Bookish Blog Format

Once a week, sometimes more, I share snippets from my WIP (work in progress) and passages that speak deeply to me from books I’m reading. Sometimes snippets from other writers’ books will be all I share because I’m determined not to give you any serious spoilers from my developing novel, which as the year deepens will be harder to avoid. Enjoy, and do check out some of these books I’m quoting!

From My Reading

New Morning Mercies, Paul Tripp, Jan 3: In a moment, your thoughts can seem more important than they actually are. In a moment, your emotions can seem more reliable than they really are. In a moment, your needs can seem more essential than they truly are…. God reminds us that this is not all there is, that we were created and re-created in Christ Jesus for eternity. He reminds us not to live for the treasures of the moment: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matt. 6:19-20).

Heaven, Randy Alcorn, p424: I don’t look back nostalgically at wonderful moments in my life, wistfully thinking the best days are behind me. I look at them as foretastes of an eternity of better things. The buds of this life’s greatest moments don’t shrivel and die; they blossom into greater moments, each to be treasured, none to be lost. Everything done in dependence on God will bear fruit for eternity. This life need not be wasted. In small and often unnoticed acts of service to Christ, we can invest this life in eternity, where today’s faithfulness will forever pay rich dividends.

Happiness, Randy Alcorn, p415: Much of the battle for joy hinges on whether we believe God is happy and wants us to be too–and whether we recognize that at this very moment God is showing himself and his happiness in hundreds of ways, if only we’ll look.

Bullet Proof, Chuck Holton, p56: Although homeschooling is not an option for every family, it is important no matter where our children attend school that we proactively teach them they have only one thing to fear–life apart from God’s will and purpose. This is especially vital if our children are exposed to daily doses of fearmongering by the world, whatever the source. Helping them to understand and appreciate the sovereignty of God over all situations will instill in our kids a wide-open optimism and fearlessness about what is to come. It will free them to risk total obedience to the Lord’s calling in their lives, opening up the path of lifelong joy. As the psalmist wrote, “I run in the path of your commandments, for you have set my heart free” (Psalm 119:32).

From My Writing

Excerpt from: Untitled 9th Historical Novel, Copyright 2024 Lori Benton (all rights reserved; do not copy without my permission). Note: this is a work in progress that will, by and by, undergo multiple rounds of editing and is therefore subject to change. To avoid spoilers, sometimes I’ll replace character names with X, Y, or Z.

The summer dim cast its twilight across the shieling, where the cattle were pastured beneath a sky gone as deeply blue as ever it did mid-June. Night’s edge hung suspended, its very touch a shyness. The stonechats and larks had hushed. Perhaps they harkened to the story young X was telling, seated cross-legged at the open bothy door, gaze lifting now and then to the milky glow outlining the moors across the glen, where the sun briefly dipped below the horizon each night.

 

With the cut peats stacked to dry, they’d brought the cattle up to the lower shieling to graze through the short summer nights. Eventually the beasts would be moved to the high shieling for fresh pasturage. Then the women of the clachan would come to make the butter and cheeses, and tell them when to sleep and when to rise.

 

For now though there was freedom, and time for storytelling. X had begun recounting the epic tale of the Táin Bó Cúailnge. The Cattle Raid of Cooley. With the story into its second night, it seemed he had his listeners well enthralled. They were Hamish MacDonald, a fair-headed, gray-eyed lad of ten—X’s own age—and Hamish’s nine-year-old sister, Jenny of the brown hair and eyes.

 

Maybe no’ so enthralled as all that, he was forced to reconsider moments later, for barely had he summarized the story told thus far—how Maeve, Queen of Connacht, and her kingly husband, Ailill, had in an idle moment compared each their wealth with the other’s and found the one thing Maeve lacked to match Ailill was a bull the like of Finnbennach Ai, the White-horned, of Ailill’s herd; how Maeve, to right this imbalance, had sought the stud loan of Donn Cúailnge, the Brown Bull of Ulster, and was denied; how Maeve raised an army to go a’raiding and take the Brown Bull for her use; how she and her warriors proceeded into Ulster where the men languished under a curse that prevented their stopping her—when Hamish cut in.

 

“But why could the Ulster men no’ stop her? I’ve ne’er understood that curse.”

 

X scrubbed his nose, hiding a grimace. It was rude to interrupt a storyteller mid-tale. Hamish would never have done the like to X’s grandfather. But then, wasn’t Grandfather accounted the best storyteller in Glen Fheannag, with tales gleaned far and wide droving the glen’s cattle to market in distant Crieff, for just about forever?

 

X said, “The fighting-aged men of Ulster were under a curse that made them groan in the pains of childbed whenever danger threatened, so they could no’ take up arms.”

 

Hamish’s eyes went round as pebbles, their whites showing in the dim. “The men were having bairns?”

 

“Clot-head!” One of Jenny’s small fists shot from the bothy’s shadowed interior, giving her brother a shove. “They only felt the pangs of childbirth. No man’s braw enough to birth a bairn—that’s why ’tis given to women to do.”