From My Commonplace: On Living Books

During our rather lazy holiday-at-home week between Christmas and New Years, I read and enjoyed Christopher Morley's two lighthearted books about the adventures of the eccentric bookseller Roger Mifflin: Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop.   Good fun and recommended if you are looking for some light reading.  In among the adventures, Mifflin likes to wax eloquent about good literature.  I can't help but think that Charlotte Mason would approve of him:

 

 

"If you let yourself think you are satisfied with husks, you'll have no appetite left for the real grain."

 

"I insist books are not absolutely dead things: they are as lively as those fabulous dragon's teeth, and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men."

~Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

 

(and thanks to AO, I got the reference there. J)

 

"A good book ought to have something simple about it.  And like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it.  A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much."

~Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels

 

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In My Bookbag This Week:
 

Devotional: Revelation, with a commentary The Final Word (Wilmshurst)

Theological or Christian Living: Ourselves (Mason)

Book Discussion Group Titles: Inferno (Dante), Idylls of the King (Tennyson), The Everlasting Man  (Chesterton)

On Education: The Abolition of Man (Lewis), How to Read a Book (Adler)

Topic of Special Interest: The New World (Churchill)

Novel/Biography/Memoir: Northanger Abbey (Austen)

Read-Alouds with the Children: Little House on the Prairie (Wilder), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Lewis), Eric Liddell: Something Greater Than Gold (Benge)

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