Thursday, March 1, 2018

I Prepare For The Trip of A Lifetime

I'm about to embark on what its organizers are cheerfully calling the Trip of a Lifetime. And I'm pretty sure that will be true. The Harold Grinspoon Foundation selected 20 children's book authors from a larger pool of applicants to spend eight days in Israel learning about Jewish and Israeli culture, with the idea that we would learn enough to be able to write about Judaism well.

I loved the idea. A Jewish German refugee named Ruth is an important character in my recent novel The War I Finally Won. I used lots of beta readers on several sections of the novel, but also I was helped by my naive Christian point-of-view character, who needed everything explained to her anyway. But if I wanted to ever write from Ruth's point of view--and I would like to--I would have to understand Judaism much better than I currently do. So I applied for this trip last fall. In January I learned I'd been accepted. I got final travel arrangements, an updated itinerary, a suggested packing list, and a list of all the participants.

I thought about contacting the organizers and asking if they had any suggested reading. Often when I travel I like to read about my destination beforehand, and especially on this trip I thought some background might be a big help. Before I could email them, however, they emailed me--with a suggested reading list! Some stories were attached as PDF files, and I zipped through those pretty quickly (2 picture books, 2 short stories, a middle-grades novel). The rest were unfamiliar to me, so I got on Amazon and ordered the lot.

"That's a lot of books for a trip that starts less than three weeks from now," my husband observed, as I typed in the order.

I ignored him. I read fast and regularly.

Well. Seven of the ten books just landed on my doorstep.

God in Search of Man. It's 400+ pages, and I just read the first seven. It's actual college-level philosophy. Then there's Israel: A History. 700 pages. Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle. Etc.

My husband and I are headed out in just a bit to spend the weekend at our house in the mountains. I'd already packed a bag of books for the trip. I just unpacked it, removing Homo Deus and some other you'll-need-to-think-about-it tomes. I'm going to be thinking about Israel this weekend, and reading as well as I can.

I did leave A Duke In Shining Armor in my bookbag. Might need it from time to time.

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