe next. He talks about the colors in heaven and the people he meets there, including a sister who had been miscarried. Every observation is given matter-of-factly. Colton’s pure, childlike faith shines through.

I made a point of not reading other reviews (especially theological ones) before I read this book. I could just see theologians of all varieties tearing it apart. And while I don’t take Colton’s knowledge of heaven as the Gospel truth in every detail, I don’t doubt that he really had this experience. I appreciated how many Bible verses were included to compare his observations to. Occasionally it seemed to be a stretch to apply a particular one, but for the most part, what Colton saw lined up with what the Bible says.

Colton believes whole-heartedly and without wavering in the truth of God’s existence and in the boundless capacity of His love. Faith doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it takes a three-year-old to remind us of that.

So a month or so ago, I went to a used book sale at a local church. I limited myself to one bag of books, and I felt pretty good about myself. Controlled accumulation. (If you want to see what I got then, you can check out this post.) I was satisfied. Then last Saturday, my mom asked if I wanted to go to the biannual library book sale. I tried to resist, but I knew I would give in eventually. Rooms full of books to browse through are just too much fun to pass up. I still tried to control myself. I filled only one paper bag (it was $5 per bag day), although it was certainly full to the brim (and maybe a bit above the brim. . .)

Here's are the goodies I can home with! The titles are all linked to Goodreads, so you can check them out for yourself.

Mistress Pat by L.M. Montgomery
Keys to the Castle by Donna Ball
The Provincial Lady in London by E.M. Delafield (This book sounds amazing. One of those random finds that make looking through hundreds of books worth it!)
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (This month's book club selection. Perfect timing for me to find a copy!)
Sacajawea by Joseph Bruchac
The Grand Tour by Patricia Wrede & Caroline Stevermer (If this is good, I'm going to have to track down the first book in the series.)
The Sooterkin by Tom Gilling (Who wouldn't want to read a book about a half-seal baby?)
Sword Song by Bernard Cornwell
Psalm at Journey's End by Erik Fosnes Hansen (Historical fiction about the musicians on the Titanic)
Milk Glass Moon by Adriana Trigiani (I was so excited to find the third book in her Big Stone Gap series!!)
The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis

(Pevensie wanted in on the action.)

Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly by Sue Halpern
Corked by Kathryn Borel
Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East by Susan Allen Toth
The Horses of St. Mark's by Charles Freeman
Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian by Scott Douglas (My husband spotted this one and grabbed it for me. He knows me so well!)
The Spinster and the Prophet: H.G. Wells, Florence Deeks, and the Case of the Plagiarized Text by A.B. McKillop (Ooh, literary scandal!)
A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World by Nicholas A. Basbanes
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (Because I own his other two books, but not the one that started it all.)
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading by Maureen Corrigan (How can you pass up a title like that!)

I'm excited for another spin! This is such a fun way to keep myself chipping away at my Classics Club list. I am cheating a little bit though - I'm just copying and pasting my list from the last spin (trading out the one I read, of course). That's mostly because I'm trying to read books I already own, so those are the books I put on the list. So here it is!

1. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
2. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
3. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
4. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
5. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
7. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
8. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
9. The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
10. Autobiography of Anthony Trollope by Anthony Trollope
11. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. Erewhon by Samuel Butler
13. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
14. Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald
15. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
16. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
17. Waverly by Sir Walter Scott
18. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Bucks
19. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
20. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

This is a book that I just randomly picked up off the library shelf. Sometimes those are the best ones. This book was so beautiful and so much more than I expected.

It’s the early 1900s in Montana. Paul’s mother has died, and his father has answered an advertisement in the newspaper about a housekeeper. Enter Rose Llewellyn – and her brother Morrie, who tagged along. Morrie ends up taking over the position of teacher for the one-room schoolhouse, where his talents as an unconventional know-it-all can shine.

Throughout the book, you come to love every single character, especially Paul’s youngest brother, Toby. What an adorable seven-year-old. Paul’s family has such a bond. Dryland farming in Montana doesn’t sound like much fun, but I would still put up with it to be part of Paul’s family, including Rose and Morrie. Ivan Doig paints a picture of a time when life was simpler and friends and family mattered more than anything. Doig’s writing, all around, is superb.

This is a truly touching book. The start may be a bit slow, but stick with it. If you do, these characters will stick with you for a very long time.

