Hunting Season and Book Club

I was ecstatic, and I do love Well Read Mom. It’s as closest as I’ve gotten to college since college, and I mean the sit-in-a-room-and-talk-about-soaring-ideas part of college. Last year, we read a 16th century monk and T.S. Eliot. This year we’re doing Virgil and Pinocchio. Each year’s list has books you’ve heard of, new releases, and works you were probably assigned to read at some point but didn’t. The conversation, joy, challenge, and sisterhood this sparks is unmatched. It forces you out of the whirlwind of your day and into thinking about art, beauty, goodness, truth.

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Tips for Finding Time to Read

Tips for Finding Time to Read Written by Marcie Stokman, Well-Read Mom Founder and President The following blog is adapted from Well-Read Mom Founder Marcie Stokman’s book, The Well-Read Mom: Read More. Read Well. Copyright © 2019 by Marcie Stokman, used with permission. The number one reason women give for not reading is lack of…

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Poetry: An Invitation to Pay Attention

I am so very grateful that the Well-Read Mom Year of the Father begins with poetry. I do realize that poetry is not everyone’s jam. And I’m not grateful in the sense that I gain some weird didactic pleasure from others’ discomfort (as my students sometimes posit). I’m grateful because I need all of the help I can get. I need help in paying attention to my life.

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To Seek and To Know the Place for the First Time

To Seek and To Know the Place for the First Time Written by Lucile Foley When we began this Year of the Seeker, I was in the midst of an intense period that felt like the climax to years of searching. What did I seek? Healing. A return of our fertility. In these years of…

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Seeking Beyond the Suffering

Seeking. I am always seeking. Seeking a bargain, a better way to do a chore, or getting two errands done simultaneously. But this year has been different. Life events have pushed me deeper toward inner strength, perseverance, and, ultimately, toward God more fully present in me.  

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Seeking the Hidden Holiness of Motherhood

In my time as a mother, I have sought long and hard for holiness. I want to feel holy. I want life to look holy. I have this false impression that my life before marriage was all those things, simply because I had the time and freedom to pray in peace, to attend mass daily, and to have a job that involved active ministry. Maybe it was holy, but holier than life as a wife and mother? More holy than a life of routine self-sacrifice, self-denial, and discomfort? 

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Erudite

I first learned about Well-Read Mom after our family moved from Florida to Georgia, and I was looking to meet new people. A dear friend invited me to join her evening group. The structure and rigor of the book selections fed my love for literature. Unfortunately, evening book club meetings were not sustainable for our growing family. I tried reading on my own, but it wasn’t the same. If I wanted a book club that fit my family’s needs, I would need to start my own chapter.

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Finding Charis

I began my journey in the Year of the Seeker by responding to a forwarded email from a friend inviting me to join a local Well-Read Mom group. It was July, and my husband and I were coordinating the fall schedules of our seven children.  We had also just found out we were expecting.  Though I have been an avid reader since childhood, I have never participated in a book club.  I thought reading some new books and chatting with like-minded women might be a good opportunity.

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A Mercy Observed

I first read A Severe Mercy in college and fell in love with it immediately. I was a lifelong C.S. Lewis fan and I was more than willing to read a book with C.S. Lewis’s letters!

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