I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to summer—although there are those who are enduring this Georgia heat along with me who’d think I’m absolutely crazy to say that! But it’s been a light-hearted (if somewhat madcap!) season of visits to and from dear ones across the country, of kindred spirits returning home from across…
Some of my very favorite memories of summer are the endless afternoons I spent reading as a girl. Whether sprawled across my bed or tipping lazily in the hammock under the dogwood trees, those blessed hours epitomize the essence of true summertime luxury to me. Unfettered by the duties and responsibilities which attend adulthood, I…
There is something about the long, languid days of summer that begs for a particular flavor of reading, in my mind. I have said this before, but books have their own season for me as definitely as my clothes. I’d no more pull on my cabled wool ‘barn sweater’–so de rigueur for frosty winter mornings–in…
I’ve made no secret of my heartfelt writerly crush on The Rabbit Room, and it is always an honor and a joy to get to chime in on the Great Conversation that’s going on over there. Most recently I’ve aired some opinions on one of the Inklings, Charles Williams, the man C.S. Lewis called his…
Of all my Christmas loves, the books and stories that express the real joys of the season are among the sweetest. Over the years I have amassed a goodly circle of friends that take their indispensable places among the cherished traditions: from the short stories we like to read aloud in the weeks leading up…
You don’t have to spend much time around here to know that I am a Romantic of the old order. I love the tenderness of a well-turned phrase, the high sensibility of a love letter. My heart plunges and rises and plunges again with the pathos of a Chopin nocturne and I am always the…
It’s easy to forget—or perhaps never fully realize in the first place—just what a treasure we hold in our hands in the form of a book. In times not too far past, books were solely the possession of the wealthy. As recently as the publication dates of many of my favorite nineteenth century novels, books…
At the gentle (and brilliant) suggestion of a reader, I have decided to act upon a notion I had back in the summer, before I even opened the Bookshop at Lanier’s Books, namely, a series of proper introductions to the authors and titles you will find on my shelves. My books are selected with great…
George Macdonald was the grandfather of us all. ~Madeleine L’Engle Ten pages into George MacDonald’s Lilith I was thoroughly entranced—there’s nothing like a memory-haunted library and a mysterious visitant and secret doors to get this girl to sit up and take notice. Twenty pages in I was right royally flummoxed. I found myself floundering and…
Quite candidly, I didn’t get the big idea. A slim volume with an address for a title. (Albeit a London, address, lending a smidge of credibility.) Nondescript, by an American lady I had never heard of. And yet, Mrs. Downs couldn’t keep it in the store. She was constantly tracking down first editions for people…
I have been waiting to write this post for a long, long time. It was a deciding factor in the name I chose for this site. It’s been a steadily-brewing desire since the days I sat among the stacks and shelves of Katherine Downs’ shop and learned to love the weight of a well-made book…
When a writer has a philosophy like Bess Streeter Aldrich’s, I know I’m in good company. And when Jodi said that The Rim of the Prairie was her favorite of Aldrich’s books, I knew that I was in for a treat. I want to begin this review by saying that one of the things I…
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens is one of those books that was just meant to be read aloud. Literally. Dickens considered himself the novelist of the common man and his works were originally published in the relatively inexpensive serialized form. I heard that in nineteenth century England, whole neighborhoods would go in together to…
When I was seven or eight, my grandparents went to England. And among the things that they brought back to me was one of those coveted little books bound in green cloth and wrapped in a gorgeously-familiar glossy white dust jacket. Not to date myself, but it must be pointed out that this was at…
… is the only word to describe the void that is following The Dean’s Watch,” quoth my friend Laura in an email over the weekend. Our book club just finished reading this 1960 Elizabeth Goudge jewel and I know exactly how she feels. We’re all kind of wandering, I’m afraid, unwilling to exchange that post-Goudge…
There was a fabulous question posed over at The Rabbit Room this morning that all good Tolkies will hail with a joyful recognition: Are you a Took or a Baggins? It reminded me of this piece I wrote for YLCF a couple of years ago after my first wild and lovely sojourn in Middle Earth…
Quaint child, old-fashioned Alice, lend your dream: I would be done with modern story-spinners, Follow with you the laughter and the gleam: Weary am I, this night, with saints and sinners. We have been friends since Lewis and old Tenniel Housed you immortally in red and gold. Come! Your naïveté is a spring perennial: Let…
Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, ‘mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample on the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o’er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence. Reading George Eliot is never a comfortable occupation. An…
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