This week on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks delve into a new literary series as we read the comedic play Tartuffe by Jean-Baptiste Moliere. If you want to listen in to the read along of this play, you can view replays on the readings on the House of Humane Letters YouTube channel. Thomas begins the conversation on this play by setting up the cultural and literary context in which Moliere was working, as well as some more biographical background on the author and actor himself. Angelina points out some differences between satire and didacticism. She and Thomas also talk about the influence of Roman comedy in Moliere?s playwriting.

Angelina introduces Act 1 with a question of how Moliere shows the audience what to think of Tartuffe before the character himself ever comes on stage. Thomas talks a little about the characters we first meet, and Angelina highlights the references to enchantments as they read through key portions of these opening scenes. Join us again next week when we will finish up this entertaining play!

If you weren?t able to join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination?, you can still purchase the recordings and find out what you missed! Also, don?t miss the launch the HHL publishing wing, Cassiodorus Press! Sign up for the newsletter at HouseofHumaneLetters.com to stay in the know about all the exciting new things we have coming up!

Commonplace Quotes:

He had the comic vision of himself as well as of the rest of humanity. He might mock the vices of the world, but he could also mock himself for hating the world, in the spirit of a superior person, on account of its vices.

Robert Lynn, from his essay ?Moliere? in Books and Authors

We think old books are strange; but we are the aliens.

Dr. Jason Baxter The Burial of Moliere

By Andrew Lang

Dead?he is dead!  The rouge has left a trace
  On that thin cheek where shone, perchance, a tear,
  Even while the people laughed that held him dear
But yesterday.  He died,?and not in grace,
And many a black-robed caitiff starts apace
  To slander him whose Tartuffe made them fear,
  And gold must win a passage for his bier,
And bribe the crowd that guards his resting-place.

Ah, Moliere, for that last time of all,
  Man?s hatred broke upon thee, and went by,
And did but make more fair thy funeral.
  Though in the dark they hid thee stealthily,
Thy coffin had the cope of night for pall,
  For torch, the stars along the windy sky!

Book List:

Menaechmi, or The Twin-Brothers by Plautus

Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse

 

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to a new episode of The Literary Life podcast and an interview with special guest Dr. Vigen Guroian, retired professor of Religious Studies and Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia and author of twelve book and numerous scholarly articles. Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks discuss with Dr. Guroian the new edition of his book, Tending the Heart of Virtue. They start out talking about how the first edition of this book came about, which leads into a discussion about the current approach to fairy tales and children?s stories in both academia and the publishing industry.

Other topics of conversation include the problem with reducing stories down to a moral, story as mystery, the place of fairy tales in classical education, and the Biblical literacy of the authors of fairy tales. Dr. Guroian also shares his thoughts on people like John Ruskin and Rudyard Kipling. Finally, he shares some suggestions on finding good editions of fairy tale collections. (Scroll down for links to his book recommendations.)

Commonplace Quotes:

It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

C. S. Lewis, from Reflections on the Psalms

Reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.

C. S. Lewis

Inertia has served them so well that they did not know how to relinquish it.

E. M. Forster, from Pharos and Pharillon

?Happy children,? say I, ?who could blunder into the very heart of the will of God concerning them, and do the thing at once that the Lord taught them, using the common sense which God had given and the fairy tale nourished!? The Lord of the promise is the Lord of all true parables and all good fairy tales.

George MacDonald, from The Elect Lady The Spring

By Thomas Carew

Now that the winter's gone, the earth hath lost Her snow-white robes, and now no more the frost Candies the grass, or casts an icy cream Upon the silver lake or crystal stream; But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth, And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree The drowsy cuckoo, and the humble-bee. Now do a choir of chirping minstrels bring In triumph to the world the youthful Spring. The valleys, hills, and woods in rich array Welcome the coming of the long'd-for May. Now all things smile, only my love doth lour; Nor hath the scalding noonday sun the power To melt that marble ice, which still doth hold Her heart congeal'd, and makes her pity cold. The ox, which lately did for shelter fly Into the stall, doth now securely lie In open fields; and love no more is made By the fireside, but in the cooler shade Amyntas now doth with his Chloris sleep Under a sycamore, and all things keep Time with the season; only she doth carry June in her eyes, in her heart January. Book List:

Tending the Heart of Virtue, 2nd Edition by Dr. Vigen Guroian

Reflections on the Psalms by C. S. Lewis

Pharos and Pharillon by E. M. Forster

The Elect Lady by George MacDonald

The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin

The Lost Princess or The Wise Woman by George MacDonald

The Victorian Fairy Tale Book ed. by Michael Patrick Hearn

The Classic Fairy Tales ed. by Iona and Peter Opie

The Classic Fairy Tales ed. by Maria Tatar

Brothers Grimm: Selected Tales trans. by David Luke

The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm trans. by Jack Zipes

Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories trans. by Erik Christian Haugaard

Den Lille Havfrue og andre historier/The Little Mermaid and Other Stories by Hans Christian Andersen, trans. by Tony J. Richardson

Hans Christian Anderson: Fairy Tales trans. by Tina Nunnally

?Fairy Tale Wars? by Vigen Guroian

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life Podcast, we bring you another episode in our ?Best of? series in which Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks discuss the importance of reading old books. They begin the conversation by addressing head on the idea that old books are irrelevant. They touch on the fact that when we use the phrase ?old books? we mean not just any piece of literature from the past, but those which have stood the test of time. 

It?s not too late to join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination? happening this week! During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Commonplace Quotes:

So, when his Folly opens
The unnecessary hells,
A Servant when He Reigneth
Throws the blame on some one else.

Rudyard Kipling

I am informed by philologists that the ?rise to power? of these two words, ?problem? and ?solution? as the dominating terms of public debate, is an affair of the last two centuries, and especially of the nineteenth, having synchronised, so they say, with a parallel ?rise to power? of the word ?happiness??for reasons which doubtless exist and would be interesting to discover. Like ?happiness?, our two terms ?problem? and ?solution? are not to be found in the Bible?a point which gives to that wonderful literature a singular charm and cogency. . . . On the whole, the influence of these words is malign, and becomes increasingly so. They have deluded poor men with Messianic expectations . . . which are fatal to steadfast persistence in good workmanship and to well-doing in general. . . . Let the valiant citizen never be ashamed to confess that he has no ?solution of the social problem? to offer to his fellow-men. Let him offer them rather the service of his skill, his vigilance, his fortitude and his probity. For the matter in question is not, primarily, a ?problem?, nor the answer to it a ?solution?.

L. P. Jacks, Stevenson Lectures 

Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C. S. Lewis To Walter de la Mare 

by T. S. Elliot

The children who explored the brook and found
A desert island with a sandy cove
(A hiding place, but very dangerous ground,

For here the water buffalo may rove,
The kinkajou, the mungabey, abound
In the dark jungle of a mango grove,

And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree ?
The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)
Recount their exploits at the nursery tea

And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn
Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,
At not quite time for bed??

Or when the lawn 
Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return
Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,
The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;

When the familiar is suddenly strange
Or the well known is what we yet have to learn,
And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance,
Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range
At witches? sabbath of the maiden aunts;

When the nocturnal traveller can arouse
No sleeper by his call; or when by chance
An empty face peers from an empty house;

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?
The whispered incantation which allows
Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

By you; by those deceptive cadences
Wherewith the common measure is refined;
By conscious art practised with natural ease;

By the delicate, invisible web you wove ?
The inexplicable mystery of sound.

Book List:

The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life, our hosts talk about their favorite poems and poets. Cindy starts off by sharing the early influences on her developing a love of poetry. Thomas also shares about his mother reading poetry to him as a child and the poetry that made an impression on him as a child. Angelina talks about coming to poetry later in life and how she finally came to love it through learning about the metaphysical poets.

Cindy and Thomas talk about the powerful effect of reading and reciting poetry in meter. Thomas also brings up the potential of hymn texts as beautiful, high-ranking poetry. From classic to modern, they share many poems and passages from their most beloved poetry, making this a soothing, lyrical episode. If you want to learn more, check out Thomas? webinar How to Love Poetry.

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.? You can visit the HHL Facebook page or Instagram to find the post to share and enter our giveaway for a $20 discount code! During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Commonplace Quotes:

The knowledge-as-information vision is actually defective and damaging. It distorts reality and humanness, and it gets in the way of good knowing.

Esther Lightcap Meek

Perhaps it would be a good idea for public statues to be made with disposable heads that can be changed with popular fashion. But even better would surely be to make statues without any heads at all, representing simply the ?idea? of a good politician.

Auberon Waugh

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock?to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you use large and startling figures.

Flannery O?Connor Reading in War Time

by Edwin Muir

Boswell by my bed,
Tolstoy on my table;
Thought the world has bled
For four and a half years,
And wives? and mothers? tears
Collected would be able
To water a little field
Untouched by anger and blood,
A penitential yield
Somewhere in the world;
Though in each latitude
Armies like forest fall,
The iniquitous and the good
Head over heels hurled,
And confusion over all:
Boswell?s turbulent friend
And his deafening verbal strife,
Ivan Ilych?s death
Tell me more about life,
The meaning and the end
Of our familiar breath,
Both being personal,
Than all the carnage can,
Retrieve the shape of man,
Lost and anonymous,
Tell me wherever I look
That not one soul can die
Of this or any clan
Who is not one of us
And has a personal tie
Perhaps to someone now
Searching an ancient book,
Folk-tale or country song
In many and many a tongue,
To find the original face,
The individual soul,
The eye, the lip, the brow
For ever gone from their place,
And gather an image whole.

Book List:

A Little Manual for Knowing by Esther Lightcap Meek

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake

The Book of Virtues by William Bennett

Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc

When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne

Now We are Six by A. A. Milne

Emma by Jane Austen

Oxford Book of English Verse ed. by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Immortal Poems of the English Language ed. by Oscar Williams

Motherland by Sally Thomas

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

In anticipation of our upcoming sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination,? this week we are re-airing a previous episode with Jason Baxter, our conference?s special keynote speaker. Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks sit down for a special conversation with Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis. Jason is a speaker, writer, and college professor who writes primarily on medieval thought and is especially interested in Lewis? ideas. You can find out more about him and his books at JasonMBaxter.com.

Our hosts and Jason discuss a wide range of ideas, including the values of literature, the sacramental view of reality, why it is important to understand medieval thought, the ?problem? of paganism in Lewis? writings, and how to approach reading ancient and medieval literature.

Commonplace Quotes:

My part has been merely that of Walter Scott?s Old Mortality, who busied himself in clearing the moss, and bringing back to light the words, on the gravestones of the dead who seemed to him to have served humanity. This needs to be done and redone, generation after generation, in a world where there persists always a strong tendency to read newer writers, not because they are better, but because they are newer. The moss grows fast, and ceaselessly.

F. L. Lucas

It is the memory of time that makes us old; remembering eternity makes us young again.

Statford Caldecott

It is my settled conviction that in order to read old Western literature aright, you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature.

C. S. Lewis, from ?De Descriptione Temporum?

What then is the good of?what is even the defense for?occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feeling which we should try to avoid in our own person??The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves?[In] reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

C. S. Lewis Victory

by C. S. Lewis

Roland is dead, Cuchulain?s crest is low,
The battered war-rear wastes and turns to rust,
And Helen?s eyes and Iseult?s lips are dust
And dust the shoulders and the breasts of snow.

The faerie people from our woods are gone,
No Dryads have I found in all our trees,
No Triton blows his horn about our seas
And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon.

The ancient songs they wither as the grass
And waste as doth a garment waxen old,
All poets have been fools who thought to mould
A monument more durable than brass.

For these decay: but not for that decays
The yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man
That never rested yet since life began
From striving with red Nature and her ways.

Now in the filth of war, the baresark shout
Of battle, it is vexed. And yet so oft
Out of the deeps, of old, it rose aloft
That they who watch the ages may not doubt.

Though often bruised, oft broken by the rod,
Yet, like the phoenix, from each fiery bed
Higher the stricken spirit lifts its head
And higher-till the beast become a god.

Book List:

Beauty in the Word by Stratford Caldecott

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis

The Art of Living: Four Eighteenth Century Minds by F. L. Lucas

Transposition by C. S. Lewis

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

The Divine Comedy by Dante

Nicholas of Cusa

The Life of St. Francis of Assisi by St. Bonaventure

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

Confessions by St. Augustine

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks are joined by Atlee Northmore to explore the various screen adaptations based on Howards End by E. M. Forster. They begin the discussion with the question of what is the good of translating one art form, in this case a book, into another art form, such as a screen play. They talk about the beauty of the Merchant Ivory film adaptation, while critiquing the casting and chemistry of the cast, sharing their favorite and least favorite scenes. In contrast, they praise the BBC-Starz series for its excellent adaptation, although it missed some important things that the 1992 film did include. Atlee also highlights some of the ways in which the screen adaptations serve as subtle visual cues for ideas from the story. In the end, Angelina, Thomas, and Atlee share thoughts on enjoying a film as a stand-alone work of art versus judging it as an adaptation of a novel.

There are still spots open in many of the classes at House of Humane Letters, so if you or your student are interested in taking something, head over to houseofhumaneletters.com to register today!

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.? You can visit the HHL Facebook page or Instagram to find the post to share and enter our giveaway for a $20 discount code! During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Commonplace Quotes:

Every poet, in his kind, is bit by him that comes behind.

Jonathan Swift, from ?Critics?

Narrative prose, especially the novel, has taken, in modern societies, the place occupied by the recitation of myths and fairy tales in traditional and popular societies. Furthermore, the ?mythic? structure of certain modern novels can be discerned, demonstrating the literary survival of major mythological themes and characters.

Mircea Eliade

Now, doesn?t it seem absurd to you? What is the good of the ear if it tells you the same as the eye? Helen?s one aim is to translate tunes into the language of painting and pictures into the language of music. It?s very ingenious, and she says several pretty things in the process, but what?s gained, I?d like to know?

