Book titles in this post have an Amazon Affiliate link. I receive a portion of purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP

It’s been one of those rare, near-perfect Sundays, the kind of Sunday that is so peaceful, it’s hard to believe it’s possible. I know that Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the Sabbath, a day of rest, but I don’t think it’s ever really been that way for me.

Growing up, Sunday was a marathon of excessive churching, in which a hot, sweaty nap would be squeezed between seemingly endless church services and band practices. I’m very thankful for that upbringing in many ways, but it always meant Sundays were an exhausting scramble, usually topped off with finishing math homework after we finally got home at 9:30 PM.

As an adult, Sundays have become a working day. After church, the day is spent prepping for the week, with lesson plans, scheduling music lessons, and the like. Sometimes that includes hammering out succulent blog posts for the week ahead.

Top that off with the “Sunday scaries”—that vague sense of dread and anxiety that settles in around 4 or 5 PM on a Sunday afternoon—and I’ve never much cared for the day, or thought of it as all that restful. Church is great (and you should go, just probably not for eight hours every Sunday), but by the time I’m home from it, the weekend is essentially over and work begins. It’s why I try to take Saturdays as my “Sabbath,” when I truly do try to rest and recuperate.

That said, today has been what I think Sundays are supposed to be. Dr. Wife and I had a quiet morning and headed to church, after which we had lunch and picked up groceries. We came back and knocked out some chores around the house and in the yard, and then took a glorious nap with the dogs, from which we both got up from a short while before I wrote this post. Minecraft Camp starts tomorrow and I have a few lessons to schedule, but I don’t feel rushed. Dr. Wife usually has to drive back on Sundays to North Carolina, but because of the nature of her new rotation (which starts tomorrow), she won’t have to leave until tomorrow morning, and she’ll leave when I head out for camp.

The net effect is that it’s been a glorious and restful Sunday. Even as we’ve gotten things done around the house, it’s been a day both to celebrate and worship the Lord with other believers and time for rest and reflection. There is a peace over the house that I’m almost hesitant to articulate, lest the momentary blessing be somehow broken.

Well, enough of that waxing poetic (and complaining about going to church, which is somewhat hypocritical of me). For today’s installment of Lazy Sunday, I thought I’d look back at various Summer Reading Lists of yesteryear:

• “TBT: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2016” (and “The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2016” on Blogger/Blogspot) – the very first TPPSRL, this list very much reflected the BoomerCon stuff I was reading at the time. I’ll stand by Ideas Have Consequences, though!
• “SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2019” (SubscribeStar) – an important political transformation was taking place in my life at this time—already well underway with Trump’s election in 2016—and the list from this year reflects that.
• “SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2020” (SubscribeStar) – the highlight of this list is The Portable Conservative Reader, which I used as the de facto textbook for my History of Conservative Thought course. The book was briefly outrageously expensive, but it seems that used prices have come down considerably.
• “SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List” (SubscribeStar) – for some reason, I did not identify the 2021 list as such; regardless, I was reading Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, which are excellent reading (Harris is also from Mississippi, which I found interesting).
• “SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2022” (SubscribeStar) – this year’s list saw me moving more and more towards fiction, with few non-fiction selections.
• “SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2023” (SubscribeStar) – I finally found this version of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book among my piles and piles of books. There are other, slightly cheaper versions available, too, but I like the Signet Classics one.

So there you have it! A little late, but a Lazy Sunday bursting with summertime freshness.

Happy Reading—and Happy Sunday!

—TPP