What I Read and Watched in October 2023

Our rented apartment has no television so I continue to get a remarkable amount of reading done. The books I read in order of most-to-least appealing were 1) The Bridge on San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (simply astonishing in its breadth of understanding of the human condition), 2) The King's Equal by Katherine Paterson (a delightful fairy tale with a strong, yet feminine heroine), 3) Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorenson (1957 Newbery winner), 4) Reading for the Love of God by Jessica Hooten Wilson, 5) When the English Fall by David Williams (dystopia in an Amish community), 6) On Asking God Why by Elisabeth Elliot (collected essays), 7) Out of a Far Country (non-fiction redemption story), 8) The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart (I love her suspense novels, but this one droned on for 150 pages before my heart rate even mildly accelerated.)

The movies that I watched on my computer were: The African Queen (via Hoopla), which was a fun classic that my husband and I both enjoyed. On YouTube I started to watch a Hallmark mystery called The Curious Caterer, but turned it off after 5 painful minutes of poor acting, banal script and odd situations. The Carrot Cake Murder is a sequel of sorts to the Murder, She Baked movies that I've raved about, but was so badly done that I barely hung on until the end. Finally, I watched another Hallmark mystery (via Frndly TV), The Dancing Detective. The male character was over-the-top ridiculous, but he kept me laughing. Plus, the footage of Malta was breathtaking. 

I linked to the books so you could read more about them, but I read all of them from library, thrift store or loaned copies. Hopefully, so can you. 

Blessings,

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Lovers of great literature will revel in Surprised by Joy, the biography of a man who was led to salvation by his reading diet. The progression of “great books” in Lewis’ life worked on him like drops of water on a stone. Eventually their Christian themes made a groove in his heart that he could no longer ignore.

The “joy” he writes of is not happiness as the world defines it, but the pang of inconsolable longing (p. 62) This longing for joy led Lewis to finally embrace theism and, soon afterwards, Christianity. Interestingly, once he became a Christian, he no long sought after those stabs of joy as before. He still had moments of intense feelings (“tastes of heaven”), but he no longer idolized those experiences. He took them as moments of grace pointing to an eternal reality yet to be experienced.

The book recounts his miserable days as a school boy, his difficult relationship with his father, his first friendships, and the heart change brought about by books.

In his penultimate chapter called “Checkmate”, he writes: All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course, it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence, had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete – Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire – all seemed a little thin… It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. They were all entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books.

One of my favorite books of 2023.

Blessings,