I am already pumped for all that’s coming in 2020.

It’s going to be an AMAZING year, I can feel it.

But before we get too far into 2020, I want to  I want to take a minute to record some favorites from 2019.

So here are some of the books, movies, songs and moments that captured my heart and widened my thinking in 2019.

2019 Favorites: Books 

Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women by Susan Burton

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Rabbit: A Memoir by Patricia Williams

On The Come Up by Angie Thomas

Educated by Tara Westover

Freckled: A Memoir of Growing Up Wild in Hawaii by T.W. Neal

Leaving Church by Barbara Taylor Bradford

Holy Envy by Barbara Taylor Bradford

The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr

2019 Favorites: Songs 

2019 Favorites: Movies

The Sun is Also A Star

This Beautiful Fantastic

Avengers: Endgame (Obviously)

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

Little Women

2019 Favorites: Podcasts 

White Lies

The 1619 Podcast

Dolly Parton’s America

Ear Hustle

DuoLingo Podcast

2019 Favorites: Experiences 

Helping to Lead a Hike + Yoga Retreat

Returning to Italy

Honoring My Mother-in-Law’s Life

Living Near My Sister

Walking from Logrono to Burgos

Want to see more favorites (mostly books) from past years? Here’s 2009, 2012, 2013, 2017, and 2018.

The post 2019 Favorites appeared first on Alison Chino.

 I just need a couple of hours to myself.

Do you ever feel that way?

Since Spring Break, it feels like we have been in catch up mode.  Since my husband works at a church, sometimes Holy Week is really busy.  I have to be super intentional to pay attention on Easter Weekend or sometimes I miss it in the rush of activity.

Which is sad, because I love Easter.  Palm Sunday and Easter are my favorite two Sundays of the year.  Spring and new life and resurrection speak to my heart and awaken all that slumbers in winter.  Both in the ground and in my soul.

Still, it was all over way too soon.  The celebration at church and the day with my family passed by in a blink.

And then the rains came.

We’ve had an unusually cold and overly wet few days for our first week of April in Arkansas.

So with Easter behind me and cloudy days in front of me, I decided I would set aside some time this week to be quiet.

I gathered up some books on prayer, some that are old friends and one that I’ve been meaning to get around to.

I got some new tea and I dug out a pretty teacup.

After I got everyone off to school, I settled in for my most favorite kind of morning.  Quiet.

Cloudy and cold outside, I did not even feel bad about not going to exercise.

I just need a couple of hours to myself.

Four cups of tea and six hours later, I was still there.

I had a few things I had meant to do later in the day.  I had meant to get up and eat lunch and then get on with my day.

But sometimes you just need a minute.

I’m curious if a stack of books and a cup of tea is heavenly to anyone else the way it is to me?

If it is, I would love to offer you a cup of tea.

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Since reading The Orphan Master’s Son, I have picked up several other books on North Korea.  All of a sudden it’s like I CAN. NOT. LOOK. AWAY.

I am obsessed.  The escape stories.  The starvation in camps stories.  The day to day COMPLETE LACK OF FREEDOM.  Every time I think I have read the worst human rights abuse yet.  Boom.  There’s another one that is even more awful.

I am astounded.  I mean I knew North Korea was sort of oppressive and the Kim family to be absurdly powerful, but really.  What is happening over there is cray cray.

Escape from Camp 14 was recommended to me by a friend in the comment section of my blog, so I read it first.  In one sitting.  Shin’s story of being born in a prison camp and escaping from the camp and then from North Korea at the age of 23 is unbelievable.

His escape is nothing short of miraculous.  This book has now become required reading at the Chino House, as in I am reading portions aloud at dinner to my children.  (They love when I do this. sarcasm)

Next was Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.  Barbara Demick interviews six different people who have defected from the same area of North Korea, which gives the book a sense of place that ties the stories together.  Each person’s journey is completely different though.  The title is from a national song that North Koreans sing in which they affirm through singing that there is nothing to envy in the world outside of North Korea.  Of course, as a book title, the flip side is true.  As outsiders, there is most certainly nothing to envy about the life of a citizen in this insane regime.

I was most fascinated by the way in which the defectors (and this was also true of Shin in Escape from Camp 14) are completely unprepared for the freedom of democracy and a normal life of making choices.  North Koreans have been told every move to make from the time they are born, so they are overwhelmed by a world full of simple decisions.

