It’s been a chaotic few months! My employer closed unexpectedly. I moved to a new state (New Hampshire), started a new job, and … drumroll, please … adopted a dog.

I think my reading from this time reflects the chaos. Reading, for example, a very contemporary, women-centered novel like “The Wren, the Wren” back-to-back with Thomas Merton’s “Contemplative Prayer” is probably not something a healthy person would necessarily think to do.

However, this list also reflects some of the good that came from this time of change and transition. Driving back and forth between the three states where I partially lived in August gave me the time to listen to 32 hours of “Middlemarch” on audiobook (which I got free through Libby). And the life I’m building here in New Hampshire has me spending many evenings sitting on the couch with my dog, reading while he naps off the day’s adventures. With him snoring beside me, I plowed through Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad.

“Middlemarch” was my first foray into audiobooks. In the past, I’ve avoided them because I resent their pace compared to reading to myself. But now that I’ve realized the power of audiobooks to allow me to read even while driving or walking the dog, I’m hooked!

I could say much more about “Middlemarch,” but it probably deserves its own post … to put it briefly, I’ll say I’ve rarely encountered a narrator at once so attuned to the absurdity of human vanity and so willing to take the mundanities of life so seriously. It’s a timeless, funny, hope-filled and faith-restoring book.

After “Middlemarch” I listened to E.M. Forster’s “Howard’s End.” I read “Maurice” earlier in the year and was blown away by Forster’s attention to the way people think, move and feel. As “Howard’s End” got underway, I felt optimistically that this story would demonstrate the same clear-eyed view of fickle man. And it did – at first – but the characters in “Howard’s End” are dissappointingly static. From a writerly perspective, there was something intriguing about that staticness. But it was intriguing in the way that pulling the tendons on a dead thing to make its limbs twitch is intriguing. Nevertheless, I liked Forster’s prose, as I did in “Maurice” and felt it labored valiantly to keep the novel alive.

Next, I listened to several young adult novels, including my former professor Gary Schmidt’s book “Orbiting Jupiter.” Schmidt is one of those rare writers for kids who seems to understand that children do not inhabit some place isolated from the one where the serious, adult world unfolds but in fact experience and respond to the same range of ugly and beautiful things adults do. I’ve been reading his books since middle school and was not disappointed by this addition to the collection.

Novels

• Anne Enright, “The Wren, the Wren”
• George Eliot, “Middlemarch”*
• Moa Backe Astot, “Fire From the Sky”*
• Gabrielle Zevin, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”
• E.M. Forster, “Howard’s End”*
• Gary Schmidt, “Orbiting Jupiter”*
• Freeman Ng, “Bridge Across the Sky”*

Nonfiction and Poetry

• Thomas Merton, “Contemplative Prayer”
• Flannery O’Connor, “A Prayer Journal”
• Ocean Vuong, “Time is a Mother”*
• Bert Hornback, “Middlemarch: A Novel of Reform”
• Homer, trans. Emily Wilson, “The Iliad”