( 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 )

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... )

As a working woman, I've had Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead hyped to me with great enthusiasm. That's probably why I didn't bother to read it until now.

( I am about to hype it to you, as well )

Once upon a time, Robert Jordan's A Wheel of Time drew me in and then drowned me in the bog of its over-serious men, caricatured women and soap-opera fantasy plotting. After I gave up on it, I backed off sword-and-sorcery for years, and when friends mentioned A Song of Ice and Fire, I politely declined to read it. Especially when they said it had ( Read more... )