Margaret Anscombe

Photo by  Alfonso Scarpa  on  Unsplash When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, "Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted." John 6:12 So often it seems like nothing we do matters all that much. It's all so trivial. But this verse lets us know that God cares about the things that seem small. He doesn't let them go to waste. We can offer him anything and he will make good use of it. In Beyond East and West John C.H. Wu quotes St Therese of Liseux's sister Marie as saying, Look at those who want to become rich, and see how they toil for gold. Now, little Therese, with far less trouble and at any hour of the day, we can lay up riches in the Kingdom of God. Heavenly diamonds are so plentiful that we can gather them, so to speak, with a golden rake, and we do this by performing all actions for the love of God. There's treasure all around us. Anything you give to God has value. You need never fear that it'...

Perhaps I'm just not the right audience for this book. I don't usually much like romances with children in them and I'm not a huge fan of love triangles and this novel has both. I do like Catherine Lanigan a lot though so I decided to give it a try. The main guy in the story, Scott, was fairly likable. He was very loyal to Isabelle, the heroine, and he had a big heart for kids. He ends up fostering a couple of kids who otherwise wouldn't really have a place to stay. I thought that was nice of him, but after years of not telling Isabelle he loves her, he decides to spring a marriage proposal on her at least in part so she can be a mother to the foster kids he took on rather suddenly, foster kids she knew nothing about until this impromptu proposal.  I could see his side of it, but I would have been pretty upset to have a guy spring something like that on me and I do want kids. Isabelle didn't at this point in the story. In any case, to me it was a li...

Photo by  Nick Scheerbart  on  Unsplash The Fault in Our Stars  by John Green is a 2012 novel about two cancer-stricken teenagers who fall in love. It ends about as cheerfully as you'd expect such a love story to end. I wanted to like this book. The teenagers were often quite funny. I loved how they kept saying that life wasn't a wish granting factory, for example, and they said a lot of similarly cute things. I liked that Hazel, the narrator, could quote poetry from memory, including T.S. Eliot. At some point in the novel they also make a trip to Amsterdam to talk to the author of Hazel's favorite book, Peter Van Houten. The descriptions of Amsterdam were vivid and true to life. They almost made me feel as if I were visiting Amsterdam although I've never been there. You could tell that John Green spent some time there as he mentions in the acknowledgments. Now for what didn't work for me. (With spoilers.) I found I didn't really believe in any the...