The book leaves the reader with each of the six people beginning to get used to navigating a life of freedom.  I want to know where they are in ten or twenty more years.

The author also brings up questions about what the world will do if the regime in North Korea collapses.  The ramifications of South Korea absorbing 23 million people  who have been brainwashed, starved and given obsolete educations are pretty devastating.

I have been poking around for answers on the internet to the many dilemmas surrounding North Koreans and I have come across one organization that I think is doing great stuff called LiNK (Liberty in North Korea).

For now, please get yourself a copy of Escape from Camp 14 and come have coffee with me.  I have chewed my nails to their nibs.

Next I want to read this: Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad

The post North Korea appeared first on Alison Chino.

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson is a thrilling, stay-up-until-you-can-not-hold-your-eyes-open tale of a young boy who is searching for meaning (and just trying to stay alive) in the most repressive nation of our time.

Set in modern day North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son reads like a futuristic George Orwell novel.  I kept reminding myself that this was not science fiction, but a real place.  And though there have been questions about how accurate a portrayal one can write of a country that so few have really extensively traveled, if Johnson’s picture is only partially accurate, the horrifying truth is that things in North Korea are worse than I could possibly imagine.

This growing awareness is part of what pulled me into the story.  The window into an unknown place is what kept me reading a book filled with haunting torture scenes, starving children and hopeless imprisonments.  I usually think of a fast-paced storyline that is filled with brutal interrogations as a man’s man kind of novel.  But I was hooked from the first pages by a character that experiences every possible horror the totalitarian regime can produce and yet still manages to believe that somehow the rules can be different for him.

As a boy, his hopes are small but the very fact that he holds on to them at all helps him to rise strong among a constantly terrorized population.

There is a simple exchange in the later half of the book that has stayed with me.

The main character has gone from living as a boy in an orphanage to driving through the nation’s capitol with a well-loved actress.  They drive through a cemetery where the actress mentions that the flowers are always stolen from the graves.

He asks her, “Why do you think they steal the flowers?”

“Yes, that’s the question, isn’t it? Who would do that? What’s happening to our country?”

He stole a brief glance, to confirm her disbelief.  Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds? That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright face of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?

I stopped to wonder:

How many times have I met someone who glances at me with disbelief because I have said something that reveals my ignorance about a suffering with which they are intimately acquainted? 

And I don’t even know it.

Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? 

Beautifully written, and sweeping in its scope, I will be turning over the events of this novel in my mind for a while.

This quote from The New Republic writer, Ruth Franklin, summed up well how I feel in finishing this heartbreaking book,

To this very short list of exceptional novels that also serve a humanitarian purpose The Orphan Master’s Son must now be added. If North Korea were not a place of current crisis, it would simply be a remarkable book: a little flamboyant perhaps, but carefully structured, packed with big ideas, and bitterly moving. The fact that the hell it describes exists now, even as you read this, makes it the kind of book that ought to keep us all up at night.

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I’m so grateful that this event served as the impetus for my introduction to such a man.  I knew of Bonhoeffer before, knew that he was martyred for resisting Hitler, and had even attempted reading his acclaimed work, Life Together, once or twice, but now…

Friends, I have experienced his story in a way that affects my own.

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

When one reads or hears about all the atrocities perpetrated by Adolf Hitler and his army of Germans during the thirties and forties, one always wonders, Where were the Christians?  Where were the people who loved Jesus?  Where were the merciful?  Where were the gracious?

One of the benefits of reading this story that begins in 1896 (10 years before Bonhoeffer’s birth) is that it helped me to understand the landscape in Germany that made Hitler’s seemingly unfathomable rise to power possible.  One begins to understand and even shudder at the thought that had you been a German in 1930, you would probably have been seduced.

Included in the book (p.193) are these familiar words written by Martin Niemoller, who initially supported Hitler, but was later imprisoned for opposing the nazification of German Protestant churches.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–

because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–

because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me–

and there was no one left to speak for me.

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer chose as a young man to pursue a career path as a theologian, he unknowingly was entering a war zone, for before he even finished all of his schooling, Hitler and his entourage would wage almost their very first battle in Germany with the German church.  By taking over the German church and making it loyal to himself and his ideologies, Hitler eliminated the institution as an enemy of his regime before he revealed himself as the madman he truly was.