E. M. Forster, from Howards End Cargoes

By John Masefield

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, Dipping through the tropics by the palm-green shores, With a cargo of diamonds, Emeralds, amythysts, Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores. Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, Butting through the channel in the mad March days, With a cargo of Tyne coal, Road-rails, pig-lead, Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays. Book and Link List:

From Pharos from Pharillon by E. M. Forster

Howards End (1992)

Howards End (BBC-Starz)

Howards End Episode 1

The Remains of the Day

The English Patient

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to The Literary Life Podcast and the final episode in our our series on Howards End by E. M. Forster. Today Angelina and Thomas seek to sum up the book and wrap up their thoughts on the way Forster weaves this story. The open with some comments on the almost allegorical nature of Howards End, then talk about the words ?only connect? and their meaning in the context of the book. They discuss the problem of Helen and Leonard?s relationship and the romance of pity. Other topics of the conversation are the crisis point between Mr. Wilcox and Margaret, the contrast between Charles and Tibby, the fate of Leonard Bast, and the future of Howards End.

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.? During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Commonplace Quotes:

Life without dragons would be tame indeed.

Desmond MacCarthy, ?The Poetry of Chesterton?

Howards End is a novel of extraordinary ambition and wide scope. Written in prose with the texture of restrained poetry, it is consummately controlled and sure of purpose. It is Forster?s most complexly orchestrated work to its date, and it smoothly manipulates imagery and symbolism, plot and character, into an organic whole. In so doing, it gracefully integrates social comedy, metaphysical explorations, and political concerns. Howards End tests Forster?s liberal humanism, finds it wanting, and proposes a marriage of liberal values to conservative tradition. Without destroying the practical contributions of progressivism, it forcefully attacks the mindless materialism that yields rootlessness and spiritual poverty.

Claude J. Summers, from E. M. Forster Finis

By Marjorie Pickthall

Give me a few more hours to pass With the mellow flower of the elm-bough falling, And then no more than the lonely grass And the birds calling. Give me a few more days to keep With a little love and a little sorrow, And then the dawn in the skies of sleep And a clear to-morrow. Give me a few more years to fill With a little work and a little lending, And then the night on a starry hill And the road's ending. Book List:

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and our series discussing Howards End by E. M. Forster. This week Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks cover chapters 26-34. Together they continue to talk about the ideas Forster is presenting in the book as seen in this section, including Howards End as a character, the echoes of Wind in the Willows (thanks to Jen Rogers!), Helen?s idealism, Margaret and Henry?s conflict, the idea of rootedness, and more.

On March 7, 2024 you can join Thomas and his brother James live for a webinar on King Alfred the Great. Register today at houseofhumaneletters.com. The webinar recording will also be available for lifetime access after that date.

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.? During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

If you want to get the special literary themed teas created by our Patron Erin Miller, go to adagiotea.com to check them out!

Commonplace Quotes:

Everything has been said already; but since nobody was listening, we shall have to begin all over again.

Toutes choses sont dites déjà; mais comme personne n?écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.

Andre Gide, from ?Narcissus?

It is under these ?present conditions? of materialism, urbanization, and cosmopolitanism that Howards End poses the question, ?Who shall inherit England?? This question is given a lyrical resonance shortly after Margaret tells Helen of her intention to marry Henry. The two women, visiting Aunt Julie at Swanage, gaze across Poole Harbor and watch the tide return. ?England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising sea,? the narrator records, and then asks: ?What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her change of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who had added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world?s fleet accompanying her towards eternity?? These questions are at the heart of the book. More crudely stated, they ask whether England belongs to the imperialist or to the yeoman, to those who see life steadily or to those who see it whole, to the prosaic or to the poet. Put another way, they ask whether the inheritors of England are to be people of action or vision.

Claude J. Summer, from ?E. M. Foster? To E. M. Forster

By W. H. Auden

Here, though the bombs are real and dangerous, And Italy and Kings are far away, And we're afraid that you will speak to us, You promise still the inner life shall pay. As we run down the slope of Hate with gladness You trip us up like an unnoticed stone, And just as we are closeted with Madness You interrupt us like the telephone. For we are Lucy, Turton, Phillip, we Wish international evil, are excited To join the jolly ranks of the benighted Where Reason is denied and Love ignored: But, as we swear our lie, Miss Avery Comes out into the garden with the sword. Book List:

Theodore Dreiser

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina and Thomas continue our series on Howards End by E. M. Forster with a discussion of chapters 17-25. In opening the conversation on this chapter, they consider the various houses and ask the question of what role Howards End plays in this whole story. They also delve into the seemingly unlikely romance between Margaret and Mr. Wilcox and the complexity of their personalities, as well as the reactions of their family members. Other ideas they share are about the seen and the unseen, connections versus transactions, and more! Keep listening next week as we cover chapters 26-34.

On March 7, 2024 you can join Thomas and his brother James live for a webinar on King Alfred the Great. Register today at houseofhumaneletters.com. The webinar recording will also be available for lifetime access after that date.

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.? During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Commonplace Quotes:

Sapiens est qui novit tacere.

Wise is he who knows when to keep silence.

St. Ambrose, from De Oficibus Ministrorum (On the Duties of the Clergy)

But ?Only connect? was the exact phrase I had been leading up to, and it has been precious to me ever since I read Howards End, of which it is the epigraph. Perhaps, indeed, it is the theme of all Forster?s writing, the attempt to link a passionate skepticism with the desire for meaning, to find the human key to the inhuman world about us, to connect the individual with the community, the known with the unknown, to relate the past to the present, and both to the future.

P. L. Travers, from ?Only Connect? To My Dear and Loving Husband

By Anne Bradstreet

If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold, Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay; The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then while we live, in love let?s so persever, That when we live no more, we may live ever. Book List:

The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories by E. M. Forster

Selected Stories by E. M. Forster

What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story by P. L. Travers

The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

 

Welcome to The Literary Life Podcast and our second episode in our series on E. M. Forster?s book Howards End. This week, Angelina and Thomas cover chapters 8-16, continuing their discussion of the book and the overarching concept of ?Story? along the way. In talking about different plot points and characters, Angelina and Thomas make some comparisons between the two couples presented in these chapters and share some thoughts on the friendship between Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox. Angelina points out that Forster is doing some medieval things in this story, as we will see as we go on further. They also bring out more of the significance and symbolism of Howards End the place in the story.

If you want to check out our previous episodes on two of E. M. Forster?s short stories, you can find those here:

Episode 17: ?The Celestial Omnibus?

Episode 99: ?The Machine Stops?

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.? During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

This March you can join Thomas and his brother James back for a webinar on King Alfred the Great. You can sign up at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

[The Greeks] were children with the intellects of men.

R. W. Livingstone, from The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us

It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story considered in itself. Granted the story, the style in which it should be told, the order in which it should be disposed, and (above all) the delineation of the characters, have been abundantly discussed. But the Story itself, the series of imagined events, is nearly always passed over in silence, or else treated exclusively as affording opportunities for the delineation of character. There are indeed three notable exceptions. Aristotle in the Poeticsconstructed a theory of Greek tragedy which puts Story in the centre and relegates character to a strictly subordinate place.

C. S. Lewis, from On Stories A Selection from ?Terminus?

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is time to be old,

To take in sail:?

The god of bounds,

Who sets to seas a shore,

Came to me in his fatal rounds,

And said: ?No more!

No farther shoot

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.

Fancy departs: no more invent;

Contract thy firmament 

To compass of a tent.

There?s not enough for this and that,

Make thy option which of two;

Economize the failing river,

Not the less revere the Giver,

Leave the many and hold the few.

Book List:

Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster

The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster

Wendell Berry

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to a new series on The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford and husband Thomas Banks. This week they begin talking about E. M. Forster?s book Howards End, giving some introductory information about Forster and also cover the first seven chapters of the book. Thomas shares some background on the Bloomsbury Group authors in contrast to their Victorian predecessors. Angelina highlights the literary tradition of naming books after houses and invites us to consider the importance of place in this story as we go forward.

We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.? During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.

Also, The House of Humane Letters is expanding to include more classes, and pre-registration for returning students and registration for new students opens soon. Sign up for their email list to find out when you can sign up at houseofhumaneletters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

E. M. Forster, Howards End

Howards End is Mr. Forster?s first fully adult book. It is richly packed with meanings; it has a mellow brilliance, a kind of shot beauty of texture; it runs like a bright, slowish, flickering river, in which different kinds of exciting fish swim and dart among mysterious reedy leptons and are observed and described by a highly interested, humane, sympathetic, often compassionate, and usually ironic commentator. The effect is of uncommon beauty and charm; the fusion of humor, perception, social comedy, witty realism, and soaring moral idealism, weaves a rare captivating, almost hypnotic spell; and many people think it (in spite of the more impressive theme and more serious technique of A Passage in India) Mr. Forester?s best book.

Rose Macaulay, The Writings of E. M. Forster The Pity of It

By Thomas Hardy

April 1915

I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar From rail-track and from highway, and I heard In field and farmstead many an ancient word Of local lineage like 'Thu bist,' 'Er war,' 'Ich woll', 'Er sholl', and by-talk similar, Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird At England's very loins, thereunto spurred By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are. Then seemed a Heart crying: 'Whosoever they be At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we, 'Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame; May their familiars grow to shun their name, And their brood perish everlastingly.'

Source: Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems (Palgrave, 2001)

Book List:

Howards End by E. M. Forster

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

Rose Macaulay

Dorothy Parker

Virginia Woolf

George Eliot

Matthew Arnold

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Wendell Berry

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life, Angelina and Thomas sit down with Cindy to chat about her new book Beyond Mere Motherhood: Moms Are People, Too. First Cindy shares some of what she has going on this year, and Angelina officially introduces the 2024 Literary Life Online Conference, ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.?

Cindy shares how this book came to be and what the process was for developing the ideas she wanted to put into words. Angelina and Thomas bring up different aspects of the book that stood out to them as important messages for mothers. Cindy talks about her approach to encouraging moms toward tackling life-long learning without the overwhelm and anxiety.

Commonplace Quotes:

?Bairns are a queer kind of blessing sometimes,? remarked the mother.

George MacDonald, from Salted with Fire

One of the disadvantages of setting up a man as a god, is that his lapses from rectitude may be quoted by his worshippers in justification of their own.

Bernard Allen, from Augustus Caesar

May the gods give you everything that your heart longs for. May they grant you a husband and a house and sweet agreement in all things, for nothing is better than this, more steadfast than when two people, man and his wife, keep a harmonious household, a thing that brings much distress to the people who hate them, and pleasure to their well-wishers, and for them the best reputation.

Homer, from The Odyssey To My Mother

by Christina Rossetti

To-day?s your natal day,
Sweet flowers I bring;
Mother, accept, I pray,
My offering.

And may you happy live,
And long us bless;
Receiving as you give
Great happiness.

Book List:

My Early Life by Winston Churchill

Possession by A. S. Byatt

Howards End by E. M. Forster

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

 

Welcome to another episode in our ?Best of The Literary Life? podcast series. Today on The Literary Life Podcast, our hosts Angelina and Cindy chat with ?superfan? Emily Raible about her own literary life. Emily is a homeschool mom, an avid reader, birdwatcher, baker and probably Angelina?s most loyal student. In telling the story of her reading life, Emily talks about her childhood and how she was not a reader as a young person. She shares how she finally started getting interested in reading through Janette Oke and Hardy Boys books. Then she tells about borrowing books from a local family?s home library and starting to fall in love with true classics. 

After getting married to an avid reader, Emily started going through her husband?s own library during her long hours at home alone. Even after she became of lover of reading, Emily still didn?t define herself as a real reader. Emily shares her journey to becoming a homeschooling parent, how she learned about Charlotte Mason and classical education, and her first time meeting Angelina and Cindy. They continue the conversation expanding on the feast of ideas, what it means to be a ?reader,? and how we learn and enter into the literary world throughout our lives. 

If you are listening to this on the day it drops, there is still time to grab a spot for Thomas Banks and Anne Phillips? webinar on Herodotus taking place today January 30, 2024. Head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com/webinars where you can sign up! Of course, you can also purchase the recordings to tune in after the webinar is released.

If you missed the 2020 Back to School Conference with Karen Glass, you can still purchase the recording at MorningTimeforMoms.com.

Also, our Sixth Annual Literary Life Online Conference is coming up in April 2024. The theme is ?Dispelling the Myth of Modernity? with keynote speaker Jason Baxter. You can learn more and register now at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

But the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see, if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing. 

G. K. Chesterton

Time can be both a threat and a friend to hope. Injustice, for example, has to be tediously dismantled, not exploded. This is often infuriating, but it is true. 

Makoto Fujimura

The poet is traditionally a blind man, but the Christian poet, and story-teller as well, is like the blind man whom Christ touched, who looked then and saw men as if they were trees but walking. This is the beginning of vision, and it is an invitation to deeper and stranger visions than we shall have to learn to accept if we are to realize a truly Christian literature.

Flannery O?Connor Armies in the Fire

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The lamps now glitter down the street;
Faintly sound the falling feet;
And the blue even slowly falls
About the garden trees and walls.

Now in the falling of the gloom
The red fire paints the empty room:
And warmly on the roof it looks,
And flickers on the back of books.

Armies march by tower and spire
Of cities blazing, in the fire;?
Till as I gaze with staring eyes,
The armies fall, the lustre dies.

Then once again the glow returns;
Again the phantom city burns;
And down the red-hot valley, lo!
The phantom armies marching go!

Blinking embers, tell me true
Where are those armies marching to,
And what the burning city is
That crumbles in your furnaces!

