Episode 136: Two for ’22 Reading Challenge Check-In
This week on The Literary Life podcast our hosts give an update on their progress with the “Two for ’22” Literary Life Reading Challenge. Angelina, Cindy and Thomas share their commonplace quotes, then begin going over each category and talking about their progress and the various books they have chosen so far. Scroll down in the show notes for all the book titles mentioned and affiliate links to them on Amazon.
Download the adult reading challenge PDF here, and the kids’ reading challenge PDF here. The Literary Life Commonplace Books published by Blue Sky Daisies are always available for purchase, as well!
Join us for the 2022 Back to School Conference, “Education: Myths and Legends” happening live online this August 1st-6th. Our special guest speakers will be Lynn Bruce and Caitlin Beauchamp, along with our hosts Cindy Rollins, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks. Learn more and register today at Morning Time for Moms.
Check out Episode 3: The Importance of the Detective Novel.
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Commonplace Quotes:
Nobody seems great to his dwarf.
Par Lagerkvist
What is true of nature is also true of freedom. The half-baked Rousseau-ism in which most of us have been brought up has given us a subconscious notion that the free act is the untrained act. But of course, freedom has nothing to do with the lack of training. We are not free to move until we have learned ot walk. We are not free to express ourselves musically until we have learned music. We are not capable of free thought unless we can think. Similarly, free speech cannot have anything to do with the mumbling and grousing of the ego. Free speech is cultivated and precise speech, which means that there are far too many people who are neither capable of it nor would know if they had lost it. A group of individuals who retain the power and desire of genuine communication is a society. An aggregate of egos is a mob.
Northrop Frye
He had had a choice, after all. The army had been keen to keep him, even with half his leg missing. Friends of friends had offered everything from management roles in the close protection industry to business partnerships, but the itch to detect, solve, and reimpose order on the moral universe could not be extinguished in him. He doubted it ever would be.
Robert Galbraith
The Composer
by W. H. Auden
All the others translate: the painter sketches A visible world to love or reject; Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches The images out that hurt and connect. From Life to Art by painstaking adaption Relying on us to cover the rift; Only your notes are pure contraption, Only your song is an absolute gift. Pour out your presence, O delight, cascading The falls of the knee and the weirs of the spine, Our climate of silence and doubt invading; You, alone, alone, O imaginary song, Are unable to say an existence is wrong, And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.
Book List:
The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist
The Well-Tempered Critic by Northrop Frye
Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason
Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye
Lethal White by Robert Galbraith
Poet’s Corner by John Lithgow
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
The Wise Woman by George MacDonald
The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris
Phantastes by George MacDonald
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott
Evelina by Fanny Burney
The Boys by Ron and Clint Howard
The Most Reluctant Convert by David C. Downing
Dorothy L. Sayers by Colin Duriez
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
An Old Man’s Love by Anthony Trollope
She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare
Timon of Athens by Williams Shakespeare
The Trojan Women by Euripedes
Antigone by Sophocles
The Rehearsal by George Villiers
The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis by Jason M. Baxter
The Oxford Inklings by Colin Duriez
Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks
Wintering by Katherine May
The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Aeneid by Virgil
A Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell
The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards
DC Smith Investigation Series by Peter Grainger
Nero Wolfe Series by Rex Stout
Simon Serrailler Series by Susan Hill
The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley
The Leavenworth Case by Anna Catherine Green
Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley
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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!
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