January Wrap-Up (ft. photography, singing, and intense study of cloister gardens)

It's crazy to me that we're 1/12 of the way through the year already! January was a fairly calm month for me, because I was at home for almost three weeks longer than I'd usually be (because the study abroad semester starts later than the semester at UIUC) and so was able to just hang out with friends and family, do research on cloister gardens (which I'll be talking about more at a later date), and try to ignore the fact that we're currently replacing almost every window in our house, which means that it's both loud and cold in our house. XD Here are some other things that happened in my January: 

-I got to hang out with quite a few friends both virtually and in person--Discord is a lifesaver, as are simple phone calls, and hikes in the beautiful unseasonably warm PNW. :)

-I've gotten to sing with our parish choir multiple times, and since Legolas plays organ for a little tiny Catholic parish I've been cantoring for that, as well. Singing with the parish choir is fun because our conductor/music director is hilarious, and singing for Legolas is fun because singing solo isn't something I do very often, but it's something I'm trying to get better at. 

-A photographer friend (who I've known since I was not quite 11) very graciously allowed me to shadow her while she was doing photo editing, and then also for a newborn session for a family that lives about an hour away. I got some images I'm quite happy with, and I'm going to practice my newfound photo editing skills on them! If both I and the photographer like how they turn out, I'll get to send them to the family who we were photographing! 

-I've gone to several talks with the Thomistic Institute at the University of Illinois, but while I was home, for a change, I got to go to a TI talk at the University of Washington! It was a talk on Catholic culture and Tolkien, and the professor had some great insights, I thought, like the importance of a living community, how memorizing things makes them more a part of you than simply knowing about them or being able to think critically about them (although that's not bad) and the importance of being apprentices instead of 'followers' (like on Instagram).

-My mom (and dad) help coordinate marriage prep at our parish, and there was a marriage prep retreat while I was here that I volunteered at--I always love that, because our pastor does an excellent job with the talks, and I always learn something. Plus, I love meeting the engaged couples and hearing how they met--at a gelato store for one of them this time! 

-Because we've had an abysmally small amount of snow this year, I only got to go cross-country skiing once this January, but we made it count! I was glad to find that I hadn't forgotten how from last year, even if it made my legs and feet really sore! And the place we went this year--because there wasn't enough snow in our usual place--was very beautiful, with lots of hemlocks along the track and patches of frozen marsh off to the side.

Fun Quotes

Galadriel: "Walgreens: the place you go to get medicine and plushies."

Eomer: "Does anyone have any dessert they want to give me?" 
Galadriel: "You can have my boogers."

Eomer: "Johnny Cash is like Frank Sinatra had a baby with..."
Legolas: "Stop."
Eomer: "A woman."
Legolas: "That's...not what I was expecting."

Eomer: "Oh, Dolly Parton."
Legolas: "...Dolly Parton is a woman."

Gandalf: "Eritrea!" *primal scream*

Father MS: *sigh* *in a pronounced Polish accent* "Can I have less problems to solve?"

Mr. C: "We're running out of babies!"

Legolas: "Sam, that's not a road. That's a wall."

Eomer: "Dude, I looked into the back of the van, and there was Jesus, staring at me!"

Legolas: *to the guys replacing our windows* "Ooh, that's a new hole! Nice job, guys!"

Galadriel: "Eomer, have you ever secreted silk out of your tush?"
Eomer: "Only in my nightmares."

Galadriel: "There are so many men wandering around our house these days."

Mom: *to Gandalf* "Wait, why aren't you marrying Eomer?"

Gandalf: "Country swing works with anything with a beat." *pause* "So, not plainchant."

Parish music director: "Shirts are not in the music director's purview." 

Worth Reading If...

You guys, as of when I wrote this post (the last few days of January, but not quite the end of it) I'd read 31 books and was planning on finishing several more by the end of the month. (To be fair, six or so of those were for cloister garden research.) And I really enjoyed the vast majority of them, so it was super, super hard to narrow down which ones I wanted to include in this post! Hence why I'm including quite a few. 

