I read a couple of books while I was recuperating from the creeping crud last week, and I’m just now getting around to writing about them. The first was The God I Love by Joni Eareckson Tada. The book is basically a re-telling of Joni’s life with more emphasis on her childhood and her life after the publication of her first, very successful, attempt at spiritual autobiography, Joni, written about 30 years ago. For those who haven’t been running in evangelical circles for as long as that, Joni Tada is a beautiful Christian author and artist; she is also a quadriplegic, injured in a diving accident when she was still a teenager. Joni writes about growing up as the youngest of four daughters in a home where her father was “bigger than life.” She also remembers horseback riding and playing the piano, travel and discovering family secrets, teenage rebellion and, of course, The Accident. She gives hope to those dealing with depression by telling about her own bouts with depression and anxiety. And she ends the book with a statement of purpose:

“Ah, this is the God I love. The Center, the Peacemaker, the Passport to Adventure, the Joyride and the Answer to all our deepest longings. The answer to all our fears, Man of Sorrows and Lord of Joy, always permitting what he hates, to accomplish something he loves. And he had brought me here, all the way from home–halfway around the earth–so I could declare to anyone within earshot of the whole universe, to anyone that might care, that yes—
There are more important things in life than walking.”

The other book I read doesn’t really fit in the same post with this one, but I suppose the contrast could be instructive. I discovered the name Olivia Manning while researching author’s birthdays a few months ago. She was an Englishwoman who married a British Council lecturer in Bucharest, Romania just before World War II. She later wrote The Balkan Trilogy (The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, Friends and Heroes) based on her experiences during the war. The back of my library paperback copy of the trilogy says that Masterpiece Theatre made this story into a TV series called Fortunes of War starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. This information sounded hopeful; I can’t imagine Kenneth Branagh and EmmaThompson making a bad movie. Unfortunately, I also can’t imagine what even those two could have done with the material in this book. There are a few intriguing characters: Prince Yakimov is an impoverished White Russian emigre who lives off his experience in aristocratic circles; Sasha is the sheltered son of a Jewish banker who is conscripted into the Romanian army. The main characters, Guy and Helen, are, like the author and her husband, a British lecturer and his new bride. The problem is that after 924 pages, I still didn’t really like any of the characters, except for maybe poor Yaki. I think the idea of the book is a “portrait of a marriage under stress,” but by the time I got to the end, my thought was that this marriage was one that should never have been consummated in the first place. I was as tired of Helen and Guy as they were of each other, and I doubt even Kenneth and Emma could breathe new life into these characters and make them interesting again. I wanted to tell these guys, “There are more important things in life than your personal convenience, and there were things going on in Europe at this time more important than the petty politics of a second-rate English school.”