Episode 55: 20 for 2020 Reading Challenge Check-In

Welcome to our 20 for 2020 Reading Challenge Check-In episode! Before we dig into the content, Angelina announces Thomas’ next webinar coming up this summer, “The Fable: From Aesop to Brer Rabbit.” Sign up at HouseofHumaneLetters.com to find out when registration opens!

After a brief discussion on the merits of reading fiction, our hosts begin listing what they have read in each category of the 20 for 2020 Reading Challenge so far. This episode is brimming over with book references, so be sure to scroll down to the book list any titles you might have missed!

Enter our 20 for 2020 Reading Challenge giveaway! Take a photo of your reading stack or your printed list with titles you are reading and post it to Instagram or Facebook with the tag #20for2020LitLife. We will announce our winners on the next episode of the podcast! We can’t wait to see what you are reading for the challenge!

Listen to The Literary Life:

Commonplace Quotes:

To know God therefore as He is, is to frame the most beautiful idea in all worlds. He delighteth in our happiness more than we, and is of all others the most lovely object.
Thomas Traherne

And often my father would read us things that he loved, without a single word of ‘explanation’. Of these the Ancient Mariner stands out beyond the rest. O happy living things! Why do people murder them by explanations?
M. V. Hughes

The mere fact that a story is a work of fiction, however, does not prevent its having a deep and significant truth of its own. We find, then, that the distinction between true stories and works of pure imagination, though convenient, is not quite essential. For fiction may be just as true, in the higher sense of the word, as history, or travel or any other record of actual experience.
George Lyman Kittredge

I Remember, I Remember

by Thomas Hood

I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day,
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!

I remember, I remember,
The roses, red and white,
The vi’lets, and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,—
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember,
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now,
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow!

I remember, I remember,
The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heav’n
Than when I was a boy.

Book List:

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

Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne

The Mother Tongue by George Lyman Kittredge

The Darkest Hour (film)

The Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare

Two Gentlemen of Verona by Shakespeare

The Comedy of Errors by Shakespeare

Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare

The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare

MacBeth by Shakespeare

A Question of Proof by Nicholas Blake

Simon Serraille Mystery Series by Susan Hill

Ian Rutledge Mystery Series by Charles Todd

The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill

Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliot Chaze

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasures of the Snow by Patricia St. John

Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Koshka’s Tales: Stories from Russia by James Mayhew

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

Munich by Robert Harris

Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

Taras Bulba by Nicolai Gogol

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers

Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling

The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon

Penhally by Caroline Gordon

The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie

Jeremy Taylor by Hugh Williamson

Holy Living and Dying by Jeremy Taylor

Swinburne by Harold Nicolson

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon

The Terrible Speed of Mercy by Jonathan Rogers

The Bark of the Bog Owl by Jonathan Rogers

The Path of Loneliness by Elisabeth Elliot

Reflections on the Psalms by C. S. Lewis

Anatomy of Criticism by Northrup Frye

Bandersnatch by Diana Pavlac Glyer

The Company They Keep by Diana Pavlac Glyer

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

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki

Ibn Fadlan and The Land of Darkness by Ibn Fadlan

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima

An Anthology of Invective and Abuse by Hugh Kingsmill

Penmarric by Susan Howatch

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spencer

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

The Clouds by Aristophanes

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor

Love in the Void by Simone Weil

The Fine Art of Reading by David Cecil

Abigail by Magda Szabo

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaula

The Turmoil (Growth Trilogy #1) by Booth Tarkington

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge

To Bless The Space Between Us by John O’Donohue

The Word in the Wilderness by Malcolm Guite

Tenebrea by Geoffrey Hill

Along Came a Spider by James Patterson

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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