wanting more

For the last few months I've been getting up in the morning with coffee, swaddling myself in a warm throw, and reading for a half hour before getting ready for work. A bit of this, a chapter of that, this daily reading and then the other daily reading...I am currently dipping into five different books simultaneously and have two stacks of books on the end table by my chair, a stack of three books waiting for me on the floor, and two more stacks of seven others waiting their turn on the ottoman like friends gathered around me.

I can't get enough of Frederick Buechner...the daily readings of Listening to Your Life, the literary sketches and spiritual food offered in Whistling in the Dark and The Alphabet of Grace. So I ordered more...Godric, Brendan, Telling the Truth, and Secrets in the Dark. I devoured Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies for the second time. Several months ago I read Rob Bell's book Velvet Elvis and then read it again, gave it to two of my friends to read (one who said she wept as she read it), and then I bought Love Wins and read that twice as well. Ten years ago I read M. Scott Peck's book A Road Less Traveled and it has remained one of the most profound books I've ever read, so I decided to read it again and it was as profound this time as it was the first time. So I started Further Along the Road Less Traveled, which I'm still taking in slowly so I can digest it and make it part of me. Along with Jesus Calling and Streams in the Desert, I'm also reading the daily meditations of Pema Choddron, a Buddhist nun, who shares simple but transforming thoughts in her book Comfortable With Uncertainty.

I'm impatiently waiting to lose myself in Love In The Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez and my copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass has been waiting on the floor for me for months now, but I told myself that I have to finish some books before I can start on other ones so I've got to hurry up and finish Will Power's Not Enough.

I just really need more time to read.