What books should you read upon returning home from vacation? Here are some recommendations

Returning from vacation is never easy. On one hand, we like to get back our daily routine, but the desire to stay at sea, in the mountains, or simply taking a break at home can linger for a long while after.

Is there a way to not think too much at the end of the summer? Distract yourself with good books.

Which ones? Below we point out some texts, some recent, others more dated, which we believe are worth being taken up by your hands…

1) The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman, 2001

A somewhat dated, yet extremely current volume, a must that we feel we can suggest because it sheds light on truths that are anything but outdated regarding married life.

Many times we reduce love to mere feeling and convince ourselves that it must feed on itself. If the relationship becomes “tired,” we say that “love is over” and slowly we surrender to its death.

This book is able to awaken the active role we must play if we want love stay alive or rise again when it seems lost. The author proposes 5 ways to nurture and grow conjugal love, simple and concrete ways that every husband and wife can follow.

It is an interesting book, which explains to us how to remind the other that he or she is not alone… that one’s own life is united with other’s.

2) An Odyssey of Love and War, Olga Brajnovic, Rialp, 2019

1941. Mussolini’s troops occupy the beautiful bay of Kotor (later Croatia and today Montenegro) and arrest Luka Brajnovic, a young and motivated Croatian journalist.

He manages to escape and months later, now in Zagreb, he marries his girlfriend, Ana Tijan.

During a trip to write a report for his newspaper, Tito’s communist partisans attack the train and stop him. Sentenced to death in a coarse trial, he is spared his life with the vain hope of obtaining his collaboration with the communist partisan propaganda, him being a well-known Catholic journalist.

He manages to escape the prison camp and reunite with his beloved. Faced with the imminent conquest by the Communists of Zagreb, and driven by his family, he finds himself facing exile, waiting to reunite with his loved ones. The wife is pregnant, but circumstances force them to separate.

Olga Brajnovic, journalist, with the help of correspondence between the parents, reconstructs a moving story, which reveals the greatness of the human being. A fascinating book, a true odyssey of love and war and a song to the fidelity of a love that overcomes the fragility of men and the harsh circumstances of war.

3) A sexually liberated youth (or almost) (Italian publisher Sonzogno, 2017)

It is a book written by Thérèse Hargot, a French psychotherapist with decades of experience in schools and in continuous contact with adolescents.

The author addresses the delicate issue of sexual liberalization, explaining how young people are no longer so free today as they were when sexuality was “reserved for marriage.”

The continuous and explicit stimuli that young people receive would lead them to feel “forced” to live out their intimacy “too soon” and “badly.”

Easy access to porn, performance anxiety, and obsession with sexual orientation: according to the author, all of the above suffocate young people, rather than freeing them, and do not allow them to develop and mature serenely.

It is a book that opens the reader’s eyes, that “unmasks” alleged conquests. Thanks to numerous testimonies, the author tries to give answers to those who want to preserveintimacy so that , instead of being soiled and wasted, it can be joyfully actualized and experienced.

4) Navarro-Valls, el portavoz. Veinte testimonios para la historia. Rafael Navarro-Valls (ed). Rialp, 2019

For twenty-two years, in the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Joaquín Navarro-Valls was spokesman for the Holy See.

To accompany John Paul II, he traveled more than a million kilometers, equivalent to twenty trips around the globe. He shared his summer holidays in the Alps with the Polish Pope. He was the latter’s special envoy in the official missions of the Holy See, such as the Cairo and Beijing Conferences, and in other delicate missions, such as the preparation of the Pope’s trip to Cuba or the first visit of a Vatican delegation to Moscow during the communist regime.

He was a psychiatrist before his appointment as Vatican spokesman, correspondent between Rome and the Middle East of the Spanish newspaper ABC and, after his retirement at the Vatican, he was President of the Advisory Council of the University of the Biomedical Campus of Rome, in addition to be a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross.
He died on July 5^th, 2017 in Rome.

This volume contains first-hand accounts, ranging from its current successor, the Jesuit Father Lombardi, to prominent journalists who knew him closely, to George Weigel, the most accredited biographer of John Paul II. The testimonies draw a human, professional, and historical profile to understand this legendary figure of the Vatican and international communication and understand a dimension of the second longest pontificate in the history of the Church, and certainly one of the most fruitful.

Enjoy reading!