"With this silver, I've bought your soul!"

Recognize that line? Here's another one of my favorites from Precious Stones & Alabaster: Gifts of Advice for Christian Women Starting College

Ransomed

Les Misérables is the best Broadway play ever in the history of theatre… in my humble opinion. The story is incredible to the very last scene, but the most amazing part is the beginning. Jean Valjean (pronounced with a French accent, of course) is a criminal recently paroled from prison for stealing bread to feed his starving family. He has no place to stay, but a kindly priest and his wife take Jean in, feed him and provide him lodging.

During the night, Jean, who is mad at God for being unjust, steals the priest’s silver serving pieces and runs. The police catch him the next day and Jean swears that the priest gave him the silver. Jean is taken back to the priest to confess, and the most incredible exchange happens.

Upon seeing Jean in the hands of the police, the priest says, “Ah, Jean Valjean, there you are and thank you for finding him, officers. Yes, I did give him the silver, and Valjean, you forgot the candlesticks that are worth at least 2000 franks. Why did you leave them?” The police unhand Valjean and leave. Jean asks the priest, “Why are you doing this?”

The priest grasps Jean by the shoulders and looks intently into his eyes. “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil. With this silver, I’ve bought your soul. I’ve ransomed you from fear and hatred. Now I give you back to God.” Jean Valjean goes on to do great things. His life is not free from trials, but Jean is not only freed from his criminal past, he helps many other suffering people as well.

Isn’t this the very picture of what God has done for us through His Son, Jesus? As an unbeliever you were just like Jean Valjean; a common criminal looking for nourishment to satisfy your hunger and a place to lay your head. God gave as a sacrifice something much more precious than silver serving pieces or silver candlesticks. With His very own Son, He has ransomed you from fear and hatred, from sin and destruction. With the sacrificial blood of Jesus, your soul has been purchased at a very high price.

“…the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.”
Matthew 20:28 (NIV)

The priest bestows great charity toward Jean Valjean, and as a result, Jean becomes a compassionate and merciful friend toward others. Through this one act of love, Jean’s life is transformed from evil to good.

How can you show Christ’s love to your fellow students? You don’t have to spend lots of money. Just use the resources you already have. I’m sure you can see that many of your fellow students are desperate for a kind word or gesture. Be the one in your Bible study, Christian student organization or even in class who reaches out to the students who need a friend. You need not sacrifice silver candlesticks to show mercy and compassion toward a fellow student, just a little of your time and compassion.

Someone was on the move...

I'm working almost nightly to update my 12-week devotional book for first semester college women. I read this one tonight for the first time in awhile and was reminded how much I love this story. I'm not nearly talented enough to convey what happened to me in these few seconds, but I've tried to come close...


Your Guardian Angel

An amazing thing happened to me several years ago. My friend, LeAnn, was serving as a short-term missionary in Guinea, West Africa, and I was fortunate to get to spend three weeks with her there. I could write volumes about the culture, the food, and the people, but I am anxious to tell you about what happened to me in the market one day.

Guineans go to the open-air market every day to purchase the day’s food. It’s a fabulous, busy place full of wonderful sights and smells. To this day, the scent of pineapples takes my mind straight to the markets in Guinea. LeAnn and I were wandering around a market one day looking at all the fabrics, the fruits and vegetables and enjoying a rare cool morning. I found something interesting and turned to ask LeAnn how much it would cost. She was gone. I had lost track of her in the rows of merchandise. I could not speak a single word of the local languages. LeAnn was my only means of communication in this world. My heart sank into my stomach. In a split second all I could imagine was that I was lost in this place where I couldn’t speak with any of these people and that LeAnn would never find me. I think it's the only time in my life when I've experienced debilitating panic.

It seemed like a lifetime, but only a few minutes later LeAnn appeared with one of the Guinean market ladies. I was so relieved that I almost started to cry! The market lady had seen the look of shock on my face when I realized LeAnn was not with me. This kind woman knew she couldn’t speak my language, so instead of trying to calm me she just ran off to find LeAnn and bring her back to me. What an amazing feeling to find out that while I was almost paralyzed with fear and my mind was racing through one escape plan after another, someone was already on the move to make things right for me.