Book List:

Tremendous Trifles by G. K. Chesterton

Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura

Rascal by Sterling North

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Poppy Ott by Leo Edwards

Midsummer Night?s Dream by William Shakespeare

The Once and Future King by T. H. White

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkein

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

Agatha Christie

James Patterson

Tom Clancy

Harry Potter series

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Howards End by E. M. Forster

The Divine Comedy by Dante (trans. by Dorothy Sayers)

Illiad and Odyssey by Homer

Dorothy L. Sayers

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Room of One?s Own by Virginia Woolf

Why Should Businessmen Read Great Literature? by Vigen Guroian

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

Arabian Nights

Are Women Human? by Dorothy Sayers

Confessions by Augustine

Beatrix Potter Treasury

Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Babe the Gallant Pig by Dick King-Smith

Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast this week, we will wrap up our series on Shakespeare?s A Midsummer Night?s Dream. Our hosts, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas walk through the last two acts of the play, sharing their thoughts on the structure and ideas presented here. Angelina talks about why she thinks Shakespeare resolves the different conflicts the way he does. They discuss the importance of the play within the play, the fairy tale atmosphere, and the unreality of time and space. Cindy and Angelina both bring up plot points that feel slightly problematic to them. Angelina highlights the theme of harmonizing discord and bringing order from disorder.

To sign up for Thomas Banks and Anne Phillips? webinar on Herodotus taking place January 30, 2024, head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com/webinars.

Find Angelina?s webinar ?Jonathan Swift: Enemy of the Enlightenment? at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Even though the spring 2022 Literary Life Conference ?The Battle Over Children?s Literature? featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian is over, you can still purchase the recordings at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Revolutionaries always hang their best friends.

Christopher Hollis

It is easy to forget that the man who writes a good love sonnet needs not only be enamored of a woman, but also to be enamored of the sonnet.

C. S. Lewis

For the end of imagination is harmony. A right imagination, being the reflex of the creation, will fall in with the divine order of things as the highest form of its own operation; ?will tune its instrument here at the door? to the divine harmonies within; will be content alone with growth towards the divine idea, which includes all that is beautiful in the imperfect imagination of men; will know that every deviation from that growth is downward; and will therefore send the man forth from its loftiest representations to do the commonest duty of the most wearisome calling in a hearty and hopeful spirit. This is the work of the right imagination; and towards this work every imagination, in proportion to the rightness that is in it, will tend. The reveries even of the wise man will make him stronger for his work; his dreaming as well as his thinking will render him sorry for past failure, and hopeful of future success.

George MacDonald Earth?s Secret

by George Meredith

Not solitarily in fields we find Earth's secret open, though one page is there; Her plainest, such as children spell, and share With bird and beast; raised letters for the blind. Not where the troubled passions toss the mind, In turbid cities, can the key be bare. It hangs for those who hither thither fare, Close interthreading nature with our kind. They, hearing History speak, of what men were, And have become, are wise. The gain is great In vision and solidity; it lives. Yet at a thought of life apart from her, Solidity and vision lose their state, For Earth, that gives the milk, the spirit gives. Book List:

Fossett?s Memory by Christopher Hollis

A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald

A Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life podcast, we continue our ?Best of? series discussing Shakespeare?s A Midsummer Night?s Dream with coverage of Act 3. Angelina talks about the pacing of this act and the importance of the characters? madcap, lunatic behavior. She also highlight?s Shakespeare?s wrestling with the relationship between the imagination and art and reality. Thomas highlights the structure of the play as reflecting a dreamlike state. Cindy shares some of her thoughts on being concerned about making sure our children know what is real and pretend.

To sign up for Thomas Banks and Anne Phillips? webinar on Herodotus taking place January 30, 2024, head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com/webinars.

Find Angelina?s webinar ?Jonathan Swift: Enemy of the Enlightenment? at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Even though the spring 2022 Literary Life Conference ?The Battle Over Children?s Literature? featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian is over, you can still purchase the recordings at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

The most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.

Samuel Pepys, describing ?A Midsummer Night?s Dream? in his diary

Or the lovely one about the Bishop of Exeter, who was giving the prizes at a girls? school. They did a performance of A Midsummer Night?s Dream, and the poor man stood up afterwards and made a speech and said [piping voice]: ?I was very interested in your delightful performance, and among other things I was very interested in seeing for the first time in my life a female Bottom.?

C. S. Lewis in a conversation with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss

Still, if Homer?s Achilles isn?t the real Achilles, he isn?t unreal either. Unrealities don?t seem so full of life after three thousand years as Homer?s Achilles does. This is the kind of problem we have to tackle next?the fact that what we meet in literature is neither real nor unreal. We have two words, imaginary, meaning unreal, and imaginative, meaning what the writer produces, and they mean entirely different things.

Northrop Frye A Dream

by William Blake

Once a dream did weave a shade O'er my angel-guarded bed, That an emmet lost its way Where on grass methought I lay. Troubled, wildered, and forlorn, Dark, benighted, travel-worn, Over many a tangle spray, All heart-broke, I heard her say: "Oh my children! do they cry, Do they hear their father sigh? Now they look abroad to see, Now return and weep for me." Pitying, I dropped a tear: But I saw a glow-worm near, Who replied, "What wailing wight Calls the watchman of the night? "I am set to light the ground, While the beetle goes his round: Follow now the beetle's hum; Little wanderer, hie thee home!" Book List:

Of Other Worlds by C. S. Lewis

The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

The Golden Ass by Apuleius

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life podcast and our ?Best of? re-air of the series on Shakespeare?s A Midsummer Night?s Dream. After kicking off the episode with their commonplace quotes, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas start digging into the play itself. Thomas brings up the importance of the timing of this story being midsummer. Angelina gives a little background into the names and characters in this play as well as some of the major ideas we can be looking for in the story.

To sign up for Thomas Banks and Anne Phillips? webinar on Herodotus taking place January 30, 2024, head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com/webinars.

Find Angelina?s webinar ?Jonathan Swift: Enemy of the Enlightenment? at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Even though the spring 2022 Literary Life Conference ?The Battle Over Children?s Literature? featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian is over, you can still purchase the recordings at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.

John Dryden, in a letter to Jonathan Swift

It would be difficult indeed to define wherein lay the peculiar truth of the phrase ?merrie England?, though some conception of it is quite necessary to the comprehension of A Midsummer Night?s Dream. In some cases at least, it may be said to lie in this, that the English of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, unlike the England of today, could conceive of the idea of a merry supernaturalism.

G. K. Chesterton

And yet, there are people who say that Shakespeare always means, ?just what he says.? He thinks that to find over and under meanings in Shakespeare?s plays is to take unwarranted liberties with them, is like a man who holds the word ?spring? must refer only to a particular period of the year, and could not possibly mean birth, or youth or hope. He is a man who has never associated anything with anything else. He is a man without metaphors, and such a man is no man at all, let alone a poet.

Harold Goddard Advice to Lovers

by Robert Graves

I knew an old man at a Fair Who made it his twice-yearly task To clamber on a cider cask And cry to all the yokels there:-- "Lovers to-day and for all time Preserve the meaning of my rhyme: Love is not kindly nor yet grim But does to you as you to him. "Whistle, and Love will come to you, Hiss, and he fades without a word, Do wrong, and he great wrong will do, Speak, he retells what he has heard. "Then all you lovers have good heed Vex not young Love in word or deed: Love never leaves an unpaid debt, He will not pardon nor forget." The old man's voice was sweet yet loud And this shows what a man was he, He'd scatter apples to the crowd And give great draughts of cider, free. Book List:

Amazon affiliate links

?Battle of the Books? by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver?s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to this new season of The Literary Life podcast! During the month of January 2024, we will be re-airing our series of episodes on Shakespeare?s A Midsummer Night?s Dream.

This week we bring you an introduction both to William Shakespeare and his play A Midsummer Night?s Dream. Hosts Angelina, Cindy and Thomas seek to give new Shakespeare readers a place from which to jump into his work and more experienced readers eyes to see more layers in his stories. Cindy begins with some perspective on how to start cultivating a love for Shakespeare. Angelina shares her ?hot take? on whether you should read the play or watch the play. They suggest some books for further digging into Shakespeare?s works, and Angelina gives an overview of the format of his comedies. Thomas goes into some detail about Roman comedy. 

Next week we will be back with a discussion of Acts I and II of the play.

Even though the spring 2022 Literary Life Conference ?The Battle Over Children?s Literature? featuring special guest speaker Vigen Guroian is over, you can still purchase the recordings at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

To sign up for Thomas Banks and Anne Phillips' webinar on Herodotus on January 30, 2024, head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com/webinars.

Commonplace Quotes:

If certain tendencies within our civilization were to proceed unchecked, they would rapidly take us towards a society which, like that of a prison, would be both completely introverted and completely without privacy. The last stand of privacy has always been, traditionally, the inner mind?.It is quite possible, however, for communications media, especially the newer electronic ones, to break down the associative structures of the inner mind and replace them by the prefabricated structures of the media . A society entirely controlled by their slogans and exhortations would be introverted because nobody would be saying anything: there would only be echo, and Echo was the mistress of Narcissus?.the triumph of communication is the death of communication: where communication forms a total environment, there is nothing to be communicated.

Northrop Frye

No writer can persist for five hundred pages in being funny at the expense of someone who is dead.

Harold Nicolson

Originality was a new and somewhat ugly idol of the nineteenth century.

Janet Spens Unwisdom

by Siegfried Sassoon

To see with different eyes
From every day,
And find in dream disguise
Worlds far away?

To walk in childhood?s land
With trusting looks,
And oldly understand
Youth?s fairy-books?

Thus our unwisdom brings
Release which hears
The bird that sings
In groves beyond the years.

Book List:

Amazon affiliate links

?The Practice of Biography? by Harold Nicolson

The Modern Century by Northrop Frye

An Essay on Shakespeare?s Relation to Tradition by Janet Spens

Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by Edith Nesbit

Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb

Tales from Shakespeare by Marcia Williams

Leon Garfield?s Shakespeare Stories by Leon Garfield

Stories from Shakespeare by Marchette Chute

Asimov?s Guide to Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

Shakespeare?s Problem Plays by E. M. Tillyard

Shakespeare?s Early Comedies by E. M. Tillyard

Shakespeare?s History Plays by E. M. Tillyard

Great Stage of Fools by Peter Leithart

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life today, Angelina and Thomas preview the upcoming season of the podcast and what books you can expect them to cover in 2024. We have some short books and exciting new series coming up in the new year, and you can scroll down for Amazon affiliate links to all the books planned.

The House of Humane Letters is currently having their Christmas sale until December 31, 2023. Everything is now 20% OFF, so hop on over and get the classes at their best prices now. In addition, you can still sign up for Atlee Northmore?s webinar ?A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: How to Read Star Wars.?

If you missed it, go back to last month?s episode to get all the information about our 2024 Reading Challenge, Book of Centuries.

Books Mentioned:

A Midsummer Night?s Dream by William Shakespeare

Howards End by E. M. Forster

Tartuffe by Jean-Baptiste Moliere, trans. by Donald M. Frame

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

Harry Potter, Book 1 by J. K. Rowling

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life today, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas recap their reading from the past year. They first share some general thoughts on their year of reading and what sorts of books they completed. Other questions they discuss are on what books surprised them, what ?low brow? books they read, and more! Come back next week for a preview of all the books we will be covering in the podcast in 2024. Stay tuned to the end of the episode for an important announcement!

Cindy is currewntly offering at 20% OFF discount throughout the holidays. Use coupon code ?advent2023? on MorningTimeforMoms.com/shop until January 2024.

The House of Humane Letters is currently having their Christmas sale until December 31, 2023. Everything pre-recorded is now 20% OFF, so hop on over and get the classes at their best prices now. You can now also sign up for Atlee Northmore?s webinar ?A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: How to Read Star Wars.?

If you missed it, go back to last month?s episode to get all the information about our 2024 Reading Challenge, Book of Centuries.

Commonplace Quotes:

Life was a hiding place that played me false.

Lascelles Abercrombie, from ?Epitaph?

But if man?s attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him, every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact, he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him, and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world?an idol.

Robert Farrar Capon, from The Supper of the Lamb

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?

W. H. Auden, from The Dyer?s Hand On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

by John Keats

O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute! Fair pluméd Syren! Queen of far away! Leave melodizing on this wintry day, Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute: Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute, Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay Must I burn through; once more humbly assay The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit. Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion, Begetters of our deep eternal theme, When through the old oak forest I am gone, Let me not wander in a barren dream, But when I am consumed in the fire, Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire. Books Mentioned:

English Literature in the 16th Century by C. S. Lewis

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Trumpet Major by Thomas Hardy

The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott

Anne of Geierstein by Sir Walter Scott

The Victorian Cycle by Esme Wingfield-Stratford

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson

The History of Tom Jones, Foundling by Henry Fielding

The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great by Henry Fielding

The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith

The Clergyman?s Daughter by George Orwell

Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

Our Island Story by H. E Marshall

English Literature for Boys and Girls by H. E. Marshall

1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman

Dave Berry Slept Here by Dave Berry

The Harry Potter Series by J. K. Rowling

Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh

The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P. D. James

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

World Enough and Time by Christian McEwen

An Anthology of Invective and Verbal Abuse edited by Hugh Kingsmill

Encyclopedia Brown books by Donald J. Sobol

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

The Woman in Me by Brittany Spears

Sackett Series by Louis L?Amour

The Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L?Amour

Madly, Deeply by Alan Rickman

Counting the Cost by Jill Duggar

Spare by Prince Harry (not recommended)

Sir John Fielding Series by Bruce Alexander

Literary Life Commonplace Books

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week?s episode of The Literary Life we bring you a special interview with Jenn Rogers! Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins talk with Jenn about her own literary life and how she learned the things she is now passing on to others through The House of Humane Letters. Jenn shares how languages and literature were a part of her life from a young age as a child of missionaries in the Dominican Republic and homeschooled in a Charlotte Mason style. She also shares how surprising challenges ended up opening a door for her family to use AmblesideOnline and other resources, using their imaginations and creativity in getting a great education.

The House of Humane Letters is currently having their Christmas sale until December 31, 2023. Everything is now 20% OFF, so hop on over and get the classes at their best prices now. In addition to the sale, you can also sign up for Atlee Northmore?s webinar ?A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: How to Read Star Wars.?

Cindy is also offering at 20% OFF discount throughout the holidays. Use coupon code ?advent2023? on MorningTimeforMoms.com/shop until January 2024.