...you're interested in friendship

Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx
Friendship is something I'm always interested in reading about (and also having in real life just to be clear) and so this treatise on friendship by a Cistercian monk in the early 12th century that I randomly found lying around our house recently (I feel like this says a lot about my family) fascinated me. It's written in a rather classical style, as a dialogue (or trialogue) between a wise monk and his friends who want to learn more about what he thinks about friendship. And while a lot of it echoes truly classical views of friendship (I believe he references Cicero as his jumping-off point) he adds quite a bit in terms of Christian friendship, and how it should be conducted. One of the things I found most interesting was his distinction between friends who excite one's affections, friends who are interesting to talk to, and friends who are both--his preference being for friends who are both. I wholeheartedly agree on that score. Despite being written almost a thousand years ago, the edition I read didn't read as antiquated, and I'd recommend it for anyone interested in friendship in general. :) 

Platonic by Marisa G. Franco
I read Spiritual Friendship at the very beginning of the month, and Platonic at the very end of the month, and they would seem to not possibly be more different approaches to thinking about friendship--from a 12th-century monk who references the classics and the Scriptures to a 21st-century female scholar who references scientific studies. However, they have many similarities in their approaches, including an emphasis on the importance of friendship for everyone (although Franco focuses on health and well-being, and Aelred focuses on getting to heaven), the need to have only a few closest friends to whom one confides one's heart, and so on. All comparison of Franco and Aelred aside (although it's an interesting exercise) I found Platonic to be one of the best nonfiction books I have read in a really long time. It first of all emphasizes how important friendships are in a world which seems to value only romantic relationships, and second of all takes the reader through a series of chapters on important components of friendship that tend to build on each other, from attachment to vulnerability to expressing anger to affection and so on. It's an excellent tool for self-reflection (especially around the attachment styles) and has left me with lots to think about in strengthening my own friendships! 

...if Middle Grade is one of your things

Bluecrowne by Kate Milford
I have a thing about not wanting to read spinoff series of a series I like if the spinoff series doesn't include the characters that I've grown to love, because I assume that I'll be bored and disappointed. That is hardly ever a correct assumption, something I have to learn over and over again, as with Bluecrowne. While Milo and Meddy obviously don't show up in this book, given that it's set right before the War of 1812, not in the modern day, it's still a wonderful book, full of Kate Milford's typical whimsy and insight. It follows siblings Lucy and Liao as they try to come to terms with being left onshore in Nagspeake while their ship captain father heads off on his next adventure. But of course, nothing is ever simple with Kate Milford, and there are some Yankee Peddlers who show up, too... It's not a long book, but it's a good one, with just enough plot for the length, and just enough character development, too. I'm not done with it yet, but I've been reading the other book about Lucy and Liao, The Left-Handed Fate (written first but comes after Bluecrowne) to my younger siblings and that one has been quite excellent, too. 

...if sci-fi is what you enjoy

Agent of Change by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
It's been far too long since I read a book in the Liad universe (even after writing a post about it not too long ago), but I started the Agent of Change arc while I was home over break, and it was so good that it gave me a massive book hangover, which isn't something that's happened to me for a long time! It's the first book ever written in the Liad universe, so it doesn't feel as much like classic Liad as, say The Dragon Variations, but ultimately it's still quite Liaden, with Val Con, nephew of Er Thom and Anne, as the main character. He's a scout who has landed on a strange planet far away from Liad and is in rather a bit of trouble. He runs into a woman with an extremely tough exterior, and with the help of some very strange cetaceans (CLUTCH TURTLES FOREVER) they get into rather more trouble before the end of the book. It's a wild ride, and while it can take a bit to get into, it's well worth the effort.  

...if reading three-volume nonfiction books on scholarly topics is something that sets your heart ablaze

The Plan of St. Gall by Walter Horn, vols. 1 & 2 (vol. 3 is the appendices)
This is kind of silly to be honest, but I didn't want my tremendous amount of reading this month on cloister gardens--even more than six books, because there were quite a few that I only read part of and not all of, and I'm not counting those--to go undocumented on my blog. And truly, I did very much enjoy reading the two volumes of the massive The Plan of St. Gall, the seminal work on the topic. (Or so it seems. Please correct me if I'm wrong and you're someone who knows about monastery plans. In fact, please email me, I'd love to talk. XD) I worked through them in a few days reading an hour a day, and it made me feel so much more alive than I had been feeling, which is a Feat for anything to accomplish in January (and makes me think that academic vocational shtuff is in my future in one way or another). But I think that even if you're not obsessively researching cloister gardens, they'd be fascinating--they explore a more-than-a-thousand-year-old plan for a monastery, going first over the history of it, the construction of the plan, and its materials, and then over each part of said plan and how it would have been constructed, used, &c to the best of our current knowledge. And it is SCINTILLATING let me tell you. (It's available on the Internet Archive if you can't find it elsewhere. Just fyi.)