See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way
and to bring you to the place I have prepared.
Exodus 23:20 (NIV)

Wow... What happened to 2011?

Fellow Snobs... I've been an absentee blogger for so long! I had such great intentions, but somewhere around February of 2011 I completely fell off the blog bandwagon. What happened? Well, this is what happened...












Yep, I met Eric White and fell head over heels in love! I think we might have started planning our wedding around the second or third date. :) I abandoned all blogging (and almost all reading) for wedding magazines and catering sites!!

We got engaged on the observation deck of Vulcan in Birmingham, Alabama on June 3, 2011. Eric had the proposal running across a sign in Southside below us. See...














(Vulcan statue)

















"Lori Barstow, I love you, will you marry me?"
YES!!!

Finally, the big day came! December 3, 2011. It was a magical, spiritual, wonderful day. I got to marry the love of my life and I got to have lots of friends and family there to celebrate!










































We went on a honeymoon cruise...












... and we're finally settling down into real life.

This Book Snob has a lot of reading to catch up on and I'm looking forward to it. Several friends and I are going to attempt to read through War and Peace this year. I think most of us are both excited about the adventure AND skeptical about our ability to understand it - not to mention stick to it long enough to finish. I'm about 60 pages in and already fairly lost as to what is happening. I'm going to forge ahead and see if it comes together for me at some point.

I'm also working on updating and republishing my devotional for college women...
Precious Stones and Alabaster: Gifts of Advice for Christian Women Starting College. www.PreciousStonesBook.com
I'm excited about the possibility of doing a format for e-readers like Kindle and Nook.

The year ahead has some great possibilities for reading snobby books and having lots to talk about.

I hope your 2012 is off to a great start and that you're starting it off with a great book.

Read on!

The Downside of Snobbery!

Wow! It’s been quite a long time since I’ve blogged! I might be a book snob, but I guess I won’t win any awards for being a blog snob.

I’ve been thinking about being a book snob recently. Generally speaking, I think being a book snob is usually a fabulous thing. I like meeting and hanging out with my other book snob friends, I like reading books written by fellow book snobs – there’s lots of great things about it! But lately I’ve been thinking about one little negative thing about being a book snob.

I’ve started noticing recently that many of us book snobs might be taking our snobbiness a little too seriously. I’m worried we might have fallen into the book snob version of the “my-life-is-harder-than-yours” syndrome. You know what I mean. If you ever say to a co-worker or friend, “Gosh, I’m so tired this week,” you can almost always expect them to say something like, “Girl, you have NO idea what tired is! This week I’ve had to….” If you take a vacation day there’s always someone who says, “Gee, tough job!” If you have one kid, you can count on your friends with five kids to tell you how easy you’ve got it. You get the idea. All of us have heard these things from others, and we’ve all said these things, too. Why do we want to brag about how tough we have it??

The book snob version of this syndrome shows up when we hear a fellow snob tell about a book, series or author that we would “never” spend time reading. (If you’re Southern, that would be “nevah”). Maybe you’re a non-fiction lover and you think it’s a colossal waste of time to read fiction. Or you love historical biographies and you can’t imagine spending one minute on the Twilight series. (Team Jacob!!). Everyone has their favorites, but what’s with our need to high-five ourselves on how much more sophisticated our reading selections are than the next snob’s? I know I’ve done it. And if I’ve ever been a little too proud of the number of books I’ve read in the last month, I can usually count on a fellow snob to tell me that if I had a real life I wouldn’t have so much time to read. What is that??

