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Well, after my failed attempt last month at giving up reading, here are my answers to the four questions I ask on the first of each month:
first, what are you reading?
what do you like best about it?
what do you like least?
what’s next on your list/pile to read? 


As always, I hope you’ll consider your current reads on your blog and/or sharing here in the comments or on Facebook.  Happy reading!


First, what are you reading?


I have just finished The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton, on the recommendation of a great friend and fellow book-lover.  I’m so grateful for this recommendation, because it’s not often that I find a newer, satisfying, well-crafted novel written for adults that is haunting in a good way.  From the Amazon description:  


Like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved classic The Secret Garden, Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden takes root in your imagination and grows into something enchanting–from a little girl with no memories left alone on a ship to Australia, to a fog-soaked London river bend where orphans comfort themselves with stories of Jack the Ripper, to a Cornish sea heaving against wind-whipped cliffs, crowned by an airless manor house where an overgrown hedge maze ends in the walled garden of a cottage left to rot.


I’m also well into the final Ranger’s Apprentice book, The Emporer of Nihon-Ja, but I’m not rushing it since it’s the last in the series.


Finally, I’ve been re-reading a lot of John Paul II’s poetry.  I have an early edition of Easter Vigil that I vividly remember buying at a used book store in Milwaukee, WI in the early 1990s (does anyone else do that with certain books?).    I also have been paging through my seen-better-days copy of The Place Within, as well as Roman Triptych.  I’ve been sharing a few of these poems here and here.


What do you like best about it?


The Forgotten Garden was excellent from start to finish.  The novel spans a century of decades, and each chapter moves effortlessly from the early 1900s to 2005, to the 1970s, and back again.  It is extremely well-done and not a bit choppy, as you might expect from a novel that moves around so much chronologically.


The characters are so likeable, even the “bad” ones, that you really want to know what happens to each, and Morton doesn’t disappoint.


One fascinating and fun feature are the original fairy tales (written by “The Authoress” in the novel) interjected throughout the book.  A nice touch, and they read as real fairy tales in the style of the Fairy books..


What do you like least about it?


I’m having trouble here finding something in The Forgotten Garden that I don’t like.  At first, I was considering writing that no characters act explicitly because of religious belief, but yet people act in an immoral way or a moral way based on their character.  The novel is fairly religion-neutral, not common among modern novels, where sometimes the religious character is the worst.


What’s next on your list to read?


I’m searching for Catholic fiction for my regular June fiction round-up, and looking for good suggestions.  Please contact me if you have some ideas.


In the meantime, The Emporer of Nihon-Ja awaits, and I’ve got several more Kate Morton books on reserve from the library.


What are you reading?  I’d love to hear about it.

As I wrote earlier today, I wanted to share a poem or two of Karol Wojtyla, who was fairly prolific in his poetry.

This is from Roman Triptypch, a section entitled, “Meditations on the Book of Genesis at the Threshold of the Sistine Chapel.”

I like to think of it as “the theology of the body in poem form,” but it is called:

Pre-Sacrament


Who is He? The Ineffable.  Self-existen Being.
One.  Creator of all things.
And yet, a Communion of Persons.
In this Communion, a mutual self-giving of the fullness
of truth, goodness and beauty.
But above all–ineffable.
Yet, He spoke to us of himself.
He spoke, by creating man in his image and likeness.
In the Sistine painting the Creator has human features.
The Almighty, the Ancient–a Man, like Adam whom He creates.
And they?
“Male and female He created them.”
God bestowed on them a gift and a task.
They accepted–in a human way–the mutual self-giving which is in Him.
Both naked…
they felt no shame, as long as the gift lasted–
Shame will come with sin,
yet the thrill remains.  They live conscious of the gift,
without being able to call it by name.
But they live it, they are pure–
Casta placent superis; pura cum veste venite,
et manibus puris surmite fontis aquam (see note below)
For eight years I read these words every day
as I entered the gate of the gymnasium in Wadowice.

Pre-sacrament–existence itself as the outward sign of eternal Love.

And when they became “one flesh”
–that wondrous union–
on the horizon there appears the mystery of fatherhood and motherhood.
–They returned to the source of life within them.
–They returned to the Beginning.
–Adam knew his wife
and she conceived and gave birth.
They know that they have crossed the threshold of the greatest responsibility!

—

note: translates as “Heaven is pleased with what is pure; come with pure robes, and with unsullied hands drink water from the source.”

I happened to see the royal wedding live this morning, which I did not intend to do, as a very small subset of my local Jane Austen book group is gathering for tea, scones, and DVR’d highlights of the royal wedding in a few hours.  However, I was up extra early and at the gym, where I was able to persuade the guys near me to change the tv channel from ESPN to the wedding “just this once.”  And when I saw Kate Middleton’s dress, one of my first thoughts was, “Wow, now that is a dress.”  And my second thought was, “I think that looks like St. Gianna Molla’s wedding dress.”

