Grace Livingston Hill

Sorry it's been a few days. There's not much to do here, so there's not really much to say.

A few days ago, I discovered a cache of books left at the apartments we're staying in (they're kept by our company for people passing through Amman). I snagged several for my reading pleasure and one of them was a romance by Grace Livingston Hill. I'd read one or two of hers back in the day when I was first reading "romances" as a pre-teen and had laughed at them then, so I figured that this would be good, enjoyable reading for a day or two. It was! :) Her novels all follow a pattern:

A beautiful, completely innocent girl is left alone for some reason (parents/guardians die or whatever). She undergoes some journey, either just aging or a physical journey in which she's tempted to lose her complete unworldliness. But instead of being tainted in the least by anything remotely resembling "the world," she instead converts everyone she meets, even just in passing. With a few people (usually the ones who are determined to make her a "woman of the world"), this takes longer, but for the most part it takes all of about two minutes for her to get the others to believe that her beliefs are right. Anyway, somewhere along this journey, she meets a guy (sometimes the first guy of marriagable age that she's ever met before) and he's not yet a believer, but she changes his life in the course of a few minutes, so after a painful separation, he also comes to believe like her. But literally in the last page, she gets reunited with her family, her guy friend shows up (as a believer), and all of those hard-boiled cases come to believe as well.

Anyway, if you're curious, read any of GLH's books and you'll come to realize that I just told you the plot. Heehee. But it _was_ entertaining for a day or so. Now I'm back to Plato (needed a break...that's some heavy stuff just to keep track of the conversation). I also finished the Qur'an a week or so ago. It was interesting. I've learned a lot recently about how it points to Jesus as the Word of God. I'm going to read it again here shortly (probably after I finish with Plato), but this time instead of reading it in the traditional order (literally longest to shortest surah or chapter), I'm going to read it chronologically.

I'll be updating the sidebar here shortly. Oh, I finished with Wordsworth too. I think that "I wandered lonely as a cloud" (or "Daffodils") is probably one of my most favorite poems of all time, but taken as a group, I prefer Burns to Wordsworth.

Ok...got a meeting to go to. We're going to be told possibly how much longer we'll be here. I hope it's not long. I'm enjoying pizza delivery, movies in a movie theater, and McDonalds, but I'd still rather be in Iraq.