Something Light?

I have too many books started right now.  It's really dumb of me to do this, especially when the end of The Fall Reading Challenge is quickly approaching and life is busy.  For some reason, I'm having a hard time finishing all these parenting books and spiritually challenging books I'm reading.  When I have a few minutes to read, I keep choosing something that looks lighter, easier, faster.

Then again, those words are rather subjective, aren't they?

One of the books I read last week was Mishna Wolff's memoir, I'm Down.  I picked it up used for a quarter and thought it looked interesting.  She was a white girl raised in a black neighborhood by a father who. . .well, wanted her to be more black.  She kept disappointing him because she "couldn't dance, couldn't sing, couldn't do double dutch and was the worst player on her basketball team."  Then she got a scholarship to a "rich kids" school and discovered she was "too black" for that environment.

As a white adoptive mother to two African American children, I thought I might benefit from reading this book about the two cultures and people having a hard time fitting in.  In the end I found it rather depressing, not nearly as funny as reviews advertised, and felt frustrated at people's pre-conceived ideas that cripple them from seeing each person as the uniquely created individual God made him or her to be.

I also remembered that I truly don't like reading memoirs because they never feel finished.  I really need a Paul Harvey moment after finishing a memoir:  "And now, for the rest of the story."

The other book I read last week was a fiction novel (free on my Kindle) which looked like it would be a great suspense/action-packed type of escape.  Instead, The Next Target by Nikki Arana was a convicting tale about ministering to Arab Americans and Muslims and sharing the gospel with them.  The main character was a widow because her husband was killed by radical Islams and she wrestled with how to protect new converts to Christianity when their radical family members would resort to "honor killing" when they learned of their conversion.

I appreciated the way the author contrasted the two belief systems and focused on the peace and forgiveness Christ brings. I was pricked by the main character's despair over Christians not reaching out to Muslim neighbors and over another character's assessment of America as "a country that had been founded on godly principles and was now known across nations as the champion of abortion, drunkenness, pornography, and gay marriage" (132).  And when Austia made phone call after phone call to fellow believers seeking a safe place for a woman who feared for her life after her conversion but was met only with excuses, I searched my heart.  Would I open my home to a new believer even if it exposed me to persecution and possible death?

Even as I benefited from both of these books, neither was the "light, quick, easy" read I was looking for.  Maybe I should have been reading the books on my list instead.