Friday Five: Read any good books lately?

For this week's "Friday Five", RevGalBlogPals asks five questions about books. Here they are with my answers:

1. What book have you read in the last six months that has really stayed with you? Why?
   Three very different books stand out from the past six months.
   
   They are Cormac McCarthy's The Road (for the stark beauty of the relationship between the father and the son), Shane Claiborne's The Irresistable Revolution (for its challenge to all of us about the role that Christians are called to play-- and could really play-- in today's society), and Geoffrey Thorne's Sword of Damocles (for its presentation of a universe that represents real diversity).
   


2. What is one of your favorite childhood books? One? You've got to be kidding.
   Among favorites would be James Garfield's Follow My Leader (about a boy who is blinded and his seeing eye dog), Ruth Gannett's Elmer and the Dragon, Ethelyn Parkinson's series of books about Rupert Piper, and the Nancy Drew mysteries. And then there are my favorite books from my children's childhoods-- Where the Wild Things Are, Goodnight Moon, and The Clown of God.
   


3. Do you have a favorite book of the Bible? Do tell!
   It'd be a toss up between Jeremiah, Job, and the gospels (though over the past year or two I've become more and more fond of Acts as well).
   
   
4. What is one book you could read again and again?
   I reread lots of poetry, especially by Mary Oliver and Adrienne Rich, as well as books by Nikos Kazantzakis, Elie Wiesel, Annie Dillard, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
   


5. Is there a book you would suggest for Lenten reading? What is it and why?
   During Lent I often dip into the writing of Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, and Rumi.
   

And because we all love bonus questions, if you were going to publish a book what would it be? Who would you want to write the jacket cover blurb expounding on your talent?
Over the years I've imagined writing lots of books-- among them a book exploring the early 13th century and how the lives of Francis of Assisi, Rumi and perhaps the Jewish mystics of the time interacted with religious institutions of the day, a novel that leaps off from a family mystery that's never been solved, a murder mystery that takes place in both a virtual world and the "real world" at the same time-- but I've never had the luxury of undisturbed time to write any of them, much less thought of who would do the blurb for the jacket cover.