However, Bonhoeffer, from his place of privilege in Berlin, recognized immediately that there would be no way to cooperate with the new regime and he worked from the very first days of Hitler’s election to office to preserve a church in Germany that would remain true to the Bible and to the commands of Jesus.  Author Eric Metaxas tells the journey of this fight against the state takeover of the German Protestant church in a narrative so gripping I would fight to stay awake late at night to keep reading it.

Also, in reading, I was amazed to see how the threads of early events in his life were God’s preparing Bonhoeffer for what would come. Bringing out these details is, of course, also the brilliant work of the author.  Metaxas is leading his reader in an understanding of how Bonhoeffer’s personal life and upbringing impacted his decisions later on.

While reading, I felt myself awaken as Bonhoeffer did, to the reality of the world around him and to the clarity of God’s call on his life.  He was a prophet from the beginning, seeing what others failed to see.  In the midst of so much turmoil and a world growing daily fuller of lies, he held fast to truth that sustained him.

I have loved all the Bonhoeffer quotes in the book, but this letter he wrote to his brother-in-law Rudiger Schleicher in 1936 was particularly precious to me. (pp. 136-7)  He begins to be in awe of discovering God through the Bible.

First of all I will confess quite simply – I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions, and that we need only to ask repeatedly and a little humbly, in order to receive this answer. One cannot simply read the Bible, like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible God speaks to us. And one cannot simply think about God in one’s own strength, one has to enquire of Him. Only if we seek Him, will He answer us.

Of course it is also possible to read the Bible like any other book, that is to say from the point of view of textual criticism, etc.; there is nothing to be said against that. Only that that is not the method which will reveal to us the heart of the Bible, but only the surface, just as we do not grasp the words of someone we love by taking them to bits, but by simply receiving them, so that for days they go on lingering in our minds, simply because they are the words of a person we love; and just as these words reveal more and more of the person who said them as we go on, like Mary, “pondering them in our heart,” so it will be with the words of the Bible. Only if we will venture to enter into the words of the Bible, as though in them this God were speaking to us who loves us and does not leave us alone with our questions, only so shall we learn to rejoice in the Bible…..

If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands. This is not according to our nature at all; it is entirely contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible, not only in the New but also in the Old Testament.

And I would like to tell you now quite personally: since I have learnt to read the Bible in this way – and this has not been for so very long – it becomes every day more wonderful to me. I read it in the morning and the evening, often during the day as well, and every day I consider a text, which I have chosen for the whole week, and try to sink deeply into it, so as really to hear what it is saying. I know that without this I could not live properly any longer.

Dear reader, can you remember a time when you first read some piece of Scripture and felt that God was speaking straight to you?  I love how Bonhoeffer rejoices that God loves us and does not leave us alone with our questions.

Bonhoeffer could never have imagined all that he would face in the years following the writing of this letter, but I believe the keys to how he continued on are all within the words he wrote here.

Those years make up the second half of the book, which I will return to on March 15.

There’s still time to join Arti and other bloggers in reading this incredible book.

The post Bonhoeffer appeared first on Alison Chino.

Since finishing the book, I have started following the author on twitter (@isabelwilkerson) and she frequently tweets about prominent African-Americans whose lives were influenced by the Great Migration.  (It’s amazing how she is able to summarize someone’s migration story in 140 characters!)

One of those is Richard Wright, whose work has fascinated me since I first read (and was slightly traumatized by) Native Son at the age of 14.

This poem by him about the violence towards African-Americans in The South is a stunning example of his ability to paint a scene you can’t bear to watch.  You want to look away, but you can’t.  He doesn’t let you.

I think it’s important to remember that these are the scenes, the dark nights that planted the seeds of The Great Migration in the hearts of men and women alike.  How many horror stories does one man have to hear before he says to himself, As for me and mine, we are leaving. 

Between the World and Me
by Richard Wright

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
themselves between the world and me….

There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly
upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt
finger accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and
a scorched coil of greasy hemp;
A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat,
and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches,
butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a
drained gin-flask, and a whore’s lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the
lingering smell of gasoline.
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow
surprise into the eye sockets of the stony skull….

And while I stood my mind was frozen within cold pity
for the life that was gone.
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by
icy walls of fear–
The sun died in the sky; a night wind muttered in the
grass and fumbled the leaves in the trees; the woods
poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds; the
darkness screamed with thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves
into my bones.
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into
my flesh.