Commonplace Quotes:

But if literature teaches us anything at all, it is this, that we have an eternal element free from care and fear which can survey the things in life we call evil with serenity, that is, not without appreciating their quality but without any disturbance of our spiritual equilibrium. Not in the same way, but in some such way, we shall all doubtless survey our own story when we know it, and a great deal more of the Whole Story.

J. R. R. Tolkien, from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

This final argument is an indication of how monastic writers like Ælfric sought to understand the cycle of the seasons. They wanted to read and interpret the natural world, to learn to recognize the meaning God had planted in it. They saw time and seasons, from the very first day of the world, as carefully arranged by God with method and purpose, so they believed it would be possible to organize the calendar, not according to the randomness of custom and inherited tradition, but in a way that reflected that divine plan.

Eleanor Parker, from Winters in the World

It is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words and that words are products, not of nature, but of a human society which uses them for a thousand different purposes. In modern societies where language is continually being debased and reduced to nonspeech, the poet is in constant danger of having his ear corrupted, a danger to which the painter and the composer, whose media are their private property, are not exposed. On the other hand, he is more protected than they from another modern peril, that of solipsist subjectivity; however esoteric a poem may be, the fact that all its words have meanings which can be looked up in a dictionary makes it testify to the existence of other people Even the language of Finnegan?s Wake was not created by Joyce ex nihilo; a purely private verbal world is not possible.

W. H. Auden, from The Dyer?s Hand Cliche Came Out of Its Cage

by C. S. Lewis

You said 'The world is going back to Paganism'. Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes, And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem. Hestia's fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush Arose (it is the mark of freemen's children) as they trooped, Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance. Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods, Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men, Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing. Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions; Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears ... You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop. Or did you mean another kind of heathenry? Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth, Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm. Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound; But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods, Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand, Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them; For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, And every man of decent blood is on the losing side. Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits Who walked back into burning houses to die with men, Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim. Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs; You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune). Books Mentioned:

The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 3 by C. S. Lewis

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life today, we wrap up our series on The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas begin the conversation with C. S. Lewis? critique of Sayers? work, both what he agreed with and disagreed with in this book, as well as touching on Tolkien?s idea of artists as sub-creators. Cindy talks about what it is like writing a book in relation to Sayers? thoughts on the subject of authorship. Thomas shares why he took issue with part of her examples of scalene triangles and the Trinity in relation to aesthetic failures. Angelina shares her dilemma with this same portion, and they discuss the principle they think Sayers was trying to illustrate.

The House of Humane Letters is currently having their Christmas sale until December 31, 2023. Everything is now 20% OFF, so hop on over and get the classes at their best prices now. In addition to the sale, you can also sign up for Atlee Northmore?s webinar ?A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: How to Read Star Wars.?

Cindy is also offering at 20% OFF discount throughout the holidays. Use coupon code ?advent2023? on MorningTimeforMoms.com/shop until January 2024.

If you missed it, go back to last week?s episode to get all the information about our 2024 Reading Challenge, Book of Centuries.

Commonplace Quotes:

Truth herself will, at the promptings of Nature, break forth from even unwilling hearts.

?Veritas ipsa cogente natura etiam ab invitis pectoribus erumpit.?

Lactantius, from Divine Institutes, Bk. II

Curiosity may elicit facts, but only real interest may mold these facts to wisdom.

Anna Botsford Comstock, from Handbook of Nature Study

I must therefore disagree with Miss Sayers very profoundly when she says that ?between the mind of the maker and the Mind of the Maker? there is ?a difference, not of category, but only of quality and degree? (p. 147). On my view there is a greater, far greater, difference between the two than between playing with a doll and suckling a child. But with this, serious disagreement ends.

This is the first ?little book on religion? I have read for a long time in which every sentence is intelligible and every page advances the argument. I recommend it heartily to theologians and critics. To novelists and poets, if they are already inclined in any degree to idolatry of their own vocation, I recommend it with much more caution. They had better read it fasting.

C. S. Lewis, from Image and Imagination Thoughts

by Thomas Beddoes

Sweet are the thoughts that haunt the poet?s brain Like rainbow-fringed clouds, through which some star Peeps in bright glory on a shepherd swain; They sweep along and trance him; sweeter far Than incense trailing up an out-stretched chain From rocking censer; sweeter too they are Than the thin mist which rises in the gale From out the slender cowslip?s bee-scarred breast. Their delicate pinions buoy up a tale Like brittle wings, which curtain in the vest Of cobweb-limbed ephemera, that sail In gauzy mantle of dun twilight dressed, Borne on the wind?s soft sighings, when the spring Listens all evening to its whispering. Books Mentioned:

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

Home Economics by Wendell Berry

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast, we have a very special 200th Episode for you! Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks are joined by their Patreon Friends and Fellows for a live episode recording to launch the 2024 Reading Challenge! This year?s challenge theme is ?Book of Centuries? and features a timeline of literary periods from which you can choose works to read throughout the next year. The discussion featured suggestions for each literary period and century, and you can get the complete list of book and author suggestions right here. (Due to the length of this list, we will not be adding hyperlinks this week, so please see the document to find any book titles and authors you want to explore.) As usual, there will also be a kids? version of the reading challenge!

To download a PDF version of the adult reading challenge, click here. To download a PDF of the kids? version, click here.

The House of Humane Letters is currently having their Christmas sale until December 31, 2023. Everything is now 20% OFF, so hop on over and get the classes at their best prices now. In addition to the sale, you can also sign up for Atlee Northmore?s webinar ?A Medieval Romance in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: How to Read Star Wars.?

Cindy is also offering at 20% OFF discount throughout the holidays. Use coupon code ?advent2023? on MorningTimeforMoms.com/shop until January 2024.

Commonplace Quotes:

Chaucer had the rare gift of an author of liking people he did not respect.

G. K. Chesterton, from Chaucer

Modern education promotes the unmitigated study of literature and concentrates our attention on the relation between a writer?s life, his surface life, and his work. That is the reason it is such a curse.

Madeleine L?Engle, from Walking on Water

A very famous writer once said, ?A book is like a mirror. If a fool looks in, you can?t expect a genius to look out.?

J. K. Rowling Whitsunday

by George Herbert

Listen sweet Dove unto my song, And spread thy golden wings in me; Hatching my tender heart so long, Till it get wing, and fly away with thee. Where is that fire which once descended On thy Apostles? thou didst then Keep open house, richly attended, Feasting all comers by twelve chosen men. Such glorious gifts thou didst bestow, That th?earth did like a heav?n appear; The stars were coming down to know If they might mend their wages, and serve here. The sun which once did shine alone, Hung down his head, and wisht for night, When he beheld twelve suns for one Going about the world, and giving light. But since those pipes of gold, which brought That cordial water to our ground, Were cut and martyr?d by the fault Of those, who did themselves through their side wound, Thou shutt?st the door, and keep?st within; Scarce a good joy creeps through the chink: And if the braves of conqu?ring sin Did not excite thee, we should wholly sink. Lord, though we change, thou art the same; The same sweet God of love and light: Restore this day, for thy great name, Unto his ancient and miraculous right. Books Mentioned:

200th Episode Literary Life Book Suggestions

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Due to illness among our hosts and holiday travel plans, we are airing a Best Of Series episode this week instead of our previously planned episode on The Mind of the Maker. Please enjoy this lighthearted discussion as you prepare for your Thanksgiving feasting, and join us right here next week for a very special 200th episode featuring our Friends and Fellows and introducing the 2024 Reading Challenge!

Today on The Literary Life Podcast we bring you another fun episode in our ?In Search of the Austen Adaptation? series. Hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks are joined by resident film aficionado, Atlee Northmore to discuss film adaptations on Sense and Sensibility. The conversation opens by revisiting the question of what makes a good adaptation of a book when translating it for the screen. They talk about the challenges of showing modern audiences the characters and situations as Jane Austen meant them to be understood. Atlee gives a brief overview of the lesser known film adaptations, as well as a more in depth discussion of the 1995 and 2008 versions. You can access the PDF he created with links to watch here.

Commonplace Quotes:

Sound principles that are old may easily be laid on the shelf and forgotten, unless in each successive generation a few industrious people can be found who will take the trouble to draw them forth from the storehouse.

Thomas Ruper, as quoted by Karen Glass

His senile fury was not exhausted by endless repetition.

Eric Linklater

?Remember, no one is made up of one fault, everyone is much greater than all his faults,? and then she would add with a smile: ?I find it much easier to put up with people?s faults than with their virtues!?

Charlotte Mason, as quoted by Essex Cholmondeley

The great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, some duty neglected, some failing indulged, impropriety, indelicacy, generous candor, blameable distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason. These are the concepts by which Jane Austen grasps the world. In her we still breathe the air of the Rambler and Idler. All is hard, clear, definable; by some modern standards, even naïvely so. The hardness is, of course, for oneself, not for one?s neighbours. It reveals to Marianne her want ?of kindness? and shows Emma that her behaviour has been ?unfeeling?. Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen?s is at once less soft and less cruel.

C. S. Lewis Selection from With a Guitar, To Jane

by Percy Shelley

Ariel to Miranda:-- Take This slave of music, for the sake Of him who is the slave of thee; And teach it all the harmony In which thou canst, and only thou, Make the delighted spirit glow, Till joy denies itself again And, too intense, is turned to pain. For by permission and command Of thine own Prince Ferdinand, Poor Ariel sends this silent token Of more than ever can be spoken; Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who From life to life must still pursue Your happiness,-- for thus alone Can Ariel ever find his own. From Prospero's enchanted cell, As the mighty verses tell, To the throne of Naples he Lit you o'er the trackless sea, Flitting on, your prow before, Like a living meteor. When you die, the silent Moon In her interlunar swoon Is not sadder in her cell Than deserted Ariel. Book List:

In Vital Harmony by Karen Glass

The Story of Charlotte Mason by Essex Cholmondeley

Robert the Bruce by Eric Linklater

C. S. Lewis? Selected Literary Essays edited by Walter Hooper

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

 

Today?s episode of The Literary Life is a continuation of our series covering The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas discuss chapters 6-8 this week, which they acknowledge are probably the most difficult portions of this book so far. Angelina starts off with some questions she has about why chapter six in included and how it fits with other arguments she has already made earlier. Thomas reads and expands on a passage about the autobiographer and his art. Angelina makes a distinction between moral goodness and artistic goodness in works of fiction and art. Cindy highlights the idea of justification and something being ?out of true.?

Coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers? webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

Commonplace Quotes:

My friend, the Scottish poet and translator Alastair Reid, carries a lifetime?s worth of poems?an entire small library?in his head. ?Do you memorize them?? someone asked him once. ?No,? he answered gravely. ?I remember them.?

Christian McEwan, World Enough and Time

The book everywhere exhibits the style and temper for which the author was both loved and hated. The essays are full of cheerful energy. The young people would call them ?bonhomous?.

By a bonhomous writer they mean one who seems to like writing and what he writes of, and to assume that his readers will mostly be people he would like. I think that this last assumption is what infuriates them.

C. S. Lewis, Image and Imagination

If you are not careful?you?ll be a genius when you grow up and disgrace your parents.

Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden The Bird and the Tree

by Ruth Pitter

The tree, and its haunting bird, Are the loves of my heart; But where is the word, the word, Oh where is the art, To say, or even to see, For a moment of time, What the Tree and the Bird must be In the true sublime? They shine, listening to the soul, And the soul replies; But the inner love is not whole, and the moment dies. O give me before I die The grace to see With eternal, ultimate eye, The Bird and the Tree. The song in the living green, The Tree and the Bird? O have they ever been seen, Ever been heard? Books Mentioned:

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life Podcast today, Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks continue discussing Dorothy L. Sayers? The Mind of the Maker. In today?s conversation, they cover the ideas in chapters 3-5, including the following: the creative process in relation to the members of the Trinity, the relationship of the writer to his own creation, the misconception of art as self-expression, the problem with poetic justice, and much more!

If you missed the live webinar Can Dante?s Inferno Save the World? with Dr. Jason Baxter, you can still purchase the recording. Also, coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers? webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

Commonplace Quotes:

He remained altogether inimitable, yet never seemed conscious of his greatness. It was native in him to rejoice in the successes of other men at least as much as in his own triumphs.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, from ?The Death of Robert Louis Stevenson?

Only one hour of the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

Rose Macaulay, as quoted by Christian McEwan in World Enough and Time

The unity of a work of art, the basis of structural analysis, has not only been produced solely by the unconditioned will of the artist, for the artist is only its efficient cause: it has form, and consequently a formal cause. The fact that revision is possible, that the poet makes changes not because he likes them better but because they are better, means that poems, like poets, are born and not made.

Northrop Frye, from Fables of Identity Nondum

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself." ISAIAH xlv. 15. God, though to Thee our psalm we raise-- No answering voice comes from the skies; To Thee the trembling sinner prays But no forgiving voice replies; Our prayer seems lost in desert ways, Our hymn in the vast silence dies. We see the glories of the earth But not the hand that wrought them all: Night to a myriad worlds gives birth, Yet like a lighted empty hall Where stands no host at door or hearth Vacant creation's lamps appall. We guess; we clothe Thee, unseen King, With attributes we deem are meet; Each in his own imagining Sets up a shadow in Thy seat; Yet know not how our gifts to bring, Where seek Thee with unsandalled feet. Books Mentioned:

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks are kick off a new series on The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. Before discussion the book itself, Angelina gives a little biographical information on Sayers for those who are new to her and her work. They begin talking about the book with the preface and Sayers own purpose in writing it. Cindy shares a little about her first reading of The Mind of the Maker when she was a young newlywed and the impact it made on her. Thomas points out the ?laws? Sayers outlines and reads some important quotes from this section.

If you are listening to this episode on the day it drops, it?s not too late to get in on today?s live webinar Can Dante?s Inferno Save the World? with Dr. Jason Baxter. You can also purchase the recording any time if you missed the live class. Also coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers? webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

Episode 9: ?Are Women Human? by Dorothy L. Sayers

Episodes 5-8 on Gaudy Night

Episode 62: The Literary Friendship of Dorothy and Jack

Commonplace Quotes:

Think not, Mistress, more true dullness lies

In Folly?s cap, than Wisdom?s grave disguise.

