Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Into the darkness of everyday life come stories we can read and share with each other. Like a beacon lighting a ship into harbor, wise and prescient authors lead us through an adventure or a true life event and teach us how to survive with the books they produce with so much courage and research.
We may read for escape, but even in those books there is much to learn and use in our everyday life.
Steering us past the rocks and into a safe place to put down an anchor is the business of a good writer who has examined life and its shoals and found a way through them.
They guide us and though we may ask many questions and look at other solutions, we still have interesting ideas to consider. Yes, metaphorical beacons. I am grateful for the books and stories that I find as lighthouses along the sea of life.
Real lighthouses are on my mind because my FL grandbaby brought me a book last week called America's Atlantic Coast Lighthouses, A Traveler's Guide by Jeremy D'Entremont 5th Edition pub. 2001 (revised and updated from an original edition by Kenneth Kochel).
When I took care of her two afternoons a week when she was 18 months old until she was three, we would take my tiny lighthouses off a shelf one by one and look at them. She has bought me a few for my collection in recent years. She and her parents have visited quite a few lighthouses in the book. My father had visited a lot, too, over the years and I had bought him many small lighthouses as gifts over the last years of his life.
My youngest son and his family visited two lighthouses on Lake Huron this summer.
Hubby and I have visited lighthouses on the Great Lakes such as in Copper Harbor in the UP of Michigan and at Mackinac and many others. We have enjoyed seeing some on the East Coast and West Coast,
But back to the books which have guided us onward and forward in good times and bad times.
There are two books that I mention all the time, but I have to say that they are my beacons still after all these years. Little Women by Alcott and Mrs. Mike by the Freedmans have guided me through storms of all kinds. Based on real people, but not completely true stories, they still resonate with me as being authentic. The characters have problems that they work on, paths they try to follow and events they can't control, but must learn to live through.
They have great courage. Hard-earned courage and wisdom learned from those characters are the lights that helped me into safe harbors over the years. The Little House on the Prairie series by Wilder helped, too.
Then there are the biographies, autobiographies and memoirs of people who have made a difference. I really enjoy reading those. The people are beacons.
I am enjoying the re-read of the Abraham Lincoln biography by Sandburg. Critics thought it was too poetic or something, but it is wonderful. I have the illustrated edition which is edited by Goodman.
A list of beacons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autobiographies
Some I have read on the list above:
Margaret Mead Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years
Vera Brittain Testament of Youth and Testament of Experience
Richard Wright Black Boy
Elie Wiesel All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs Vol. 1, 1928-1969
Eudora Welty One Writer's Beginnings
Amos Oz A Tale of Love and Darkness
Richard Feynman Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Barack Obama Dreams from My Father
Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl
Gerald Durrell My Family and Other Animals
Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Frank McCourt Angela's Ashes
Sidney Poitier The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography
Azar Nafisi Reading Lolita in Tehran
Carlos Eire Waiting for Snow in Havana
………..
Others:
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
John Adams by David McCullough
Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki.
Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
by Madeleine Albright
Out of Africa by Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Homer Hickam
Rocket Boys
The Coalwood Way
Sky of Stone
To the Castle and Back by Vaclav Havel
An Ordinary Man: The True Story Behind 'Hotel Rwanda'
by Paul Rusesabagina with Tom Zoellner
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo is a 2012 biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas written by Tom Reiss.
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie
……….
Novel based on the life of a beacon
Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh by Irving Stone
……...
There are so many more great books of fiction and non-fiction to be mentioned in comments. I look forward to reading your list.
Diaries of the Week:
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Write On! A found item. (Building to a moment.)
By SensibleShoes
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/3/1686610/-Write-On-A-found-item-Building-to-a-moment
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Introducing the New Kos Katalogue!
By Avilyn
www.dailykos.com/...
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AIDS Walk Austin - We Get To Carry Each Other
By anotherdemocrat
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/3/1686547/-AIDS-Walk-Austin-We-Get-To-Carry-Each-Other
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