...if you need a new spiritual reading book 

To Sanctify The World by George Weigel
This is the best book I have ever read about Vatican II. I don't care how you currently feel about Vatican II--you should read this book. (For my non-Catholic readers, Vatican II was a counsel of the whole Catholic Church which took place in the 60s and the implementation of which has been rather controversial.) It covers the state of the church before the Counsel, both politically and theologically (which was quite a bit that I'd never learned) as well as the lead-up to the counsel, the intentions of the Holy Father, how the counsel actually went, and how the media warped it. There is a chapter on each document (or each set of documents) from the counsel and the original intentions of those documents (especially important for Sacrosanctum Concilium). And then at the end, there's an analysis of the implementation of the Counsel and how it went well and how it could have gone better, and how actually the real meaning of the documents of Vatican II may only be being implemented now...and how that's very similar to what happened after the counsel of Trent, with sixty years of chaos after the counsel before things settled down. 
You guys. It's so good. And it's not even that long. You should read it. 

The World's First Love by Fulton Sheen
I've been trying to grow closer in my relationship with Mary recently and this book by Fulton Sheen, which I got for Christmas, was a big help for most of the month! It starts out by talking about the person of Mary, herself and the prophesies about her, and so on and so forth. Which was really cool. But I think my favorite parts of it were where he was talking about each Mystery of the Rosary and how it pertains to Mary, and the Seven Sorrows of Mary and how those are connected, and how in each one, Jesus takes the sword to His own Heart before it's plunged into Mary's Immaculate Heart. It covers a lot of ground, and is something that I think I shall need to reread before long. (But not while I'm in England bc Fulton Sheen is an American and while we're in England we read John Henry Cardinal Newman. ;)) (That was only like 20% a joke.)

...if modern classic-feeling books are something you enjoy

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

I didn't actually know that St. John Mandel had written anything other than Station Eleven, which, granted, was my own oversight, but my dad put this one on his Christmas list, so I got it for him in order to steal it back when he was done, which is, of course, the best motive for giving someone a gift, obviously. (Thankfully, he offered to loan it for me before I had to steal it, so we're all good. ;)) The book is very hard to describe...it's one of those books that are both slice of life (from many lives) and dramatic at once. So, shall we say, it's the story of a web of lives that get caught up in a Ponzi scheme a la the 2008 financial crisis, what happens to each of them, and how it affects all of the others. Which sounds boring, but I promise it's not, mostly because each character is fleshed out beautiful and fascinatingly, especially Vincent, a young woman whose mother died not far from the glass hotel, and who is desperate to get out of that tiny town on that tiny island. And the glass hotel itself is almost a character, and I love that it's in the Vancouver area, not far from where I live. 

...if you, like me, are obsessed with the Inklings, and Tolkien in particular

Tolkien's Faith by Holly Ordway
I have read a lot of biographies of Tolkien since I started being obsessed with him during lockdown in 2020 (but NOT the Humphrey Carpenter one because that guy is the WORST and I don't like him At All) and I think this is the best biography I have ever read of him. And while it glosses over some points about his life--it doesn't spend much time on his academic work, for instance--it hits all the high points while also being a sophisticated and beautiful analysis of his faith and how it affected his life. Not so much his work--there are other books that break down the Catholicity in his work--but his actual life. His relationship with his foster father, the Oratorian. His relationship with his wife. His friendships with the other Inklings. His time in WWI. And so on. And it's absolutely BEAUTIFUL and such a wonderful way to frame Tolkien's life, because his faith was vitally important to him, and ignoring that actually warps any account of his life. One of my favorite parts was the description of how he basically grew up at the Oratory (in Birmingham--the one founded, if I remember correctly, by John Henry Cardinal Newman, whose work, as I have just said, we read when we're in England) and was raised (quite literally, after his mother died) by the Oratorians. Because while my parents are both still very much living, and I'm very grateful for that, I do feel rather like I was raised at least partially by Dominicans and spent enough time running around our parish for it to feel like a second home, which is just as it was for Tolkien and the Oratory. And I love that. 

