Episode 117: Our 2021 Literary Life Reading Wrap-up

On this week’s episode of The Literary Life podcast, Angelina, Cindy and Thomas share a wrap up of their year in reading–their favorite books of the year, their most hated books read in 2021, 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.

Download the Two for ’22 adult reading challenge PDF here, and the kids’ reading challenge PDF here.

The Literary Life Commonplace Books published by Blue Sky Daisies are back with new covers for 2022! Also, check out the Christmas sale at HouseofHumaneLetters.com!

Coming up on The Literary Life podcast in the new year, we have Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream coming up in January and after that, Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis. Then we will be reading The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times later in the year. Our children’s classic novel this year will be The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

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:

Hallelujah: Cultivating Advent Traditions with Handel’s Messiah by Cindy Rollins

The Educated Imagination by Northrup 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

Anthony Horowitz

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

Elizabeth Goudge

Assignment in Brittany by Helen Macinnes

Look Back with Love by Dodie Smith

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

The Atonement by Ian McEwan

Desmond MacCarthay

David Cecil

Letters by 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

Neil Gaiman

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 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!

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