Books

I have spent a good amount of time reading lately, as I decided TV is not very interesting lately, with all the negative programming..... Even the news is blatantly bad with little gleams of hope in this dark world..... Okay, so maybe it is a little melodramatic, but I have noticed that I don't miss the fear that a lot of TV brings into the home every night.... We still watch TV, it just consists of Barney, Winnie the Pooh, and Strawberry Shortcake..... and other tame shows.....and hence turns off when the kids go to bed.

I have found that without the TV though, that I a lot of extra time on my hands that I never knew I had before. I would spend the time sewing and doing other creative things, but my sewing room is inaccessible at night or else wake a rather sleepy daddy. (We are trying to remedy that shortly) So instead I have been reading. It has been really nice to read again. Though I have very little to show for the hours of time spent doing it, it is enjoyable. I started by rereading Deadline by Randy Alcorn, The Hidden Value of a Man by John Trent and Gary Smalley, and just finished Bringing up Girls by James Dobson. Then I started rereading The mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers. So now I am wrapped up in the story of Christianity in Rome........ what better way to spend time that that???

I would honestly recommend the Hidden Value of a Man book, which I had bought a few years ago for Mike on Fathers Day. It is written by two men for men, so the illustration and manner of writing is not typical for a woman's reading style. Towards the middle to end of the book though, the chapters still refer to male offspring as it is the goal of the book, but the truths written apply to all children and even adults who still need some resolution from childhood pains....

The Bringing up Girls by James Dobson was somewhat of a disappointment to me though. It focused mostly on Teenage years for which I am not yet at the point in which I must prepare my girls. By the time I get there, the obstacles that they face may even be vastly different.... but my biggest issue with the book was simply the general stance of the book. While it went into statistics and so forth, it never really gave any answers to the problems that parents face, but instead sent the reader to fish out another book by other authors or earlier works of Dobsons. Part of it may be that as a woman, I know a lot more of the struggles in being a woman that Dr Dobson ever could being a counselor, he is still very much a man and therefore can only scratch the surface of the topic.... secondly, we happen to know a lot of the youth pastors at local churches or have worked directly with youth at some point in our life make the statistics and so forth not as shell shocking as Dobson would have liked. So, the target audience of the book would really be moms who are out of touch, Dads for sure, and the general population that doesn't have much exposure to what it is like for a teenage life and culture....which isn't really me. Otherwise I would recommend it.

The other tow books, being older books, I probably will not go into, just know I own all of the francine rivers books (except her newest one) and just the fact that I am rereading the books, must tell you something.