The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth, cigars and
cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared lipstick red
upon her lips,
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that
my life be burned….

And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my
black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
sides of death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in
yellow surprise at the sun….

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I am still working my way through The Warmth of Other Suns.

I even read a few stories aloud at dinner this week.

I am in the middle of Part 4, which is the is the largest section of The Warmth of Other Suns.

The section is entitled The Kinder Mistress, from the Langston Hughes‘ poem that opens the section.  Wilkerson opens each of the five parts of the book with a quotation from writings by iconic African-American intellectuals. These poems and quotes are some of my favorite parts of the book.  I was especially moved by this one though so I wanted to share it.

The South

by Langston Hughes

The lazy, laughing South
With blood on its mouth …
Passionate, cruel,
Honey-dipped, syphilitic —
That is the South.
And I, who am black, would love her
But she spits in my face …
So now I seek the North —
The cold-faced North,
For she, they say,
is a kinder mistress.

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This year we are looking at Great Migration books.

This fall, my aunt recommended The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.  It is a sweeping history of the many decades that cover the Great Migration told in a beautiful narrative.

Countless personal stories that came from Wilkerson’s personally interviewing over 1200 people make up the shape of the book.  They are held together by three main characters whose journeys make up the bulk of the narrative: Ida Mae Gladney, who moves from Mississippi to Chicago, George Starling, who fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster who left Louisiana and ended up in California.

Less than halfway in, I am already deeply invested in where the individual migrations of these three are taking them.

Between 1915 and 1970, it is estimated that 6 million black citizens left the South in search of a better life.  The author has set out to give us a broader picture of this historical event.

from the introduction:

The actions of the people in this book were both universal and distinctly American.  Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making.  They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable–what the pilgrims did under the tyranny of British rule, what the Scotch-Irish did in Oklahoma when the land turned to dust, what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat, what the European Jews did during the spread of Nazism, what the landless in Russia, Italy, China, and elsewhere did when something better across the ocean called to them.  What binds these stories together was the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were.  They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done.

They left.

We have also come across two wonderful children’s books on the Great Migration.  The Great Migration is told through the beautiful paintings of Jacob Lawrence.

These paintings were my first introduction to the Great Migration.  I saw them at a special exhibition during the years we lived in Chicago.  I remember being captured by them for hours.

So I was excited to see them put into a book for children.  The story begins in the South in cotton fields and ends in the city in the North, where, though there is more freedom, life is still not easy for the migrants.

I love the paintings of families gathered to discuss what to do, of groups of people traveling with only what they could carry and of railway stations packed with black Americans full of hope.

And the migrants kept coming.

Theirs is a story of African-American strength and courage.  I share it now as my parents told it to me, because their struggles and triumphs ring true today.  People all over the world are still on the move, trying to build better lives for themselves and for their families.

God Bless the Child is a picture book interpretation of Billie Holliday’s famous song by the same name.  Illustrator Jerry Pinkney tells the story through pictures of a family that moves from the rural South to the urban North during the Great Migration.

Jerry Pinkney’s illustrations are so beautiful.

You can feel the family’s camaraderie through these images.

Isabel Wilkerson refers to Richard Wright as the bard of the Great Migration.  She opens her book with this quote from his poem that also gave her the title of her book.  These few lines tell so much about this period in our nation’s history.

I was leaving the South

To fling myself into the unknown…

I was taking a part of the South

To transplant in alien soul,

To see if it could grow differently,

If it could drink of new and cool rains,

Bend in strange winds,

Respond to the warmth of other suns,

And perhaps, to bloom.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! Every year on this day, I honor in my heart those who have fought to make this country better for African Americans and I grieve the shameful history of the South, a place I have long loved.

Yesterday, at church, our pastor preached the Gospel that is for all people, that in Jesus we would all be reconciled to God and to one another.  Every year I hope we get a little closer to that reality.

The post Great Migration Tales appeared first on Alison Chino.

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

The City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell

Peace Like A River by Leif Enger

The Fiddler’s Green by A.S. Peterson (sequel to The Fiddler’s Gun)

I read around 60 books in 2012.  These six novels were my favorites.

The first two books are set during World War II, one in Hungary and the other in Russia.  I think I will never get tired of reading books about this time period. These stories remind me that though the world is fraught with evil, people still shine light in the darkness.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is also filled with this same kind of hope inside a darker story.  Foer captured me with a highly intelligent young protagonist who is trying to make sense of the world in his own special way.  (I also enjoyed the movie version of this book.)

