How Books Help Put us Back Together Again

Children's author, Katherine Paterson, reflects on her love for good literature:

And when you close Homer, there are the books of Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad, and great fat volumes of Tolstoy.  There is the Bible, perhaps the most over prescribed and least taken of any.  There is Flannery O’Connor and Anne Tyler.  There is William Shakespeare and Jacob Bronowski.  There is The Yearling and A Tale of Two Cities.  There is The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows.  There is Ramona the Brave and Where the Wild Things Are.  I have only begun to name what I especially love.  There are countless others - really good books.  Good or even great because they make the right connections.  They pull together for us a world that is falling apart.  They are the words that integrate us, stretch us, comfort and heal us.  They are the words that mirror the Word of creation, bringing order out of chaos.

(p. 238 from her book of essays The Invisible Child)

Blessings,

A Quiet Neighborhood by George MacDonald

It's been over 25 years since I binged on George MacDonald's adult novels so it was a joy to revisit this favorite author in August. C.S. Lewis said he never wrote anything that wasn't somehow connected to his love of George MacDonald and I enjoyed catching glimpses in this book of ideas that were later fleshed out by Lewis in his own works.

Henry Walton is a young vicar who has been assigned to a new parish. He encounters many wonderful characters and a few despicable ones. Some of his parishioners have been nursing hurts for many years and Walton does his best to point them to Christ who is their Healer. He experiences various successes and failures along the way. The plot is thickened with a few mysteries and a possible love interest. Plus the writing is wonderful.

A description of Mrs. Rogers: Beside him stood his old woman in a portentous bonnet. Beneath the gay yellow ribbons appeared a dusky old wrinkled face with a pair of keen black eyes, where the best beauty - that of lovingkindness - triumphed. 

The vicar reflects on his love for books: I am very fond of books. Do not mistake me. I do not mean that I love reading. I hope I do. But I delight in seeing books about me, books even of which there seems to be no prospect that I shall have time to read a single chapter. I confess that if they are nicely bound, so as to glow and shine in the firelight, I like them ever so much better. I suspect that by the time books (which ought to be loved for the truth that is in them) come to be loved as articles of furniture, the mind has gone through a process which the miser's mind goes through - that of passing from the respect of money because of what it can do, to the love of money because it is money. I have not reached the furniture stage, and I do not think I ever shall. I would rather burn them all. 

There were several passages on the benefits of adversity: How often do we look to God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to Him because we have nowhere else to go. And then we learn that the storms of life have driven us not upon the rocks but into the desired haven. 

The book is based on MacDonald's Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood. Editor Dan Hamilton does a wonderful job of removing some of the excesses of Victorian fiction while at the same time retaining the beautiful language. He divides up the original Annals into three novels of which A Quiet Neighborhood is the first. I look forward to reading the others.

Blessings,