In our patch of Midwest, we are currently hearing forecasts of 6-10 inches or more of snow on Sunday. Will winter never end? Of course in my town this means a mass descent on the local grocery stores where people buy enough food for a month even though we’ll be dug out within a day or two. [See my post on Ten Things Columbus People Do When Snow is Forecast.]  I wonder, do book lovers make an equivalent descent on local bookstores or libraries preceding similar weather events?

January 25 storm looking out our front door

It seems to me that “snow days” like this are a delicious invitation to curl up with a book (or three), a warm cup of something, a comfortable chair and maybe some good music. That is Nirvana to this introvert!

So if you are sharing in the latest version of “snowmageddon” or anticipating something like this in the future, what are the books you’d like to curl up with. Here are a few that I’m looking forward to:

Pilgrim’s Regress by C.S. Lewis. A group of us are starting to read it and this should be a good chance to get some of that reading done and see what Lewis did with this classic idea of a pilgrimage.

This feels like a great time for an Agatha Christie mystery.  I have a few of those on my Kindle and so I might just pull one of them up.

I’m in the midst of wading through a couple more serious books and I’ll probably take some time at my most attentive (usually mornings) to make some headway in Jesus the Sage by Ben Witherington exploring how Jesus represents the culmination of the Jewish wisdom tradition and in Andres Tapia’s The Inclusion Paradox, a book that is assigned reading for an upcoming conference.  The latter so far has been an eye-opening tour of how diverse our marketplaces are becoming and how businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions all need to take this on board. What is unique about this book is that Tapia sees diversity and inclusion not primarily through the lenses of challenges, problems or recruitment strategies, but rather as an opportunity for growth.

Lastly, I hope to finish off Paul Miller’s Praying Life, a very practical book that has been opening my eyes to the opportunities for prayerfulness in daily life.

Of course the one challenge to these great aspirations is that sometime I’ll have to get out and shovel all of that snow! But even just the thought of some time to curl up with a book is delicious. What about you?