Episode 257: “Best of” Series — Our Literary Lives of 2021
On this week’s episode of The Literary Life podcast, we bring you an episode from our vault in which Angelina, Cindy and Thomas share a wrap up of their 2021 year in reading–their favorite books of the year, their most hated books read, and how they each did with covering the categories of the #LitLife192021 Reading Challenge. They also talk a little about how they will be approaching their reading for next year.
If you are looking for a reading challenge for the coming year, you can look back at our catalogue of previous challenges and pick your favorite one to follow in 2025!
You can check out Cindy’s Christmas sale at MorningTimeforMoms.com. This is the time to purchase any of the pre-recorded classes you’ve had your eye on at HouseofHumaneLetters.com because the Christmas sale is on now through December 31, 2024. For those who want a way to keep track of their HHL webinars, conferences, and mini-classes, here is a handy spreadsheet to help you out! Just copy the document into your own files, and you can edit it as you please!
Listen to The Literary Life:
Commonplace Quotes:
Literature’s world is a concrete human world of immediate experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he uses abstract ideas. The novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments.
Northrop Frye
The moon is the only one of the heavenly bodies that, whilst rising resplendently like the other luminaries, nevertheless changes and waxes and wanes as we do.
Malcolm Guite
I almost think that the same skin
For one without has two or three within.
Lord Byron, from “Don Juan”
The Poetry of Shakespeare
by George Meredith
Picture some Isle smiling green ‘mid the white-foaming ocean; –
Full of old woods, leafy wisdoms, and frolicsome fays;
Passions and pageants; sweet love singing bird-like above it;
Life in all shapes, aims, and fates, is there warm’d by one great
human heart.
Book List:
Amazon affiliate links follow.
Hallelujah: Cultivating Advent Traditions with Handel’s Messiah by Cindy Rollins
The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye
Faith, Hope, and Poetry by Malcolm Guite
David’s Crown by Malcolm Guite
Savior of the World by Charlotte Mason
The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side by Agatha Christie
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Hiking Through by Paul Stutzman
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
Wintering by Katherine May
The Narnian by Alan Jacobs
In the Year of Our Lord 1943 by Alan Jacobs
Assignment in Brittany by Helen Macinnes
Look Back with Love by Dodie Smith
The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells
The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Odd Women by George Gissing
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
If Walls Could Talk by Lucy Worsley
Corsets and Codpieces by Karen Bowman
*The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall (not recommended)
*Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt (not recommended)
MacBeth by William Shakespeare
As the Indians Left It by Robert Sparks Walker
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth
A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and A World War by Joseph Laconte
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
Mythos by Stephen Fry
Nina Balatka by Anthony Trollope
Christmas at Thompson Hall by Anthony Trollope
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Connect with Us:
You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/.
You can find Cindy Rollins at MorningTimeforMoms.com, over on her podcast The New Mason Jar, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. You can also check out her Patreon for additional content.
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
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