Alexander Pope, from ?The Dunciad?

We do not own stories, and when we try to limit them, squeeze the life out of them, lose the love that gave them to us, and fall back into that fatal human flaw?pride, hubris?we are right back to Adam and Eve, who listened to the power of the snake instead of the creativity of God.

Madeleine L?Engle, from Bright Evening Star

This is the first ?little book on religion? I have read for a long time in which every sentence is intelligible and every page advances the argument.

C. S. Lewis, in a review of Mind of the Maker Reason Has Moons

by Ralph Hodgson

Reason has moons, but moons not hers, Lie mirror'd on the sea, Confounding her astronomers, But O! delighting me. Books Mentioned:

Walking on Water by Madeleine L?Engle

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

?Learning in Wartime? by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast this week as we wrap up our series of discussion on C. S. Lewis? novel Out of the Silent Planet. Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks are covering from chapter 16 to the end of the book in today?s episode. After sharing their commonplace quotes, Angelina starts the conversation comparing the ideas in Gulliver?s Travels with what Lewis is doing in this book. Thomas quotes a passage from the Aeneid in Latin as they talk about the parallels to Out of the Silent Planet. The structure of the medieval romance is seen fully as we finish the story, as noted by Angelina. She and Thomas also point out more connections with Paradise Lost. Cindy brings everything together with some thoughts on the unraveling of modernity.

Join us next week as we kick off a new series on The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers!

House of Humane Letters is thrilled to announce an all new webinar from Dr. Jason Baxter coming October 31st! Register today for Can Dante?s Inferno Save the World? Also coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers? webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

Commonplace Quotes:

But unlike most artists, Ruskin valued the seeing more than the doing. ?The sight is more important than the drawing,? he said. ?The greatest thing a human being ever does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what he saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands of people can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion?all in one.?

from The World Enough and Time, by Christian McEwan

Build, build your Babels black against the sky-

But mark yon small green blade, your stones between,

The single spy

Of that uncounted host you have outcast;

For with their tiny pennons waving green

They shall storm your streets at last.

F. L. Lucas, from ?Beleaguered Cities?

The old universe was wholly different in its effect. It was an answer, not a question. It offered not a field for musing but a single overwhelming object; an object which at once abashes and exalts the mind. For in it there is a final standard of size. The Primum Mobile is really large because it is the largest corporeal thing there is. We are really small because our whole Earth is a speck compared with the Primum Mobile.

C. S. Lewis, from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature Science-Fiction Cradlesong

by C. S. Lewis

By and by Man will try To get out into the sky, Sailing far beyond the air From Down and Here to Up and There. Stars and sky, sky and stars Make us feel the prison bars. Suppose it done. Now we ride Closed in steel, up there, outside Through our port-holes see the vast Heaven-scape go rushing past. Shall we? All that meets the eye Is sky and stars, stars and sky. Points of light with black between Hang like a painted scene Motionless, no nearer there Than on Earth, everywhere Equidistant from our ship. Heaven has given us the slip. Hush, be still. Outer space Is a concept, not a place. Try no more. Where we are Never can be sky or star. From prison, in a prison, we fly; There's no way into the sky. Books Mentioned:

The Secular Scripture by Northrop Frye

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L?Engle

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, our hosts continue their discussion of C. S. Lewis? science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet, covering chapters 6-15. Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks begin by sharing their commonplace quotes, including some heated debate about sausages, then dive in to this section. They start by looking at Ransom?s need to let go of some of his own modern preconceptions and categories, in spite of being steeped in the classics. Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy also discuss a variety of other themes, including: the contrasts between Lewis and Tolkien in world-building, Lewis? crafting a medieval tale in the genre of modern science fiction, and the problems with Ransom?s anthro-centric perspective.

House of Humane Letters is thrilled to announce an all new webinar from Dr. Jason Baxter coming October 31st! Register today for Can Dante?s Inferno Save the World? Also coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers? webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up nowand save your spot!

Commonplace Quotes:

It is to me inconceivable that Nature as we see it is either what God intended or merely evil; it looks like a good thing spoiled.

C. S. Lewis, from Letters of C. S. Lewis

What do you usually do when you are shut up in a secret room, with no chance of getting out for hours? As for me, I always say poetry to myself. It is one of the uses of poetry?one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances of that kind, or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night. You will find poetry most useful for this purpose. So learn plenty of it, and be sure it is the best kind, because this is most useful as well as most agreeable.

Edith Nesbit, from The House of Arden

Lewis began the trilogy as a conscious critique of what he called ?Wellsianity,? a philosophy that applies Darwinism to the metaphysical sphere, believing that humans may evolve into a new species of gods, spreading from world to world and galaxy to galaxy. Though one finds this quasi-religious belief sometimes called ?Evolutionism? in Olaf Stapledon, G. B. Shaw, and C. H. Waddington, Lewis found it most fully embodied in Wells? novels, and he set out to produce a Wellsian fantasy with an anti-Welsian theme. Lewis? Ransom books contrast so sharply from other stories of space voyages that Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin credit him with inventing a new genre: ?anti-science fiction.?

from Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis, edited by Thomas L. Martin A Selection from ?I Saw Eternity the Other Night?

by Henry Vaughn

I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright; And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, Driv'n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world And all her train were hurl'd. Books Mentioned:

Kingsley Amis

William Morris

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast, Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas bring us the first installment in their series of discussions about C. S. Lewis? science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet. Angelina shares some background on how Lewis began writing this book and what he set out to do through the genre of science fiction within the form of a romance. In looking at the historical time period in which he was writing, Thomas brings out the transcendent quality of Lewis? message. They talk about Ransom?s character and his embodiment of the ?old ways.? Cindy points out the Dante-esque details of the beginning of Ransom?s journey.

Other themes our hosts discuss are the problem of eugenics, the study of philology, the similarities in setup with First Men in the Moon, the enchantment of modernity, medieval cosmology, and so much more!

House of Humane Letters is thrilled to announce an all new webinar from Dr. Jason Baxter coming October 31st! Register today for Can Dante?s Inferno Save the World? Also coming up from House of Humane Letters on November 16, 2023, Jennifer Rogers? webinar on Tolkien and The Old English Tradition. You can sign up now and save your spot!

Commonplace Quotes:

?I?m with Orwell,? said Strike. ?Some ideas are so stupid, only intellectuals believe them.?

Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling)

An age of discovery?is apt to loathe established institutions, and be filled with spiritual arrogance.

Agnes Mure Mackenzie, The Kingdom of Scotland

It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies hid in a hideous paper-backed edition, wholly unnoticed by the cognescenti, while any ?realistic? drivel about some neurotic in a London flat?something that needs no real invention at all, something that any educated man could write if he chose, may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious book?as if it really mattered. I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return: but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.

C. S. Lewis, from a letter to Joy Davidman, Dec. 1953 A Selection from New Heaven and New Earth

by D. H. Lawrence

I was greedy, I was mad for the unknown. I, new-risen, resurrected, starved from the tomb starved from a life of devouring always myself now here was I, new-awakened, with my hand stretched out and touching the unknown, the real unknown, the unknown unknown. My God, but I can only say I touch, I feel the unknown! I am the first comer! Cortes, Pisarro, Columbus, Cabot, they are nothing, nothing! I am the first comer! I am the discoverer! I have found the other world! Books Mentioned:

On Stories by C. S. Lewis

Gulliver?s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis

The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and a brand new episode for this fall season! This week Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas begin this series of episodes on science fiction stories, beginning with some background on H. G. Wells and his book The First Men in the Moon. This sets the scene for us as we then continue on next week with the opening of a discussion of C. S. Lewis? Out of the Silent Planet.

Thomas gives some biographical background information about Wells, and Angelina shares some distinctives of the science fiction genre and its sub-categories. Cindy highlights how much Out of the Silent Planet truly is a derivative of The First Men In the Moon with Lewis putting forward a very different premise.

House of Humane Letters is thrilled to announce an all new webinar from Dr. Jason Baxter coming October 31st! Register today for Can Dante?s Inferno Save the World?

Commonplace Quotes:

One of the very best things about the world is that so little of it is me.

Andrew Grieg

He could bear anything except to be silenced. Like most violent controversialists, he believed himself to be the pattern of meekness and good temper.

Ronald Knox, from Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

Mr. Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message.

G. K. Chesterton Astrophil and Stella 31: With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb?st the skies

by Sir Philip Sydney

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies! How silently, and with how wan a face! What, may it be that even in heav'nly place That busy archer his sharp arrows tries! Sure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case, I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me, Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit? Are beauties there as proud as here they be? Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess? Do they call virtue there ungratefulness? Books Mentioned:

World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down by Christian McEwan

From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne

Ursula K. Le Guin

Isaac Asimov

Michael Crichton

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

Gulliver?s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On this week?s episode of The Literary Life, we bring you another installment in our ?Best of? Series. Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks continue their discussion of J. R. R. Tolkien?s short story ?Leaf by Niggle?. If you missed the Back to School 2020 Conference when it was live, you can still purchase access to the recordings at MorningTimeforMoms.com. Angelina opens the book chat highlighting Tolkien?s mirroring of Dante?s Divine Comedy with Niggle?s journey, and our hosts move through a recap of the story. The questions we should be asking as we read are whether this story deals with the recovery of our vision and whether it ends with a eucatastrophe.

Cindy brings out more of the autobiographical nature of this story for Tolkien. Angelina tosses around the idea that Parish and Niggle may be doubles and be a picture of Tolkien?s two selves. Thomas talks about what Niggle has to do in the ?purgatory? section of the story. They also talk about the themes of art and the artist, sub-creation, and redemption. Come back next week to hear a discussion about why we ought to read myths.

Commonplace Quotes:

It is when a writer first begins to make enemies that he begins to matter.

Hilton Brown

Kill that whence spring the crude fancies and wild day-dreams of the young, and you will never lead them beyond dull facts?dull because their relations to each other, and the one life that works in them all, must remain undiscovered. Whoever would have his children avoid this arid region will do well to allow no teacher to approach them?not even of mathematics?who has no imagination.

George MacDonald

There were people who cared for him and people didn?t, and those who didn?t hate him were out to get him. . . But they couldn?t touch him. . . because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deidre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees.

Joseph Heller On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet

by Samuel Johnson

Condemned to Hope?s delusive mine,
    As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
    Our social comforts drop away.

Well tried through many a varying year,
    See Levet to the grave descend;
Officious, innocent, sincere,
    Of every friendless name the friend.

Yet still he fills Affection?s eye,
    Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind;
Nor, lettered Arrogance, deny
    Thy praise to merit unrefined.

When fainting Nature called for aid,
    And hovering Death prepared the blow,
His vigorous remedy displayed
    The power of art without the show.

In Misery?s darkest cavern known,
    His useful care was ever nigh,
Where hopeless Anguish poured his groan,
    And lonely Want retired to die.

No summons mocked by chill delay,
    No petty gain disdained by pride,
The modest wants of every day
    The toil of every day supplied.

His virtues walked their narrow round,
    Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found
    The single talent well employed.

The busy day, the peaceful night,
    Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;
His frame was firm, his powers were bright,
    Though now his eightieth year was nigh.

Then with no throbbing fiery pain,
    No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
    And freed his soul the nearest way.

Book List:

Rudyard Kipling by Hilton Brown

A Dish of Orts by George MacDonald

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Letters from Father Christmas by J. R. R. Tolkien

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome to another episode of our ?Best Of? Series on The Literary Life with Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks. Both this week and next, our hosts will be discussing J. R. R. Tolkien?s short story ?Leaf by Niggle?.

Angelina sets the stage with a little historical background on Tolkien?s writing of this story as well as some thoughts on allegory and how to read a fairy tale. She talks about this story as an exploration of the struggle of the ideals and demands of art against the demands of practical life and the question of whether or not art is useful. Cindy shares her ideas about the importance of the Inklings for Tolkien to get his work out into the world. Angelina shares about the type of journey on which the main character, Niggle, is called to go on in this story. As you read, we encourage you to look for how Tolkien harmonizes the different tensions within the story.

Commonplace Quotes:

Here are some of the points which make a story worth studying to tell to the nestling listeners in many a sweet ?Children?s Hour?;??graceful and artistic details; moral impulse of a high order, conveyed with a strong and delicate touch; sweet human affection; a tender, fanciful link between the children and the Nature-world; humour, pathos, righteous satire, and last, but not least, the fact that the story does not turn on children, and does not foster that self-consciousness, the dawn of which in the child is, perhaps, the individual ?Fall of Man.?

Charlotte Mason

The essay began by noting that total war was underway, with fighting not only ?in the field and on the sea and in the air,? but also in ?the realm of ideas.? It said: ?The mightiest single weapon this war has yet employed? was ?not a plane, or a bomb or a juggernaut of tanks??it was Mein Kampf. This single book caused an educated nation to ?burn the great books that keep liberty fresh in the hearts of men.? If America?s goal was victory and world peace, ?all of us will have to know more and think better than our enemies think and know,? the council asserted. ?This was is a war of books. . . Books are our weapons.?

Molly Guptill Manning, quoting from the essay ?Books and the War?

In everything I have sought peace and not found it, save in a corner with a book.

Thomas à Kempis Milton

by Edward Muir

Milton, his face set fair for Paradise,
And knowing that he and Paradise were lost
In separate desolation, bravely crossed
Into his second night and paid his price.
There towards the end he to the dark tower came
Set square in the gate, a mass of blackened stone
Crowned with vermilion fiends like streamers blown
From a great funnel filled with roaring flame.
Shut in his darkness, these he could not see,
But heard the steely clamour known too well
On Saturday nights in every street in Hell.
Where, past the devilish din, could Paradise be?
A footstep more, and his unblinded eyes
Saw far and near the fields of Paradise.

