Episode 31: Our Year in Reading

In this last episode of 2019, our Literary Life podcast hosts chat all about their past year in books, as well as what they hope to read in the coming year. Cindy, Angelina and Thomas begin by sharing some commonplace quotes from books they read in 2019. They discuss their strategies for planning their reading goals and how they curate their "to be read" lists. Each host also share some highlights from their year in books.

Angelina then introduces The Literary Life Podcast 20 for 2020 Reading Challenge. She talks about how to approach this reading challenge. Then our hosts talk a little about each category in the challenge and give some of their possible book picks for 2020. Cindy mentions a list of Shakespeare's plays in chronological order. She also has a list of "Books for Cultivating Honorable Boys."

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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.

Book List:

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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

Susan Hill

P. D. James

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

Wendell Berry

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

Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone

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

Elizabeth Goudge

Miss Read

Ellis Peters

Edith Pargeter

George Eliot

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

The Oxford Book of Essays

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

Becoming by Michelle Obama

Abigail by Magda Szabo

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Connect with Us:

Find Angelina at  https://angelinastanford.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at https://cindyrollins.net, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/

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