...if you haven't read YA in a while, but you'd like to

You Bring The Distant Near by Mitali Perkins 
Legolas got this book for Christmas and recommended it to me as soon as she'd finished it. I was a bit skeptical, given that I don't always love books with more than one POV, and this was a generational novel with multiple POVs per generation. But I ended up loving it. It's the story of a Bengali family with two daughters who moves to the United States in the 70s or so, and their journey of growing up, figuring out where they belong and who they are. The story follows the two girls' mother, the two girls themselves, and their daughters who are growing up in the present day, more or less. Each woman has her very distinctive own point of view and personality, which is impressive given that each only has about four POV chapters in the entire book. Because it's not one of those bloated YA books that are perhaps fun to read but just looooooong. It's almost more a collection of vignetted moments that tells the story of a family. Each chapter is very self-contained, the perfect length, and conveys the perfect amount of information. The craft is so impressive that I would maybe have read it even for that, even if I didn't love the characters as well. But I did love the characters--Ranee, trying to be the perfect wife, Tara who just wants to fit in but also to act, Sonia who wants to change the world, Anna who really doesn't want to be in the US, and Shanti who is 'the golden girl' where Anna is concerned, but who's having trouble figuring out where she belongs. There's so much in such a short book, and it's so very layered, with many relationships, all seen from multiple angles, and it's beautiful. 

The Month In Music

Crazy Faith by Alison Krauss: you're not asking if I love this man/I know you don't/you don't believe you can/yet I've seen love open like a dancer's fan/

Go To Sea No More by Matthew Byrne: my thoughts are always with you/have you changed since I've been gone/oh how I long to see you/the time has been so long

Winter Song by the cast of Hadestown: this is my winter song to you/the storm is coming soon/it rolls in from the sea

The Bear Song by Lady Maisery: the moonlight shows her she is not alone/"hello", she says, to the bear in the forest

Corner by The Arcadian Wild: I woke up to the wind and you came running/you whisper through the noise/it's looking like the storm is worse than we thought/it's time to go/but what about everything/you said, "I'm already holding you"

It's A Great Day to Be Alive by Home Free: yeah, I think I'll make me some homemade soup/I'm feelin' pretty good and that's the truth

Everybody's Got A Song by Andrew Peterson: for a hundred years the hardwood here's been soaking up the sound/and now the stage it feels as sacred as a Sunday/and oh, I love this city/everybody's got a song

Bring Him Home by Colm Wilkinson: God on high, hear my prayer/in my need you have always been there

Gravity by Alison Krauss: and the people who love me still ask me/when are you coming back to town/and I answer quite frankly/when they stop building roads/and there ain't no more highways to be found/and all God needs is gravity to hold me down

Sweet Afton by Nickel Creek: thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forebear/oh, I charge you disturb not my slumbering fair/oh, how lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighboring hills/far mark'd with the courses of clear winding rills

10,000 Reasons (Bless the Lord) by Matt Redman: whatever may pass and whatever lies before me/let me be singing when the evening comes

For The Love of God by Andrew Peterson: well, I know you thought you'd never find a woman/well, I never thought I'd have to write this song/but here I am and there you are together/after all

Lully, Lulla, Lullay by VOCES8: lully lulla/thou little tiny child/by by lully lullay

Daisies White (traditional Appalachian): and often while I'm dreaming so/across the sky the moon will go/it is a lady, sweet and fair/who comes to gather daisies there

I'll Tell Me Ma/Belle of Belfast by The Irish Rovers: Albert Mooney says he loves her/all the boys are after her/knock at the door, ringin' the bell/oh, my true love are you well?

How was your January? Have you read any of these books? Have you read any good YA recently?