Book List:

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason

When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

Planet Narnia by Michael Ward

The Company They Keep by Diana Pavlac Glyer

Smith of Wooten Major by J. R. R. Tolkien

Farmer Giles of Ham by J. R. R. Tolkien

Letters from Father Christmas by J. R. R. Tolkien

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War by Joseph Loconte

Spirits in Bondage by C. S. Lewis

Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today on The Literary Life podcast, we bring you another episode from the ?Best of? series vault, our discussion of J. R. R. Tolkien?s essay ?On Fairy Stories?. Tune in again over the next two weeks as we continue the conversation with Tolkien?s short story Leaf by Niggle. If you missed the 2020 Back to School conference that Cindy introduced in this episode, you can still get the recording at MorningTimeforMoms.com.

Angelina sets the stage for this discussion by orienting us to the context for the essay by Tolkien as a critique of what is considered a fairy story. She points out the difference between cautionary tales like those by Charles Perrault and the German folk and fairy tales collected by the Grimm Brothers. Our hosts highlight Tolkien?s definition of true fairy stories, ones that take place in the ?perilous realm? and involve a journey element. He critiques Andrew Lang as including many stories as fairy tale that are not truly fairy stories. They also discuss topics from the essay including sub-creation, magic and spells, suspension of disbelief, and children?s responses to fairy stories.

Commonplace Quotes:

One should forgive one?s enemies, but only after they are hanged.

Heinrich Heine

The German folk soul can again express itself. These flames do not only illuminate the final end of the old era. They also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past. If the old men do not understand what is going on, let them grasp that we young men have gone and done it. The old goes up in flames. The new shall be fashioned from the flame of our hearts.

Joseph Goebbles

Human beings are not human doings.

Nigel Goodwin Into My Heart an Air That Kills

by A. E. Houseman

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those far remembered hills,
What spires, what towns are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot go again.

Book List:

When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning

Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura

Roger Lancelyn Green

Gulliver?s Travels by Jonathan Swift

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur?s Court by Mark Twain

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Bandersnatch by Diana Pavlac Glyer

The Company They Keep by Diana Pavlac Glyer

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

Phantastes by George MacDonald

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today we are pleased to bring you a special episode focusing on the importance of a good translation when reading works originally written in other languages. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are joined for this conversation by Dr. Anne Phillips, who has a BA in Latin and Greek and a Doctorate in Classical Studies and teaches Latin at the House of Humane Letters. They start out with the question of basic principles for determining what makes a good translation. Angelina brings up C. S. Lewis? review of Fitzgerald?s translation of The Odyssey and the principles he sets forth. Anne shares her experience with reading classic works in their original languages and how much richer and more enjoyable it is for her. Another topic they cover is the challenge of translating poetry.

Angelina, Thomas, and Anne both share some of their least liked translations of classical Greek and Latin works, as well as some recommendations for better translations. They also talk about finding good translations of Old English and Middle English works.

Thomas is also teaching a webinar along with Michael Williams on the modern poets W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot on September 28th. You can now register at House of Humane Letters.

Commonplace Quotes:

He had the successful portrait painters essential gift and saw men, with few exceptions, as they liked to see themselves.

C. V. Wedgwood

In my opinion value-judgements in literature should not be hurried. It does a student little good to be told that A is better than B, especially if he prefers B at the time. He has to feel values for himself, and should follow his individual rhythm in doing  so. In the meantime, he can read almost anything in any order, just as he can eat mixtures of food that would have his elders reaching for the baking soda. A sensible teaching or librarian can soon learn how to give guidance to a youth?s reading that allows for undeveloped taste and still doesn?t turn him into a gourmet or a dyspeptic before his time.

Northrop Frye

A good translation is one that lets Homer sing.

Thomas Banks

There is a sense in which everything is untranslatable. A man may write what is as good or even better than the original, but from the nature of the case it cannot be precisely the same thing. There are even moments when one feels it is something of a desecration to translate at all, but that is surely over-scrupulous, a weakness which, if all had yielded to it, would certainly have left the world poorer.

Walter Headlam Ode 5, Book 1: To Pyrrha

by Horace, trans. by John Milton

What slender youth, bedew?d with liquid odors, Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave, Pyrrha? For whom bind?st thou In wreaths thy golden hair, Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he Of faith and changed gods complain, and seas Rough with black winds, and storms Unwonted shall admire! Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold, Who, always vacant, always amiable Hopes thee, of flattering gales Unmindful. Hapless they To whom thou untried seem?st fair. Me, in my vow?d Picture, the sacred wall declares to have hung My dank and dropping weeds To the stern god of sea. Books Mentioned:

Velvet Studies by C. V. Wedgwood

The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

The Children?s Homer by Padraic Colum

The Odyssey trans. by Richmond Lattimore

The Iliad trans. by Richmond Lattimore

The Aeneid trans. by Sarah Ruden

A. E. Stallings

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Beowulf trans. by Burton Raffel

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight trans. by Burton Raffel

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, trans. by Burton Raffel

The Landmark Heroditus trans. by Andrea L. Purvis

The Landmark Thucydides trans. by Richard Crawley

The Landmark Xenophon trans. by John Marincola

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast, we wrap up our discussion of The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton. After sharing their commonplace quotes, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas dive right in to the last section and share their various thoughts on finishing this book. Angelina and Thomas talk about some of Chesterton?s thoughts on Impressionism in the arts. Cindy and Thomas make some connections with the old rhyme about ?Monday?s Child.? They talk about more of the allegorical elements that are clearly spelled out by Chesterton, as well as many other relations they make to other stories, including the one great story.

Be sure to join us next week when we have a special episode about why translation matters with Dr. Anne Phillips!

Angelina is teaching a class on How to Read Beowulf August 28-September 1, 2023. Get in on this mini-class at House of Humane Letters.

Thomas is also teaching a webinar along with Michael Williams on the modern poets W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot on September 28th. You can now register at House of Humane Letters.

Commonplace Quotes:

Almost everywhere and almost invariably the man who has sought a cryptogram in a great masterpiece has been highly exhilarated, logically justified, morally excited, and entirely wrong.

But it is all detail; and detail by itself means madness. The very definition of a lunatic is a man who has taken details out of their real atmosphere.

The truth is, I fear, that madness has a great advantage over sanity. Sanity is always careless. Madness is always careful.

G. K. Chesterton, from The Soul of Wit

Looking for an author?s life in his books is vulgar anyhow, and can be most misleading.

L. P. Hartley, from A Perfect Woman

Perhaps it is not worthwhile to try to kill heresies which so rapidly kill themselves, and the cult of suicide committed suicide some time ago. But it should not wish it supposed as some think I have supposed, that in resisting the heresy of pessimism, I have implied the equally morbid and diseased insanity of optimism. I was not then considering whether anything is really evil but whether is really evil, and in relation to the latter nightmare, it does still seem to me relevant to say that nightmares are not true and that in them even the faces of friends may appear as the faces of fiends. I tried to turn this notion of resistance to a nightmare into a topsy-turvy tale about a man who fancied himself alone among enemies and found that each of the enemies was, in fact, on his own side and in his own solitude.

G. K. Chesterton, on The Man Who Was Thursday The End of the World

by Dana Gioia

?We're going,? they said, ?to the end of the world.? So they stopped the car where the river curled, And we scrambled down beneath the bridge On the gravel track of a narrow ridge. We tramped for miles on a wooded walk Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk. Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore. We came to a bend, where the river grew wide And green mountains rose on the opposite side. My guides moved back. I stood alone, As the current streaked over smooth flat stone. Shelf by stone shelf the river fell. The white water goosetailed with eddying swell. Faster and louder the current dropped Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped. I stood at the edge where the mist ascended, My journey done where the world ended. I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky, The sound of the water, and the water?s reply.

?The End of the World? from Interrogations at Noon. Copyright © 2001 by Dana Gioia. Reprinted for educational purposes only.

Books Mentioned:

W. Summerset Maugham

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

The Human Beast by Emile Zola

Theodore Dreiser

Jack London

On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters by Hilaire Belloc

Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On the Literary Life podcast this week Angelina, Cindy and Thomas continue their series on G. K. Chesterton?s The Man Who Was Thursday. Before diving into the plot of these chapters, our hosts discuss the similarities and differences between Chesterton and Kafka?s works of fiction. Thomas gives some historical context on anarchy as well as assassinations in the time period of this book. Angelina points out the Dante-esque language in this section, as well as the continuing themes of chivalry. Cindy highlights the character of Sunday and how he looms large, quite literally, over everyone?s imaginations in the story. Some other thoughts our hosts discuss include modernity?s mindset as it relates to the atmosphere of this story, the idea of the underdog fighting against all odds, and the humorous moments that break some of the tension. Be sure to come back next week when we wrap up our series on The Man Who Was Thursday.

If you missed our 2023 Back to School Conference when it was live, you can still go back and view the recordings when you purchase access to the conference at MorningTimeforMom.com.

Angelina is teaching a class on How to Read Beowulf at the end of August 2023. Get in on this mini-class at House of Humane Letters.

Thomas is also teaching a webinar along with Michael Williams on the modern poets W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot on September 28th. You can now register at House of Humane Letters.

Commonplace Quotes:

It?s important, too, that everything that has a story, such as a myth, should be read or listened to purely as a story. Many people grow up without really understanding the difference between imaginative and discursive writing. On the rare occasions when they encounter poems or even pictures, they treat them exactly as though they were intended to be pieces of more or less disguised information. Their questions are all based on this assumption: ?What is he trying to get across?? ?What am I supposed to get out of it?? ?Why doesn?t someone explain it to me?? ?Why couldn?t he have written it in a different way so that I could understand him?? The art of listening to story is a basic training for the imagination.

Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination

The biographer is there to explain rather than to judge. To get a clear view of a man we do not need to be told if his actions were good?but how and why he came to do them.

Lord David Cecil, ?Modern Biography?

Or read again The Man Who Was Thursday. Compare it with another good writer, Kafka. Is the difference simply that the one is ?dated? and the other contemporary? Or is it rather that while both give a powerful picture of the loneliness and bewilderment which each one of us encounters in his (apparently) single-handed struggle with the universe, Chesterton, attributing to the universe a more complicated disguise, and admitting the exhilaration as well as the terror of the struggle, has got in rather more, is more balanced: in that sense, more classical, more permanent?

C. S. Lewis, ?Period Criticism? Selection from Paradise Lost, Book 1

by John Milton

Innumerable force of Spirits arm?d

That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,

His utmost power with adverse power oppos?d

In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav?n,

And shook his throne.   What though the field be lost?

All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield:

And what is else not to be overcome?

Books Mentioned:

The Oxford Book of Christian Verse ed. by Lord David Cecil

On Stories by C. S. Lewis

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Day of the Assassins by Michael Burleigh

The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton

The Song of Roland trans. by Dorothy L. Sayers

Tess of the D?Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

King Lear by William Shakespeare

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to the Literary Life podcast this week and our new series on G. K. Chesterton?s The Man Who Was Thursday. Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas open with their commonplace quotes, as usual, then proceed to setting up the background for this book and the man Chesterton himself. Thomas also shares Chesterton?s poem to E. C. Bentley that opens this book and gives a brief explication of the poem. Following this, our hosts recap each chapter in the first section. Angelina makes several connections to Paradise Lost in this section, as well as pointing out the romantic and chivalric quest elements in the story. Cindy highlights the fact that we also have the fair maiden character here. Join us again next week when we will cover chapters 5-10 as events become even more strange.

If you missed our 2023 Back to School Conference when it was live, you can still go back and view the recordings when you purchase access to the conference at MorningTimeforMom.com.

Angelina is teaching a class on How to Read Beowulf at the end of August 2023. Get in on this mini-class at House of Humane Letters.

Thomas is also teaching a webinar along with Michael Williams on the modern poets W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot on September 28th. You can now register at House of Humane Letters.

Commonplace Quotes:

Had her mother been somebody else?s mother she would perhaps have admired her unreservedly.

L. P. Hartley, A Perfect Woman

When a child is reading, he should not be teased with questions as to the meaning of what he has read, the signification of this word or that; what is annoying to older people is equally annoying to children.

Charlotte Mason

And there is?Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffeeroom, view from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

J. R. R. Tolkien, ?On Fairy Stories? GKC

by Walter de la Mare

Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way,

Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest;

The mills of Satan keep his lance in play,

Pity and innocence his heart at rest.

Books Mentioned:

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

John Le Carre

Graham Greene

Oscar Wilde

Franz Kafka

John Buchan

Thursday Next Series by Jasper Fforde

Trent?s Last Case by E. C. Bentley

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast we have a fun ?Best of? Series episode for you from our collection of ?In Search of the Austen Adaptation? podcasts! On this episode our hosts Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are joined by Atlee Northmore, and together they are debating which film version of Jane Austen?s Pride and Prejudice is the best. Atlee shares some of the history of the Pride and Prejudice adaptations that were made for TV and film. Angelina highlights different ideas of what makes a good film adaptation of a book. Cindy brings up the importance of the casting, and Angelina talks about why she still feels like no film has gotten Mr. Darcy right. She also talks about the difficulty of embodying the virtues that Jane Austen gives her characters. Our hosts critique each major movies from over the decades, sharing what they like and dislike about each one.

Click here to download the PDF Atlee created for all the Pride and Prejudice film adaptations.

Commonplace Quotes:

If we cannot get the better of life, at any rate, we can be so free as to laugh at it.

Desmond MacCarthy

Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader?s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.

Virginia Woolf

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

G. K. Chesterton

Never judge a book by its movie.

Anonymous False Though She Be

by William Congreve

FALSE though she be to me and love, I'll ne'er pursue revenge; For still the charmer I approve, Though I deplore her change. In hours of bliss we oft have met: They could not always last; And though the present I regret, I'm grateful for the past. Book List:

The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On today?s ?Best of The Literary Life? episode, Angelina and Cindy interview Caitlin Bruce Beauchamp. In addition to being an AmblesideOnline homeschool graduate and a lover of the humanities, Caitlin is a busy wife and a mother of young children. In their conversation, Angelina, Cindy and Caitlin dive into the deep end from the start, discussing the purpose of beauty. They talk about Caitlin?s early reading life and how she came to love books. She shares how she had to learn some humility in her reading life as an adult.