This syndrome isn’t just for book snobs! Those who are not on Facebook congratulate themselves on being “above it all” - usually because they “have no idea who has enough time for that!” Some who are on Facebook want you to believe they only get on it once a month and would never stoop to the ridiculousness of changing their profile picture. I suspect those people check it daily, but instead of sharing their lives with their friends, they’re just spying on ours. (Confession: I understand this a little… I’ll never tweet! See… we all do it!) Our culture certainly helps those of us with a tendency toward snobbiness – Starbucks addicts snub those with Folger’s in their cups, green tea drinkers think those who like a classic cup of Lipton are “so last year.”

In light of all this, my mid-year resolution is to try to be more affirming to my fellow book snobs in their reading choices. Thank goodness they are reading anything, right?? So what if I bailed in the 4^th book of Harry Potter because I just didn’t get it? I’m obviously the one out of the loop since a gabillion people on the planet have read and loved this series. What difference does it make that Stephenie Meyer spells her name funny and started every single paragraph in Twilight with “I”? She’s not wondering how to fill her gas tank with two weeks left until payday!

So, if you’re a book snob, coffee snob, music snob, writer snob, ski-doo snob or any other kind of snob you can think of – let’s all try to reign in our snobbiness just a little and be glad there are other people in the world who like the same kind of things we do – even if they prefer a different version of it.

Unless it’s thrash metal music. That’s just unacceptable.

Read on, Snobs!

The Winter of Our... Jane

I just heard on the news that Tuscaloosa is getting 2-3" of snow later this afternoon. My first reaction? Thank goodness, I can catch up on Jane. It's my Book Snobs pick this month and I decided to choose something REALLY snobby... Jane Eyre. Problem is, I'm a wee bit behind schedule for finishing on time. I need a snow day to catch up. It would be awful if the Snob who picked the book didn't finish it before the meeting!

So... my last post was about reading in the rain, but now I'm hoping to read in the snow.

Great news for Jane Eyre fans!! I was so excited to see during the previews for another movie that "Jane Eyre: the movie" is coming March 2011. Check out the trailer here. I went to see The King's Speech (a must see, by the way) with another Snob - when the JE preview came on we were probably the only ones who audibly squealed (maybe that was just me). But I bet it will be an amazing movie - for Book Snobs and Movie Snobs alike.

The top 5 fabulous things about a snow day:

5) Sleeping late - provided the heat is working.

4) Having a really great excuse for being behind on work email.

3) The cultural event in the South called "Git yo bread and milk" - this happens every time the word "snow" is uttered by Meteorologist James Spann, even though no one in Tuscaloosa has ever been snowed in more than about 24 hours.

2) Trying out my new rain/snow boots (the first I've ever owned, not sure why!).

1) Reading a great book written in the 19th century on a 21st century Kindle. :)

Reading in the Rain...

What's better than reading a book when it's raining outside? That's right, pretty much nothing!

Alabama has been having it's fair share of rain these days. In fact, it's been raining/icing/snowing so much that I still haven't made it to the store for my coveted rain boots!! Much of the rest of the country is experiencing the same thing. I haven't blogged much lately, so I thought I'd encourage your book snobbiness by posting some great quotes about reading, rain, and reading in the rain.

I can't wait for the weekend to start so I can continue on my journey with Jane Eyre. She just found out last night that she's off to Lowood and I especially loved when she blessed out Mrs. Reed around 9:00 pm. I'm just at the beginning of this one, but I hope it rains cats and dogs all weekend so I can stay in and enjoy hanging out with Jane.

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
~B. F. Skinner

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
~James Dickey

Only your friends steal your books.
~Voltaire

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
~William Styron

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
~Author Unknown

I find television to be very educating. Every time someone turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.
~Groucho Marx

Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.
~Billie Holiday

April showers bring May flowers,
I have seen rain before,
But if Sunday mornin' lets that sun in,
What are we waiting for?
'Cause love leaves an open door.
~Sugarland


















From Jane Eyre...
"I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one."

Don't judge a book by it's cover??

I have to confess to being a cover girl. No, not the kind you see on tv, obviously. I'm a Book Snob cover girl - and I must confess that I regularly judge a book by it's cover. In fact, the only time I don't judge a book by it's cover is when I've read and loved the author for so long that I stop caring what the dust jackets look like on their new books. But that's rare for me.

