One of the most poignant observations that the precocious Laura Timmins makes in Lark Rise to Candleford comes near the end of the third book, Candleford Green. Uniquely poised in history as a young girl watching an old order give way to the new, she comments on the differences between the housewives of her mother’s…
The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in the flat, wheat-growing north-east corner of Oxfordshire. We will call it Lark Rise because of the great number of skylarks which made the surrounding fields their springboard and nested on the bare earth between the rows of green corn… Thus opens Flora Thompson’s gentle masterpiece of rural…
Each and every one of Elizabeth Goudge’s books is crammed full for me of all-time favorite passages, and I never read one without a notebook or a piece of paper close at hand to jot down the page numbers of the most shining and stirring among them. Here’s an oft-revisited jewel from The City of…
(originally published 2005 in Inkblots magazine) It was five years ago this October that I casually tossed my new Victoria magazine on the coffee table and then snatched it back up again. Invite Your Book Club to Tea proclaimed luxurious scrolls above a picture of a tastefully laid table by the fire and promises of…
The old Art Deco theatre in my hometown has recently been restored, and Friday night Philip and I went to a movie there. The fact that it was a favorite of mine, based on one of my all-time favorite books made it even more special: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, set to the…
Sharing a loved book with a beloved person is one of the sweetest pleasures I can imagine. That’s why reading Jane Eyre with my husband this past month has sent my cup of joy spilling over the edge. Though I could never forget my first passion for this masterpiece—my initial reading was at fourteen and…
I hope that y’all are having a lovely summer! It’s getting too hot here to go out and garden past ten o’clock in the morning, but there are plenty of pleasant indoor things to put one’s hands to. Not the least of which is a good book when all (or almost all ;)) the…
A couple of weeks ago we were sitting on the front porch of our dear friends in Birmingham, savoring a cup of tea and fresh scones with them and a new friend from across the street. How effortlessly does conversation flourish upon the common ground of our fellowship in Christ! We womenfolk had kept up…
A couple of weeks ago we were sitting on the front porch of our dear friends in Birmingham, savoring a cup of tea and fresh scones with them and a new friend from across the street. How effortlessly does conversation flourish upon the common ground of our fellowship in Christ! We womenfolk had kept up…
I could read a seed catalogue from cover-to-cover. Especially one with beautiful photographs. I still remember the thrill of that first one from Park Seed, and the infinite sense of possibility that it offered me. I was seventeen, and completely dazzled with the notion that a whole garden could come from an envelope of those…
I first made the acquaintance of Alice Van Leer Carrick many years ago by way of a fat, red book of Christmas stories. Though delighted by most, I was completely enchanted with the one entitled simply Christmas in Our Town. In her treasured reminiscences of a New England holiday over eighty years ago I found…
Is there any more delicious treat than a mailbox stuffed with a manilla envelope containing a much-awaited book? As a little Christmas present to myself this year I located four of the published volumes of a new favorite author, Alice Van Leer Carrick. At 3 to 6 dollars a piece–one of which was inscribed by…
My mother read me a passage from the newest Jan Karon book the other day; it was actually a quote from an old and somewhat obscure volume of sketches that we both love very dearly: Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther. It was like hearing good news of an old friend and a warm sense of…
For an enchanting sojourn in a quaint Scottish village tucked away in the heart of the Angus Glens, allow me to recommend J. M. Barrie’s delightful The Little Minister. The story—among the most touching of love stories I’ve ever read—opens with the arrival of a new minister in the town of Thrums, a village based…
Isn’t it lovely the way a truly great book lingers with you long after the cover is closed? I dreamed about the end of A Room With a View last night, and this morning I pulled it off the shelf and looked up Mr. Emerson’s heartfelt speech to Lucy in the second to the last…
Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace, But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny’s face: As still was her look and as still was her ee, As the stillness that lay on the emerant lea, Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea. I had been in the book stall at our local…
Augusta Evans’ St. Elmo belongs to that class of fiction which my sister and I lovingly refer to as ‘high Victorian’. If you are in the mood for heart-rending melodrama, virtuous pale-faced heroines with raven tresses, impossible love and evil characters convincingly reformed by the Gospel :), then I venture to suggest any one of…
Here is a lecture given by Dr. Peter Kreeft of Boston College on C. S. Lewis’ beautiful and obscure Till We Have Faces. Having devoured the book with delight and awe, I still found myself trying to wrap my mind around some of the weightier concepts of this masterful re-telling of the Cupid and Psyche…
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