Angelina asks Caitlin how she finds the time to keep up her reading life amidst the responsibilities of mothering. Cindy and Caitlin talk about the importance of feeding your mind with other people?s ideas instead of taking the road to self-pity. The ladies discuss the timing of reading certain books to children and the great joy of watching children blossom as they listen to the right kinds of stories. Caitlin shares some of the books she reads to get out of a slump, as well as some other favorites and current reads.

Commonplace Quotes:

In his memoir Suprised by Joy Lewis described his ideal daily routine to be reading and writing from nine until one and again from five until seven, with breaks for meals, walking, or tea-time. Apart from those six hours of study every day, he also enjoyed light reading over meals or in the evening hours. All in all, Lewis? preferred schedule seemed to include seven or eight hours of reading per day!

David C. Downing and Michael G. Maudlin, in the preface to The Reading Life

To be seeking always after the useful does not become free and exalted souls.

Aristotle

The years to come ? this is a promise ?

will grant you ample time

to try the difficult steps in the empire of thought

where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.

But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding,

than this deepest affinity between your eyes and the world.

The flock thickens

over the roiling, salt brightness. Listen,

maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world

in the clasp of attention, isn?t the perfect prayer,

but it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt,

is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,

but of pure submission. Tell me, what else

could beauty be for? And now the tide

is at its very crown,

the white birds sprinkle down,

gathering up the loose silver, rising

as if weightless. It isn?t instruction, or a parable.

It isn?t for any vanity or ambition

except for the one aloud, to stay alive.

It?s only a nimble frolic

over the waves. And you find, for hours,

you cannot even remember the questions

that weigh so in your mind.

Mary Oliver, selection from ?Terns? In the Bleak Midwinter

by Christina Rossetti

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshiped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

Book List:

The Reading Life by C. S. Lewis

Poetics by Aristotle

The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Happy Hollisters by Jerry West

Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace

Stories from The Faerie Queen by Jeanie Lang

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Silence by Shusako Endo

Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery

Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Middlemarch by George Eliot (the Audible version read by Juliet Stevenson)

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

Light in August by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane

Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane

Elizabeth Goudge

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, our hosts Angelina, Cindy and Thomas sit down for a chat with twin sisters Addison and Ella Hornstra. Together they have been given a literary home education, and this fall they will continue that journey at New College Franklin. Angelina introduces the Hornstra ladies and she and Thomas tell a little bit about having them as students. Cindy also shares how she met the Hornstra family. Then they dig into the girls? reading journeys from the beginning of their learning to read all the way to their current reading lives. Some of the topics that come up in this conversation are: reading content beyond your understanding, owning your reading life, the problem with using the wrong approach to literature, the dangers of modern education for uniquely gifted students, the power of just reading well, and so much more.

Come explore, with seasoned moms, the things that stand the test of time in our homeschools at this year?s Literary Life Back to School Online Conference. In addition to our hosts, Donna-Jean Breckenridge and a panel of home educating parents and their adult children, will be bringing encouragement and insight to help you on your homeschool journey. This year?s conference will be live online on August 2-5, with recordings available for those who cannot join live.

Commonplace Quotes:

It is bad to spend too many hours over either a microscope or telescope or in gazing fixedly at some one distance range. The eyes need change of focus, and so does the imagination. There has been in modern Europe a shocking riot in misuse of the imagination. The remedy is to learn to use it. But the same kind of people who would like to bandage a child?s eyes lest it should learn to squint like to bandage the imagination lest it should wear itself out by squinting.

Mary Everest Boole

Away from the immense, cloistered in our own concepts, we may scorn and revile everything. But standing between earth and sky, we are silenced by the sight.

Abraham Heschel

In nature, the bird who gets up earliest catches the most worms, but in book collecting, the prizes fall to birds who know worms when they see them.

Michael Sadlier

The madman, of all men, lives most in a world of his own.

E. J. Oliver

Symbols are the nature speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words.

Edmund Spenser Sonnet XIX: On His Blindness

by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; ?Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?? I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, ?God doth not need Either man?s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o?er Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait.? Books Mentioned:

The Philosophy and Fun of Algebra by Mary Everest Boole

Thunder in the Soul by Abraham Heschel

A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes

Coventry Patmore by E. J. Oliver

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

Beatrix Potter

Mistmantle Chronicles by M. I. McAllister

Redwall Series by Brian Jacques

Poppy Series by Avi

The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White

Ralph Mouse Series by Beverley Cleary

The Cat of Bubastes by G. A. Henty

In Freedom?s Cause by G. A. Henty

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Gene Stratton Porter

The Chronicles of Prydain Series by Lloyd Alexander

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Phantastes by George MacDonald

The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and the final episode in our series on Robert Louis Stevenson?s Kidnapped. This week, Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas open with a discussion of the difference between Jacobites and Whigs and how that contrast is played out in this story. Angelina and Cindy compare the characters of David Balfour and Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island and how they display honor. Angelina addresses moralizing stories versus making a moral observation of a story. Thomas gives a summary of the last several chapters of Kidnapped and makes some comment on the lawyer Rankeillor. They highlight more of the epic romance elements found in this book, as well.

Check out our Upcoming Events page to see the schedule for the rest of the summer and into fall.

Join us for the 5th Annual Back to School Conference with your hosts, along with special guest speaker Donna-Jean Breckenridge this August 2-5, 2023. Learn more and register at morningtimeformoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

But in these days we are forced even against our will to judge everything, even plays, morally. A crowd of artists and aesthetes have declared in this age that art is immoral; but the fact plainly and obviously remains that there never was a time in the history of the world when art was so moral. If there be a fault in the popular criticism of the day, it is that it is far too much so.

G. K. Chesterton, The Soul of Wit

Man is by nature so dissatisfied an animal that he must always be acclaiming something that he fondly believes to be new.

Charles Petrie, The Four Georges

But though the thing is to be criticised (and admired) strictly as an adventure story, there are sidelights of interest about it considered as a historical novel. It carries on a rather curiously balanced critical attitude, partly inherited from the attitude of Sir Walter Scott, the paradox of being intellectually on the side of the Whigs and morally on the side of the Jacobites.

G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson Scotland?s Winter

by Edwin Muir

Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the hill
Helmed in his winter casket,
And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky.
The water at the mill
Sounds more hoarse and dull.
The miller?s daughter walking by
With frozen fingers soldered to her basket
Seems to be knocking 
Upon a hundred leagues of floor
With her light heels, and mocking
Percy and Douglas dead,
And Bruce on his burial bed,
Where he lies white as may
With wars and leprosy,
And all the kings before
This land was kingless,
And all the singers before
This land was songless,
This land that with its dead and living waits the Judgement Day.
But they, the powerless dead,
Listening can hear no more
Than a hard tapping on the floor
A little overhead
Of common heels that do not know
Whence they come or where they go
And are content
With their poor frozen life and shallow banishment.

Books Mentioned:

The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

David Balfour/Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy continue their discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson?s Kidnapped, covering chapters 7-18. After sharing their commonplace quotes, Thomas opens the conversation with a brief synopsis of chapter 7. Angelina notes the increase in danger and violence in this section of the book, and our hosts talk about the roguish character of Alan Breck. They make many comparisons between Kidnapped and Treasure Island and highlight the other-world atmosphere Stevenson creates while staying in the real world. Cindy mentions some of the conflict between the Campbells and MacDonalds, and Thomas fleshes out a little more of this aspect of Scottish history.

Join us for the 5th Annual Back to School Conference with your hosts, along with special guest speaker Donna-Jean Breckenridge this August 2-5, 2023. Learn more and register at morningtimeformoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Mr. Roger Lancelyn Green, writing in English not long ago, remarked that the reading of Rider Haggard had been to many a sort of religious experience. To some people this will have seemed simply grotesque. I myself would strongly disagree with it if ?religious? is taken to mean ?Christian.? And even if we take it in a sub-Christian sense, it would have been safer to say that such people had first met in Haggard?s romances elements which they would meet again in religious experience if they ever came to have any. But I think Mr. Green is very much nearer the mark than those who assume that no one has ever read the romances except in order to be thrilled by hair-breadth escapes. If he had said simply that something which the educated receive from poetry can reach the masses through stories of adventure, and almost in no other way, then I think he would have been right.

C. S. Lewis

The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was that romance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far more important than mere occurrences: that one was the soul of our life, the other the body, and that the soul was the precious thing.

G. K. Chesterton, from Varied Types

What do you usually do when you are shut up in a secret room, with no chance of getting out for hours? As for me, I always say poetry to myself. It is one of the uses of poetry?one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances of that kind, or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night. You will find poetry most useful for this purpose. So learn plenty of it, and be sure it is the best kind, because this is most useful as well as most agreeable.

E. Nesbit, from The House of Arden A Selection from Rob Roy?s Grave

by William Wordsworth

Thou, although with some wild thoughts
Wild Chieftain of a savage Clan!
Hadst this to boast of; thou didst love
The liberty of man.

And, had it been thy lot to live
With us who now behold the light,
Thou would?st have nobly stirred thyself,
And battled for the Right.

For thou wert still the poor man?s stay,
The poor man?s heart, the poor man?s hand;
And all the oppressed, who wanted strength,
Had thine at their command.

Books Mentioned:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

King Solomon?s Mines by H. Rider Haggard

The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Welcome back to a new read along series on The Literary Life Podcast! This week Angelina, Thomas, and Cindy will begin their discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson?s Kidnapped, covering chapters 1-6, as well as giving some background information on the beloved author and the historical setting of this book. Angelina talks about the life of R. L. Stevenson, and Thomas sets the historical stage for the story. We also get a glimpse into the form of the novel as a romance from some clues Stevenson gives at the outset. Cindy highlights the foreboding in the song of a woman David Balfour passes on the road. They look more closely at David?s plight, the role of the usurping uncle, and Stevenson?s excellent storytelling.

Come back next week to get in on the discussion of chapters 7-18.

You are not too late to participate in Thomas? mini-class on G. K. Chesterton taking place live or later from June 26th through July 7th. Register at HouseofHumaneLetters.com today!

Commonplace Quotes:

Perhaps it is a mistake to suppose that metaphors can be invented. The real ones, those that formulate intimate connections between one image and another, have always existed; those we can invent are the false ones, which are not worth inventing.

Jorge Luis Borges, An Essay on Hawthorne

The tragedy of King Lear, in some of its elements perhaps the very greatest of all the Shakespearean tragedies, is relatively seldom played. It is even possible to have a dark suspicion that it is not universally read; with the usual deplorable result, that it is universally quoted. Perhaps nothing has done so much to weaken the greatest of English achievements, and to leave it open to facile revolt or fatigued reaction, than the abominable habit of quoting Shakespeare without reading Shakespeare.

G. K. Chesterton, from and introduction to The Spice of Life

Truth is a stern mistress, and when one hath once started off with her one must follow on after the jade, though she lead in flat defiance of all the rules and conditions which would fain turn that tangled wilderness the world into the trim Dutch garden of the story-tellers.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke Epitaph on a Jacobite

by Thomas Macaulay

To my true king I offered free from stain
Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.
For him, I threw lands, honours, wealth, away.
And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.
For him I languished in a foreign clime,
Grey-haired with sorrow in my manhood?s prime;
Heard on Lavernia Scargill?s whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees;
Beheld each night my home in fevered sleep,
Each morning started from the dream to weep;
Till God who saw me tried too sorely, gave
The resting place I asked, an early grave.
Oh thou, whom chance leads to this nameless stone,
From that proud country which was once mine own,
By those white cliffs I never more must see,
By that dear language which I spake like thee,
Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear
O?er English dust. A broken heart lies here.

Books Mentioned:

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton

Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952 by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. by Ruth L. C. Simms

The Soul of Wit by G. K. Chesterton, ed. by Dale Ahlquist

The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle

George MacDonald

Andrew Lang

Sir Walter Scott

C. S. Lewis

Alfred de Vigny

Alessandro Manzoni

Alexandre Dumas

The Sacketts Series by Louis L?Amour

Roger Lancelyn Greene

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas wrap up their discussion of C. S. Lewis? The Great Divorce with the final chapters 11-14. Cindy and Angelina talk about the dangers of familial love becoming the end-all-be-all, as well as Lewis? exploration of Dante?s idea of sin. They go in depth with this exploration of sin as a distortion of something that might naturally seem good and the way Lewis pairs people to demonstrate that in these chapters. Angelina talks about the medieval view of ordered man versus the disordered man and how that relates to the man with the horse. They wrap up with the importance of stories in depicting truth in a veiled way, instead of only theological argument and discourse, in helping us live out our faith in a properly ordered way.

Until next time, check out our Upcoming Events page to view our schedule and see what we will be reading together over the next few months!

Commonplace Quotes:

We chose from the library shelves any book of Tales for the Young, and took much pleasure in prophesying the events. We could rely on Providence to punish the naughty and bring to notice the heroism of the good, and generally grant an early death to both. Why was there a bull in a field? To gore the disobedient. Why did cholera break out? To kill the child who went down a forbidden street. The names told us much: Tom, Sam, or Jack were predestined to evil, while a Frank could do nothing but good. Henry was a bit uncertain: he might lead his little sister into that field with bravado, or he might attack the bull to save her life at the cost of his own. We had bettings of gooseberries on such points.

M. V. Hughes

Exaggeration is one of art?s great devices.

J. B. Priestley

Hell is inaccurate.

Charles Williams There is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods

by Lord Byron

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne?er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Book List:

A London Child of the Seventies by M. V. Hughes

Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc

An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley

The Good Companions by J. B. Priestley

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Paradise Lost by John Milton

A Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

Mere Motherhood by Cindy Rollins

The Allegory of Love by C. S. Lewis

A Woman of the Pharisees by François Mauriac

Perelandra by C. S. Lewis

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, our hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks discuss chapters 7-10 of C. S. Lewis? The Great Divorce. Angelina points out the way in which Lewis uses the ?newcomer? character to explain the world he has created. They discuss the various personalities Lewis presents who choose not to take the journey to heaven, sharing how these sketches often hit a little too close to home.

