Happy New Year and welcome to 2021! 

This year I’ve decided to prioritize relationships with the people in my life: with my husband, my children, my family and my friends. So as my first January recommendation, I’m proposing a relationship building/sustaining book. The other two recommendations are beautiful stories of love, friendship, and perseverance.  

The 5 Love Languages  by Gary Chapman – uncovers and describes the perfect way to communicate, relate and bond with your partner.  I would take it a step further and suggest that these principals are also applicable to your relationship with your children and/or your colleagues. The techniques you will learn, or be reminded of, will help you identify the best way to fill the ‘bucket’ of your partner by understanding their love language, understand your own love language, thus eliminating loads and loads of miscommunication.

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom – This book illustrates great love and respect between a professor and a student. The impact the professor made was illuminated by the journey which was ending for him yet breathing a new life into his student friend. Over the course of fourteen Tuesdays they covered the most important lessons in life. One of these lessons was about forgiveness, where he employs his student to “forgive yourself. Forgive others. Don’t wait.” 

All the Light We Cannot See  by Anthony Doerr – A beautifully written novel taking place in France and Germany during WWII. The main heroine in the book is blind and heavily relies on her other senses. Her father, in an attempt to normalize her life, personifies her sight by building her miniature models of the city, allowing her to freely navigate. At the same time, an orphan boy in Germany is gifted with all things electrical, especially radio transmitters, and escapes his destiny working in mines. Instead, he is recruited and trained by the German military interseeding the communication of Russians. The war finally brings the two together. It is a great novel, reminding us of the horror and inhumanity of war; and yet the benevolence and the kindness that humans are capable of.   

I hope  you enjoy one or all of these books!  They enriched my view, imagination and knowledge of the human kind.