3 Books for Summer Vacation

My family and I just returned from a refreshing vacation on Nantucket island, a vacation made possible by the generosity of my mother in-law. This is the second year in a row that we’ve done this and I’m enjoying the rhythm of this emerging family tradition: spending a week of our summer relaxing in a far away, beautiful place where the most stressful event of the day is deciding which beach to go to.

Vacation was great, but it’s good to be home. This week I’ll return to a normal blogging schedule.

If you’re still looking for some summer reading, below are the 3 books I read during vacation, 3 books that I couldn’t put down.
1. Colin Duriez, Francis Shaeffer: An Authentic Life. In my opinion, biography should play a central role in your summer reading. I spent last summer being personally mentored by Martyn Llyod Jones as I read volume 1 of his biography (by Iain Murray) during my vacation in Nantucket. This year I received a week of mentoring from Francis Shaeffer as I read this new and excellent biography by Colin Duriez. I’m already brainstorming which biography I’ll read next summer.
2. Ethan Rarick, Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West. Rarick’s new book is being hailed as the best researched account of the Donner Party to date. I grew up hearing stories and folklore about the Donner Party and regularly visiting the pass in the Sierras where the Donner Party experienced their ordeal of tragedy, starvation, cannibalism, and rescue. This is an excellent, well researched, and well written book that consumed my full attention.

3. Ed Welch, Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest. This is the way I’ve been putting it to my wife: “this book is filleting my soul.” Welch’s writing about fear, worry, and the God of rest has been cutting me open, convicting me, healing me, and changing me. I’m not finished with this book yet. I’m reading just one chapter per day (as Welch suggests). I think this book could appear on a top 40 list of the most influential books of my life.

PS. I took the above photo at an ice cream shop on the Nantucket wharf. I finally invested in a decent camera, a Nikon D40. Hopefully this will result in some better photos here on the blog. In the coming weeks I’ll post some of the shots I took during vacation.