5×5 Reading Challenge Update

Hello faithful Amy’s Garden readers! What have you been reading lately?

I have been steadily working on my Scholé Sisters 5×5 reading challenge. I originally wrote about my plans in this post and later wrote a detailed review of the book Miracles, which is one of the books for the challenge.

In this challenge, a reader chooses five categories and then reads five books in each category. The first category I chose is Classic Dystopian Fiction. So far I have read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and 1984 by George Orwell. Next up is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I will admit I am not enjoying this category, but I do think it’s important to know the major works in this genre. What dystopian books should I read after Brave New World?

My next category is C.S. Lewis. Being a member of a C.S. Lewis book club is helpful. 🙂 Our book club has read Miracles and The Problem of Pain so far this year. Next, we hope to read some works by George MacDonald, since MacDonald’s writing was so instrumental in Lewis’s life.

My third category is Memoirs. I kind of stumbled into this one, because there were a few memoirs coming out I wanted to read anyway. First I read Becoming Free Indeed by Jinger Duggar Vuolo. This book was not super well-written (Jinger is not really an author, after all), but I’m so glad she wrote it anyway. There are so many Christians publicly “deconstructing” their faith right now, but Jinger is instead “disentangling” faith from fear.

Next, I read Beth Moore’s new memoir, All My Knotted Up Life. Beth Moore made headlines a few years ago when she left her lifelong denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. As a fellow Southern Baptist and also as someone who has sat under her teaching via video lessons, I followed this very closely when it happened. Since then, Beth is rubbing shoulders with more Progressive Christians, but as far as I have heard, she has not yet said anything that I personally consider off the mark theologically. Her memoir is beautifully written.

The third memoir I read was my dad’s! My brother and his wife got my dad a membership to Storyworth. He received weekly emails with writing prompts, which were turned into a hardback book! My dad is already a writer, so this was the perfect gift for him. I had heard several of his stories already, of course, but some of them were new to me.

The fourth and final category (for now) is Political Thought. Whoa! Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought on the same list! Who is the woman reading these books?

Anyway, I have taken an interest in the History of Communism, due to Lydia taking a class by that name and also reading some books, particularly Live Not by Lies by Rod Dreher. In this book, Dreher references a book by Václav Havel called The Power of the Powerless. Havel became the first president of Czechoslovakia and then Czech Republic after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, which ended Communism in that country. The Power of the Powerless was written in 1979, when he had no idea Communism’s overthrow was so close at hand. The book is a bit of a chore to get through. The main idea is that people have a desire to “live in the truth,” regardless of the consequences and whether actual political change comes as a result. See my Goodreads review for more thoughts. I recently saw that Václav Havel wrote a memoir. I might decide to read this as a part of my memoirs category.

Speaking of Goodreads, feel free to follow me there! Here is a link to my Goodreads profile.

So that’s it for now! Any recommendations to fill out my categories? What about my fifth category? I have some ideas, but I would love to hear yours as well!