Even though I'm a confessed cover girl, I also acknowledge that this process for choosing new books is severely flawed. I didn't know this until I started writing myself, but it's extremely rare for an author to have any input when choosing the cover for a book. I can assure you that this would kill me if I were an author with a traditional publishing house! The cover says in one glance what the synopsis of a book should tell you - and some of those covers say "Use this instead of a Tylenol PM."

An interesting fact about dust jackets is that much of the value of a book hinges on their condition. You've likely heard about how much a "first edition" book from a famous author can sell for, but did you know that the dust jacket makes or breaks that value? For example, you can buy a first edition of The Great Gatsby with no dust jacket for $10,000. The same book with a dust jacket that's even in moderate repair will jump that price to $80,000! My friend, Annelle, confessed at Book Snobs one night that she throws away all her dust jackets. I choked on my pasta dish, fell to the floor in full cardiac arrest and they had to call the ambulance. WHAT??? Keep those dust jackets, people! Even if you don't care about them, your children will care about them when they go to sell your book collection after you've kicked the bucket.

One of my favorite shows, CBS Sunday Morning, did a segment about books and dust jackets a few weeks ago. Mo Rocca (who totally cracks me up!) walked the viewers through the process of how a publisher/editor chooses the cover art for a book. Evidently, when you see an awful book cover on the shelf in a bookstore you can know that someone thought about it for more than 2 minutes. I know, hard to believe in so many cases. But for the great ones, it's obvious that the publisher took the time to tell part of the story on the dust jacket and knew people like me would buy it just because of that!

Here are some examples of horrible book covers from the New Releases page on barnesandnoble.com:
I heard about this book on the news and it actually seems kind of interesting. It's supposedly about how Chinese mothers raise their children more strictly than moms in other cultures. The author was engaging and upbeat in her interview. But this book cover is b.o.r.i.n.g!

Can't you imagine how fabulous this cover could have been with a colorful Chinese image of a tiger - like something you'd see at Swen? This book cover is an epic FAIL in my opinion.




Here's another thing I hate: Book covers that have the author's name 10x larger than the book title. At first glance, it looks like the title of this book is Susan Elizabeth Phillips. I don't understand this at all.









And check this one out! This is not a textbook - it's a new release on BN.com. Thomas Sowell is a syndicated columnist and has now published the 4th edition to this book. It's supposed to be a book for the common folk so they can learn about economics in a "relaxed and even enjoyable way." Well, look, Mr./Ms. Editor, if you want people to think economics is enjoyable, find a cover for this book that does not scream, "This is the most boring book ever written!"



On the other hand, here are some book covers I love!

Cassandra King's Same Sweet Girls - you can tell a lot about the basic plot of the book just from this cover.
















Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants kept catching my attention in the book stores and I finally read it!











I think this is a great cover for Rick Bragg's Prince of Frogtown. I love "real" photos on memoirs and this one is perfect. You can almost see what kind of story Rick is going to tell about his dad.









And then there's my own book's cover. Is it terribly conceited to say that I think my book cover is gloriously beautiful?? (Yes, it's larger than the others so you can so how fabulous it is!) I had in mind what I wanted it to look like long before I had finished writing it. I spent HOURS paging through stock photos to find the right one. My friend and computer guru, Adam Miller, took the picture I had in my head and made it a reality. Check this out - Adam was even able to change a couple of the gems on this book cover because I didn't like how they looked. THAT's how much time and thought I put into my book cover. Surely other authors must do the same!

In my next life, I'm either going to be a country music diva like Faith Hill or I'm going to be a book cover editor. I'm thinking the latter is more probable. My mission in life would to be abolish boring book covers for all publications except textbooks - there's nothing you can do to make those more attractive.

In the meantime, this cover girl can be found browsing the shelves for the next great read - based solely, of course, on the cover art. It's worked pretty good for me so far!

Read on, Snobs!