Now, our family has had a lot of St. Gianna in the past year, as our oldest daughter chose St. Gianna as her confirmation saint.  She chose St. Gianna because of her great life story, her family life and her work as a doctor (she’s interested in healthcare as a career path), but I think a bit of our fashion-conscious daughter likes that St. Gianna had a really great sense of style.

But the real reason I thought about St. Gianna’s wedding dress is I had just been exploring last night the new App series from Little iApps.  I got the terrific one devoted to St. Gianna, and in looking through it last night, I noticed a photo of St. Gianna in her wedding dress.

So see if you agree with me.  Doesn’t her dress look extremely similar to St. Gianna’s?  I took a screenshot of the above wedding dress photo from the App.

I noticed one commentator talking about Kate’s dress being very 50s-inspired, and Pietro and Gianna were married September 24, 1955, so I don’t think I’m too far off the mark.

Two interesting facts about St. Gianna’s wedding dress: she made it herself, and that she hoped to re-use it for vestments if she had a son who became a priest.

I will get the chance to use this eVotions App later today, as I plan to pray some of the prayers for the newly married couple for a happy, holy marriage.  St. Gianna seems a good saint for this stylish new princess, and I’m sure we all wish her and Prince William the best.

Now we’re back to our regular books-centered writing.  Look for later today excerpts from two poems by John Paul II in honor of his beatification Sunday.  I’ll be watching that, too.

Next Monday, the day after the beatification of John Paul II, the Vatican is hosting a meeting for Catholic bloggers in Rome.  As a Catholic blogger, I’ve found it exciting to follow this in the last few weeks.  I didn’t sign up to be in the lottery to be invited, because I knew I couldn’t go–our youngest’s first Communion is May 1.  For our family, that date is especially providential because it is not only John Paul II’s beatification, Divine Mercy Sunday, but also (when it doesn’t fall on Sunday) the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, a big feast for our Joseph-heavy family.   So while I wish I could be there, we’ll be celebrating pretty big here in Illinois.

However, my not signing up did not prevent me from following and enjoying the news of who did get invited.   There were more than 700 bloggers worldwide who applied, and 150 got invites.   I was delighted to see that quite a few people I know, through blogging, Twitter and reviews, made the list.

Lisa Hendey, the author of last May’s book selection, The Handbook for Catholic Moms, is writing on her website, CatholicMom.com, all about her preparations for traveling to Rome.  Lisa is actually the only one I’ve met in person.   I interviewed her in Chicago last year, and it was a real highlight of my first few months writing this blog.

The Ironic Catholic is also one of ” the 150.”   Longtime Catholic Post Book Group readers will remember my interview with Ironic Catholic last year.  Initially, she was going to have to turn down the invitation to go to Rome, but it all worked out in the end.    Strange but true:  another invited blogger, Brandon Vogt of The Thin Veil, won a book giveaway I ran around Christmastime.  I’m excited to learn more about his new book, The Church and the New Media, to be published later this year by Our Sunday Visitor, as well as his take on the blog meeting.

Other bloggers I “know” in a more remote way (kind of like I might have met someone famous once, but I don’t think that person could pick me out of a lineup) include Rocco Palmo, who writes what I used to call “my husband’s second favorite blog,” Whispers in the Loggia, (though in reality, he probably visits it more than mine, because Rocco is way more prolific, plus I can tell my husband in person what I write about).    Another super-prolific and sensible, thoughtful Catholic blogger to attend is Elizabeth Scalia, better known as The Anchoress.  And so many more.

I will certainly be following news of the Catholic blog meeting through the blogs of those invited, and via Twitter, which I’m finding such an interesting and helpful way of keeping up-to-date.  I also discovered (via Twitter) a blog called Vatican Blog Meeting, with helpful updates and what looks to be feeds of all the invited blogs.   Cool!  In fact, just as I thought I better go searching for this link again (since I had not bookmarked), in came a “tweet” with the link again.  Thank you @cybertheology for retweeting this!

After I read an article about the difficulty of qualifying, as well as getting a place, at the Boston Marathon, in the latest issue of Runner’s World, I remembered that Sister Madonna Buder, author of The Grace to Race, had mentioned to me in our interview that she had hoped to run the Boston marathon:

I plan to run the Boston Marathon in April.  I want to open a new age group for women if possible.  I don’t know if there’s been an 80-year-old woman to run Boston.  When I last ran Boston in 2008, there were several men in their 80s, but no women.

She had told me about quite a few negative race experiences that she has had lately–not finishing different triathlons or other races because of health problems, so I was concerned that she might not get a chance to compete, or finish, the Boston Marathon this year.

Well, she did, and she finished!  And she opened a new class for over-80 women, coming in first (and I assume only) in her class.  Her time was amazing,  finishing in just over 5 hours.  (5:01:05).    That’s a great time for many runners, regardless of age.

Congratulations, Sister Madonna!  And thanks for the inspiration!