They also talk about the influence of George MacDonald on Lewis and his role in this story. Thomas helps us make some connections with Lewis and Virgil, as well as explaining some of the references made by MacDonald?s character. Cindy points out how our loves can be entryways into either heaven or hell. Join us again next week as we finish up our discussion of The Great Divorce together!

There is still time to sign up for Thomas? upcoming mini-class on G. K. Chesterton taking place live from June 26th through July 7th. Register at HouseofHumaneLetters.com today!

Commonplace Quotes:

Meanwhile, you will write an essay on self-indulgence. There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.

Evelyn Waugh

Shame belongs, rather, to the bookish recluse who knows not how to apply his reading to the good of his fellows or to manifest its fruit to the eyes of all.

Cicero

It is simply my lifelong experience?that men are more likely to hand over to others what they ought to do themselves, and women more likely to do themselves what others wish they would leave alone. Hence both sexes must be told ?Mind your own business,? but in two different senses!

C. S. Lewis To a Skylark

by William Wordsworth

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!
Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye
Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,
Those quivering wings composed, that music still!

Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine;
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

Book List:

Letters to an American Lady by C. S. Lewis

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Pro Archia Poeta by Cicero

Farmer Giles of Ham by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Hitchhiker?s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

George MacDonald

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Psychomachia by Prudentius

Holy Living and Dying by Jeremy Taylor

Satires of Circumstance by Thomas Hardy

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, our hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks discuss chapters 2-6 of C. S. Lewis? The Great Divorce. Angelina reminds us as we begin this exploration of Lewis? narrative not to read too much theology into the details of this dreamlike world he creates. Cindy points out the similarities between these chapters and his descriptions at the end of The Last Battle. Thomas highlights the passage on Napoleon from chapter 2, showing what Lewis envisioned hell to be like. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas talks about the description of the land near heaven, the various characters? responses, as well as the weight of the actual environment and Lewis? picture of those who people it.

Be sure to check out Thomas? upcoming mini-class on G. K. Chesterton taking place live from June 26th through July 7th. Register at HouseofHumaneLetters.com today!

Commonplace Quotes:

We long for paradise because we were created for paradise. We were created to live in an environment that cooperates with, not fights against, our desires. We were created for Eden, a place we?ve never been, and so we desire a perfect life full of healthy relationships.

Julie Sparkman

Anyone who puts himself forward to be elected to a position of political power is almost bound to be socially or emotionally insecure, or criminally motivated, or mad.

Auberon Waugh

?The secret is not to dream,? she whispered. ?The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and now I am real. I know where I come from and where I?m going. You cannot fool me anymore. Or touch me. Or anything that is mine.?

Terry Pratchett The Stricken Deer

by William Cowper

I was a stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charg?d, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I found by one who had himself
Been hurt by th? archers. In his side he bore,
And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts,
He drew them forth, and heal?d, and bade me live.
Since then, with few associates, in remote
And silent woods I wander, far from those
My former partners of the peopled scene;
With few associates, and not wishing more.
Here much I ruminate, as much I may,
With other views of men and manners now
Than once, and others of a life to come.
I see that all are wand?rers, gone astray
Each in his own delusions; they are lost
In chace of fancied happiness, still wooed
And never won. Dream after dream ensues,
And still they dream that they shall still succeed,
And still are disappointed; rings the world
With the vain stir. I sum up half mankind,
And add two-thirds of the remainder half,
And find the total of their hopes and fears
Dreams, empty dreams. The million flit as gay
As if created only like the fly
That spreads his motley wings in th? eye of noon
To sport their season and be seen no more.

Book List:

Unhitching from the Crazy Train by Julie Sparkman

Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

?Unspoken Sermons: The Last Farthing? by George MacDonald

The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

The Personal Heresy by C. S. Lewis and E. M. Tillyard

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

Tramp for the Lord by Corrie Ten Boom

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Brook Kerith by George Moore

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On The Literary Life podcast today, Cindy Rollins, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks begin their series on The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. Today you are going to get a crash-course in Medievalism through Lewis? story, and we hope you will enjoy this book as much as our hosts do. Angelina kicks off the discussion even while sharing her commonplace quote, sharing some information about the epigraph and front matter. She gives us some historical context, both for where this books comes in Lewis? own timeline, as well as some ideas of the journey of the soul and medieval dream literature.

Thomas gives some background on Prudentius and his allegorical work The Psychomachia. Angelina goes into some comparisons between The Great Divorce and Dante?s Divine Comedy. Thomas talks about Nathanial Hawthorne?s short story The Celestial Railroad as a satire of Pilgrim?s Progress. Also, if you haven?t read and listened to E. M. Forster?s Celestial Omnibus, see Episode 17. As they get into discussing the Preface, Thomas give us some information on William Blake. We will be back next week with a discussion on Chapters 2-6.

Be sure to check out Thomas' upcoming mini-class on G. K. Chesterton taking place live from June 26th through July 7th. Register at HouseofHumaneLetters.com today!

Commonplace Quotes:

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern the falsity.

Simone Weil, from ?Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God?

A poet is not a man who says ?look at me?, but rather a man who points at something and says ?look at that.?

C. S. Lewis

No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it?no plan to retain this of that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.

George MacDonald, from ?Unspoken Sermons: The Last Farthing? MCMXIV

by Philip Larkin

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day?

And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat?s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word?the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Book List:

The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald

The Personal Heresy by C. S. Lewis and E. M. Tillyard

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Divine Comedy by Dante

Pilgrim?s Progress by John Bunyan

The Holy War by John Bunyan

Ourselves by Charlotte Mason

A Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

In this conversation, Angelina and Cindy talk all things related to the detective novel. Why do we love detective fiction so much? What are the qualities of a good detective novel? What is the history of detective fiction, and how did World War I bring about the Golden Age of the genre? Angelina and Cindy answer all these questions and more. Be sure to scroll down for links to all the books and authors mentioned in this episode! 

Commonplace Quotes:

Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry, for the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end. The Muses will submit to no marriage of convenience.

C. S. Lewis

One of these days I shall write a book in which two men are seen to walk down a cul de sac, and there is a shot, and one man is found murdered, and the other runs away with a gun in his hand, and after twenty chapters stinking with red herrings, it turns out that the man with the gun did it after all.

Dorothy L. Sayers The Listeners

by Walter De La Mare

?Is there anybody there?? said the Traveler,   
   Knocking on the moonlit door; 
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses   
   Of the forest?s ferny floor: 
And a bird flew up out of the turret,   
   Above the Traveler?s head: 
And he smote upon the door again a second time;   
   ?Is there anybody there?? he said. 
But no one descended to the Traveler;   
   No head from the leaf-fringed sill 
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,   
   Where he stood perplexed and still. 
But only a host of phantom listeners   
   That dwelt in the lone house then 
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight   
   To that voice from the world of men: 
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,   
   That goes down to the empty hall, 
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken   
   By the lonely Traveler?s call. 
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,   
   Their stillness answering his cry, 
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,   
   ?Neath the starred and leafy sky; 
For he suddenly smote on the door, even   
   Louder, and lifted his head:? 
?Tell them I came, and no one answered,   
   That I kept my word,? he said. 
Never the least stir made the listeners,   
   Though every word he spake 
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house   
   From the one man left awake: 
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,   
   And the sound of iron on stone, 
And how the silence surged softly backward,   
   When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Book List:

The World?s Last Night by C.S. Lewis 

The Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise, and Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers 

Nancy Drew #45: The Spider Sapphire Mystery by Carolyn Keene 

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

The Footsteps at the Lock by Ronald Knox

Agatha Christie 

Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe 

The Moonstone and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

The Albert Campion Series by Margery Allingham

The Roderick Alleyn Series by Ngaio Marsh

The Flavia de Luce Series by Allen Bradley

The Inspector Appleby Mystery Series by Michael Innes 

The Daughter of Time and Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey 

Murder Fantastical by Patricia Moyes

The Cormoran Strike Series by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

Alexander McCall Smith

Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Series by Laurie King

Chief Inspector Gamache Series by Louise Penny 

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Chronicles of Brother Cadfael Series by Ellis Peters

The Inspector Adam Dalgliesh Series by P.D. James 

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast with Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks, we have a very special episode for you. Our hosts are joined by guests Dan Bunting and Anthony Dodgers, both of whom are pastors, for a discussion on why pastors should read fiction books. Dan is also host of the the Reading the Psalms podcast. Angelina starts off the conversation by asking why these men would prioritize taking literature classes. Anthony shares about his own literary life journey and how rediscovering literature has helped him personally. Dan talks about the book club that he and a couple of his pastor friends have and what kinds of books they read together. They discuss many other deep topics and crucial questions that we hope will be encouraging and thought-provoking to everyone who listens to and shares this episode.

If you want to get the replays of the 2022 Back to School Conference, ?Education: Myths and Legends? with special guest speakers Lynn Bruce and Caitlin Beauchamp, along with our hosts Cindy Rollins, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks, you can learn more at Morning Time for Moms.

Commonplace Quotes:

If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.

C. S. Lewis, from ?Our English Syllabus?

How am I a hog and me both?

Flannery O?Connor

He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times.

Freidrich Schiller

Whoever wants to become a Christian, must first become a poet.

St. Porphyrios of Kafsokalivia

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in press or pulpit, who warn us that we are ?relapsing into paganism?. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan?t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity ?by the same door as in she went?, and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past, and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.

C. S. Lewis, from ?De Descriptione Temporum? A Boy in Church

by Robert Graves

?Gabble-gabble, . . . brethren, . . . gabble-gabble!? My window frames forest and heather. I hardly hear the tuneful babble, Not knowing nor much caring whether The text is praise or exhortation, Prayer or thanksgiving, or damnation. Outside it blows wetter and wetter, The tossing trees never stay still. I shift my elbows to catch better The full round sweep of heathered hill. The tortured copse bends to and fro In silence like a shadow-show. The parson?s voice runs like a river Over smooth rocks, I like this church: The pews are staid, they never shiver, They never bend or sway or lurch. ?Prayer,? says the kind voice, ?is a chain That draws down Grace from Heaven again.? I add the hymns up, over and over, Until there?s not the least mistake. Seven-seventy-one. (Look! there?s a plover! It?s gone!) Who?s that Saint by the lake? The red light from his mantle passes Across the broad memorial brasses. It?s pleasant here for dreams and thinking, Lolling and letting reason nod, With ugly serious people linking Sad prayers to a forgiving God . . . . But a dumb blast sets the trees swaying With furious zeal like madmen praying. Book List:

Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh

Asterix Comics by René Goscinny

Tin Tin by Herge

Sigrid Undset

Giants in the Earth by Ole Rolvaag

Roald Dahl

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L?Engle

John Donne

George Herbert

The Complete Stories by Flannery O?Connor

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

Graham Greene

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse edited by Donald Davie

Waiting on the Word by Malcolm Guite

Word in the Wilderness by Malcolm Guite

Neil Gaiman

Bill Bryson

Ursula Le Guin

Terry Pratchett

Reflections on the Psalms by C. S. Lewis

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

This week on The Literary Life podcast, our hosts Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are joined by their podcast producer Kiel Lemon to chat about her own literary life. Kiel and her husband, along with their two children, live in West Virginia where they homeschool and enjoy the outdoors together whenever they can. After sharing commonplace quotes and how Angelina and Cindy met Kiel, they dig in to her background in reading. They also talk at some length about making use of audio books and speak to the concern parents have about audio versus physical books.

Kiel gives a shout out to her high school English teacher for giving her a good foundation in the classics and poetry. She also shares some of her early attempts to give herself a literary education in early adulthood, and Angelina asks Kiel why she was so drawn to old books. They also discuss the challenges of a dry time she went through when she wasn?t reading much at all and how to get out of a reading slump. Some other topics they touch on are disciplined versus whimsical reading, keeping multiple books at the same time, going through the AmblesideOnline curriculum with children, and more.

To find out more about Thomas? summer class on G. K. Chesterton and sign up for that, go to houseofhumaneletters.com. To register for Cindy?s summer discipleship session, visit morningtimeformoms.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed??Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power?

Annie Dillard, from The Abundance: Narrative Essays New and Old

My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.

Jane Austen

A man living at the bottom of a well will think the sky is small.

Han Yu

Recent psychological research, together with a number of other contributory factors, has influenced us to emphasise?possibly to over-emphasise?the importance of the unconscious in determining our actions and opinions. Our confidence in such faculties as will and judgement has been undermined, and in collapsing has taken with it a good deal of our interest in ourselves as responsible individuals.

Dorothy L. Sayers, from Introductory Papers on Dante The Land of Story-Books

by Robert Louis Stevenson

At evening when the lamp is lit,
Around the fire my parents sit;
They sit at home and talk and sing,
And do not play at anything.

Now, with my little gun, I crawl
All in the dark along the wall,
And follow round the forest track
Away behind the sofa back.

There, in the night, where none can spy,
All in my hunter?s camp I lie,
And play at books that I have read
Till it is time to go to bed.

These are the hills, these are the woods,
These are my starry solitudes;
And there the river by whose brink
The roaring lions come to drink.

I see the others far away
As if in firelit camp they lay,
And I, like to an Indian scout,
Around their party prowled about.

So when my nurse comes in for me,
Home I return across the sea,
And go to bed with backward looks
At my dear land of Story-books.

Books Mentioned:

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

The Real Mother Goose by Blanche Fisher Wright

The Odyssey by Homer

Howards End by E. M. Forster

Cormoran Strike Series by Robert Galbraith

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge

Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis

?Kate Crackernuts? retold by Joseph Jacobs

Beowulf trans. by Burton Raffell

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Bess Streeter Aldrich

Gene Stratton-Porter

Poems That Touch the Heart ed. by A. L. Alexander

Black Plumes by Margery Allingham

To the Far Blue Mountains by Louis L?Amour

The Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoire by Louis L?Amour

Redwall Series by Brian Jacques

Continuing the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

Kidnapped by Robert Lewis Stevenson

Support The Literary Life:

Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the ?Friends and Fellows Community? on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support!

Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy?s own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let?s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB