Episode 307: “Best of” – Our Year in Reading, Ep. 31
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This week on The Literary Life podcast, we are dipping back into the archives to bring you a delightful conversation from 2019 in which our Literary Life podcast hosts chatted all about their past year in books, as well as what they hoped to read in the coming year. Cindy, Angelina and Thomas began by sharing some commonplace quotes from books they read in 2019. They discussed their strategies for planning their reading goals and how they curate their “to be read” lists. Each of our hosts also shared some highlights from their year in books.
Angelina then introduced The Literary Life Podcast 20 for 2020 Reading Challenge. She talked about how to approach this reading challenge. Then our hosts talked a little about each category in the challenge and gave some of their possible book picks for the challenge. Cindy mentioned a list of Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order. She also has a list of “Books for Cultivating Honorable Boys.”
Happening now–the House of Humane Letters Christmas sale! Head over to the website to peruse the discounted webinars and mini-classes on sale, already discounted, no coupon code needed.
Don’t forget to check out this coming year’s annual Literary Life Online Conference, happening January 23-30, 2026, “The Letter Killeth, but the Spirit Quickeneth: Reading Like a Human”. Our speakers will be Dr. Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, Dr. Anne Phillips, and, of course, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks.
Commonplace Quotes:
…Thus we sit, myself/ thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s/ perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich/ it is to love the world.
Mary Oliver, from “The Sweetness of Dogs”
The progress of manners and knowledge has an influence on the stage and will in time destroy both tragedy and comedy. The ghosts in Shakespeare will become obsolete.
William Hazlitt, from Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays
Along with your interest in the tale of “The Snow Maiden,” I am reminded of you spent as a child chasing fairies in the woods near our home. As I recall, you slept more than one night in those great oak trees, and when mother found you the next morning you would swear you had seen fairies that flew like butterflies and lit up the night like lightning bugs. I remember with some shame that the rest of us teased you about seeing such spirits, but now my own grandchildren chase similar fancies, and I do know discourage them. In my old age I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.
Eowyn Ivey, from The Snow Child
Books:
Winter Hours by Mary Oliver
Rules for the Dance by Mary Oliver
Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays by William Hazlitt
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser
Miracles by C. S. Lewis
Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
Letters from Father Christmas by J. R. Tolkein
Leaf by Niggle by J. R. Tolkein
Time and Chance by Sharon Kay Penman
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
The Home of the Gentry by Ivan Turgenev
The Killer and the Slain by Hugh Walpole
Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy
The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham
The Crane Wife by Sumiko Yagawa
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
The White Company by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
The Bacchae by Euripides
Prince Albert by A. N. Wilson
Marie Antoinette by Hilaire Belloc
Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle
How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster
A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland
How the Heather Looks by Joan Bodger
Silence by Shusako Endo
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Paradise Regained by John Milton
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathon Swift
Candide by Voltaire
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
Lyrical Ballads by Coleridge and Wordsworth
The Hundredfold by Anthony Esolen
Motherland by Sally Thomas
The Autobiograhy of a Cad by A. G. Macdonell
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
The Oxford Book of Essays compiled by John Gross
How to Travel with a Salmon by Umberto Eco
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Savage Messiah by Jim Proser
Abigail by Magda Szabo
In Memoriam
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.
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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.
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