Thought courtesy of Flannery O'Connor's essays on writing: it is the artist's job to look at the world and write what she sees, whether that is a mirror of society or connections between human action and some greater truth. She cannot write what people ask her for, nor what social pressures attempt to impose on her, but what she actually sees. That ( Read more... )

( Cry, the Beloved Country )

There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;
O for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.

--Henry Vaughan, from “The Night”

( Learning to Walk in the Dark )

I've read MacDonald's work throughout my life, from his fairy tales and Phantastes through his realistic novels and even his sermons and essays. I hadn't read Lilith yet (I think I picked it up in a library once and was put off by the creepy atmosphere). I totally thought it was written before Phantastes, but the Internet tells me it was written ( Read more... )

Everyone talks about Evelyn Waugh, although usually they're discussing Brideshead Revisited. But I've wanted to read his fictional biography of Saint Helena ever since our rector put the prayer Waugh had her pray to the Magi in our Epiphany order of service. The prayer has a good deal more punch after reading the whole story-and I say that as ( Read more... )

I've been reading, I just haven't been getting reviews posted! Here's one to hopefully kick off three or four in a row.

( Unclean )

Hello, fellow fans!

I won some stuff in a raffle recently which I don't really need, and my local fan friends weren't particularly interested--perhaps because it's all stuff about The Pretender.

I have two copies of a new tie-in novel, The Pretender: Rebirth, by Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle. Haven't read it yet (might do so ( Read more... )

All right, it’s far past this time of year, but I forgot to copy the 2016 list over to LJ when I posted it on Facebook in January.

I read only eight of my 10 Books to Read in 2015, and the two I missed are moving to this year’s list. No rereads this year--I’ll have my review of LotR reread up in a while, I just finished it. The books on this list ( Read more... )

I'd been meaning to read Rachel Held Evans' A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband 'Master' for a while, but never got around to it. I think this was partly because I didn't want to revisit some of the stricter doctrines I grew up around and partly because I ( Read more... )

Thank you to my church friend Kristin for recommending The Glass Castle to me ( Read more... )