1. Essays & Reflections: In her piece on “The Pandemic Book Club,” Margaret Renkl reflects on the importance of books these days:
“What a book offers that I most need myself is a way to slow down. A book doesn’t drag me along at the speed of life – or the speed of breaking news – the way television shows and movies do. A book lets me linger, slowing down or speeding up as I wish, backtracking with the turn of a page.” In the same piece, Amy Ephron, owner of the Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin, IN, suggests that “Bookshops are lighthouses for people.” But as Renkl notes, bookstores operate on the slimmest of margins, even in the best of times. That's why it’s even more important now to support Eighth Day Books and your local independent bookstore, for as Renkl concludes,
“As distracted as I am in these darkening days, I have never more desperately the need to turn away from screens, the need to slow down and immerse myself not in breaking news but in the timelessness of the printed page.”
Click here to read “The Pandemic Book Club: How to get through this cataclysm even halfway calm: Enter a slower world.”
2. Essays & Reflections: Here’s some good advice from an independent bookseller
sharing the brutal truth about the herculean effort required to run an independent bookstore, especially these days: “So, Do You Really Want to Help Bookstores?”
Read it here
and please heed the advice.
3. Essays & Reflections: Are bookstores essential? Do they offer anything more than mere commerce?
Lucy Kogler, manager of Talking Leaves… Books in Buffalo, ponders the survivability of bookstores. “Grocery stores will survive because they are inculcated into our routines. We need food and will go to where it physically is. But books? Do we need to go where they physically are?”
You can read her short reflection here.
4. Books:Nicholas Basbanes is definitely my favorite author who has written extensively on the book. The image for this post is a photo of several of his titles on my personal bookshelf at home. You won’t go wrong purchasing any of them from Eighth Day Books. Here’s a sampling of the titles:
- A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
- A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World
- Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World
- Patience and Fortitude: Wherein a Colorful Cast of Determined Book Collectors, Dealers, and Librarians Go About the Quixotic Task of Preserving a Legacy
- Editions & Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat
- Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book-Hunter in the 21st Century
5. Poetry: Today’s poem is by Czeslaw Milosz: “And Yet the Books.”
Click here to read it on an EDI flyer
from way back in January of 2012 promoting the memorization of poetry (the flyer is delightfully subtitled “AN EXERCISE for flabby 21st-century MEMORY MUSCLES.
”
6. Bible readings:
Is. 41:4-14, Gen. 17:1-9, Prov. 15:20-16:9. Online here.
7. Liturgy: Today is the feast day of St Mary of Egypt.
Her life is read every year on the fifth Thursday of Lent; she is also commemorated annually on the fifth Sunday of Lent. We here offer St Nikolai Velimirović’s “Hymn of Praise to St Mary of Egypt”:
A wonderful penitent, self-tormentor,
Mary hid herself from the face of men.
Yea, O sinful me,
By passion darkened.
Passions are beasts which eat at our heart;
Like serpents they secretly weave in us a nest.
Yea, O sinful me,
By passion consumed!
In order to save sinners, Thou didst, O Christ,
Do Thou now not loathe me, the impure one!
Hearken to the cry of Mary,
The most sinful of all
The Lord showed compassion, He healed Mary;
Her darkened soul He whitened as snow.
Thanks be to Thee, O All-good One,
O Lord most dear!
Thou didst cleanse an impure vessel and gild it with gold;
Thou didst fill it to overflowing with Thy grace.
This is true mercy.
To Thee, O God, be glory!
And Mary became radiant with the Spirit,
Girded by strength as an angel of God,
By Thy power, O Christ,
By Thy mercy, Most-pure!
What is this fragrance in the awesome wilderness,
Like beautiful incense in a temple coffer?
Mary breathes it,
She exudes sanctity!
Then the woman asked the elder: “Why have you come, man of God, to me who am so sinful? Why do you wish to see a woman naked and devoid of every virtue? Though I know one thing – the Grace of the Holy Spirit has brought you to render me a service in time. Tell me, father, how are the Christian peoples living? And the kings? How is the Church guided?”
Zosimas said: “By your prayers, mother, Christ has granted lasting peace to all. But fulfill the unworthy petition of an old man and pray for the whole world and for me who am a sinner, so that my wanderings in the desert may not be fruitless.”
She answered: “You who are a priest, Abba Zosimas, it is you who must pray for me and for all – for this is your calling. But as we must all be obedient, I will gladly do what you ask.” And with these words she turned to the East, and raising her eyes to heaven and stretching out her hands, she began to pray in a whisper. One could not hear separate words, so that Zosimas could not understand anything that she said in her prayers. Meanwhile he stood, according to his own word, all in a flutter, looking at the ground without saying a word. And he swore, calling God to witness, that when at length he thought that her prayer was very long, he took his eyes off the ground and saw that she was raised about a forearm’s distance from the ground and stood praying in the air. When he saw this, even greater terror seized him and he fell on the ground weeping and repeating many times, “Lord, have mercy.” And whilst lying prostrate on the ground he was tempted by a thought: Is it not a spirit, and perhaps her prayer is hypocrisy.
But at the very same moment the woman turned round, raised the elder from the ground and said: “Why do thoughts confuse you, Abba, and tempt you about me, as if I were a spirit and a dissembler in prayer? Know, holy father, that I am only a sinful woman, though I am guarded by Holy Baptism. And I am no spirit but earth and ashes, and flesh alone.” And with these words she guarded herself with the sign of the Cross on her forehead, eyes, mouth and breast, saying: “May God defend us from the evil one and from his designs, for fierce is his struggle against us.”
**All books (and icons) in print available from Eighth Day Books.
Please support an independent bookstore that believes in the eighth day resurrection of our God and Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Give them a call at 1.800.841.2541 or visit their website here. And don't forget Eighth Day Members (Patrons+) receive 10% discount, plus lots of other perks! 