The last three books fed my soul as much as my mind.  A precious missionary couple, a miracle-working single father and his three children, and an orphan girl masquerading as a pirate boy are the characters of these three novels that became friends I would be sad to leave when these books were done.  They are books I have given and will give again as gifts.  They are stories as rich in faith as they are in characters, plots and settings.

I read The Fiddler’s Green on a boat in September, which was perfectly magical since it is set mostly on a pirate ship during the American Revolutionary War.  I loved being out on the sea while reading about Fin’s sea adventures.  I plan to read both The Fiddler’s Gun and The Fiddler’s Green out loud this year to the children who still listen at the Chino House.

And here is the bonus round of 2012.

Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren Winner

Seven: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess  by Jen Hatmaker

I could not leave out these two books to which I have already returned in 2013.  Still is just full of the kind of wisdom and empathy that one wants to revisit and Seven is forming the basis for a movement of women at my church that I am looking forward to.

Our Greatest Gift by Henri Nouwen

Also, I read Henri Nouwen’s book on dying while my grandmother was sick this fall.  I just mention it because it was hugely helpful to me in preparing for her death and I am certain I will return to it again and again.

Chicken Boy by Frances O’Roark Dowell

I always read a lot of children’s novels and this one was by far my favorite this year, recommended to me by a very beloved teacher.

I’m already happy with the reading that 2013 is bringing my way, but I always keep my eyes and ears open for the next book in line.

What are your favorite reads from the last year?

The post Favorite Books of 2012 appeared first on Alison Chino.

Here are my Advent Readings for this year.

My six year old, Simon, is counting down the days until December 1st.

He remembers fondly that even though there is currently no evidence of the coming season in our house, we usually start Christmas on December 1st with the opening of advent calendars.

I have an activity advent calendar that I fill up with plans for December.  And I have another one that sits on the table with daily readings.  However, Simon is more concerned with the advent calendar that comes filled with tiny chocolates that he gets to eat before breakfast for the entire month of December.

His daily reminders that DECEMBER IS COMING are also serving to creak open the part of my heart that is hoping for Advent.  If I am still for a minute, I can admit that I am also longing for a coming.

Before I can pull out the Christmas boxes, I am looking to a familiar place to answer the cries of my heart.  To words.

If a word is helpful to you in preparing for Christmas, here are a few tried and true places I am going.

Preparing for Christmas by Richard Rohr

This one is new this year.  It is a tiny collection of daily readings for December that I can carry in my pocket or purse.  I came to love Richard Rohr when a friend gave me Falling Upward, so even though I have not yet read this selection, I feel certain it will become a treasured addition to my Christmas.

Watch for the Light

This collection had been a favorite for a few years now.  Filled with 40 essays and poems by all different writers, these rich reflections are a feast for the soul.

Good News of Great Joy

This might be the easiest addition to your Advent collection.  It is a free download of daily readings from Desiring God Ministries.  I’ve already read through the first few days and they are beautiful.  Now on my phone and Kindle, a word for today could not be more easily accessible.

WinterSong  by Luci Shaw and Madeleine L’Engle and A Widening Light by Luci Shaw

These are Christmas poetry collections I found a few years ago through another blogger.  I love to gather them up and sit with a cup of mulled spiced wine under the Christmas tree lights and read.  (This image is almost the motivation I need to get my Christmas tree up.)

Christmastide: Prayers for Advent through Epiphany from Phyllis Tickle

I go in and out of seasons of praying these Divine Hours.  When I come back to them, it is like coming home.

What the Land Already Knows by Phyllis Tickle

My friend Jerusalem introduced me years ago to these winter stories.  They are now both a yearly favorite and a reminder to me that I want to write down my own family stories according to the seasons.

Going back through my Christmas books is just what I needed to start to long for Christmas.

I found this quote in the second reading from Good News of Great Joy about God’s word, the words I most need at Christmas and always:

“Is not my word like fire, says the Lord!”

(Jeremiah 23:29)

Gather ‘round that fire this Advent season.

It is warm.

It is sparkling with colors of grace.

It is healing for a thousand hurts.

It is light for dark nights.

Do you have a favorite book of Christmas readings?  Please share it in the comments!

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