It's May! It's May! The flowers are blooming. The trees are giving out hints of green. The temperature is more or less warm. The days of reading out in the sun are just around the corner. . .

The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen by Syrie James - Review
Smiling Shelves Soapbox - The Book That Got Away (Anyone else have one of those?)
My Man Jeeves & Aunts Aren't Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse (for the Reading to Know Book Club)

La Bella Lingua by Dianne Hales (A fascinating history of the Italian language)
Longbourn by Jo Baker (My thoughts are still formulating, but I did enjoy it overall.)

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (I'm so close to being done with this audiobook! Half an hour to go!)
Bucking the Sun by Ivan Doig

A Romance on Three Legs by Katie Hafner (This is probably the next book I'll read, though I'm not committing for sure! I've wanted to get to it for awhile, and this seems like a pretty good time.)

It took some doing to get ahold of My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. None of the library systems around me had it (and there are 4!). I finally discovered it accidentally on an audiobook app I had just downloaded - Librivox. Otherwise, I would have been out of luck. I'm not a huge audiobook person, so I've only been listening to it when I go running. Which means, after nearly a month, I'm still not quite finished. Just half of the last story to go (so please, nobody tell me how it turns out!).

I also decided to read a paper Jeeves novel that I already owned during this month - Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. Turns out it's the last Jeeves novel written by Wodehouse, so inadvertently, I ended up reading Bertie and Jeeves' first and last adventures during April.

It was very interesting to see what had changed over the course of those 15 novels and what hadn't. Wodehouse's humor was the same. Bertie Wooster was just as bumbling and helpless as ever, and Jeeves is just as wise and resourceful as ever. In My Man Jeeves, though, there was a bit more emphasis on Bertie's battle for independence, although that only stretched as far as the purchase of a hat or coat that Jeeves disapproved of. In Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, Bertie was wrapped completely around Jeeves' little finger, even if he didn't understand him any better as a person than he had in the first novel. The other major difference I noticed was that Aunts Aren't Gentlemen had a lot of abbreviations that sometimes took me quite awhile to puzzle out. For example, "And life in a country cottage with the aged r just around the corner would be a very different thing from a country c with her. . ." Kind of brings the fluid reading to a halt. Whereas, My Man Jeeves didn't have any of these. Or it's possible that the audiobook narrator just read the whole word instead of the abbreviation for the sake of clarity.

Wodehouse seems to have found a formula, a style, and a voice that worked for him in My Man Jeeves, and he stayed true to form all the way through Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. It takes quite the imagination to think up all the scrapes that Bertie was constantly getting himself into, inadvertently or through his own foolishness. At the end of the day, though, it wasn't the plots that stuck with me. It was Wodehouse's laugh-out-loud wit, which I'm sure garnered me some strange looks as I'm running along laughing to myself. But who can help it, when confronted with such lines as, "The man looked like Clarence, only an earlier model. I concluded that it must be Clarence's father." Still makes me chuckle even now.

Has this ever happened to you? You read an amazing book, return it to the library, and then can never find it again. Because of Goodreads, this will no longer happen to me. But I've only been using Goodreads for a little over a year. And there are two books that stick in my memory as "the book that got away." And yes, they still bother me.

This first happened when I was in middle school. I had read a book from my local library. I remember very little about the plot now, except there was a maze and a castle involved. What I do remember is going out to my tire swing after I had finished reading it. I just swung idly and thought about the book for nearly half an hour. I'm pretty sure this was my first experience of a book hangover. That branch of my library closed several years ago, and I have always kicked myself for not going back and finding that book again.

The second time this happened was only a couple of summers ago. I was sitting in one of the comfy chairs in the YA section of the library. A book caught my eye. I checked it out, devoured it, and immediately requested the other two books in the series. The main character was going to live with her dad because her mom had just passed away. Her dad works at the Renaissance Fair over the summer, so that's where she goes. She discovers that, while there are humans at the Renaissance Fair, there are also many that aren't human. In fact, she herself isn't entirely human.

I know this author has written other books that I would love to read. But I can't remember the title of any of the books I read, let alone the author's name. I have scoured the shelves in the YA section of my library, but I can't find it again.

There are some books that stick with us long after we've read them because the characters or the plot becomes part of us. So much so that we want to experience them again someday. Unless we can never find them again! Then they simply live on in our memory, although we always keep a watchful eye out at libraries and book sales. We live in hope.

Does anyone else have a story of "the book that got away"?