Fiction

  • Novels

    Revisiting Old Friends

    I’ve been immersed in Elizabeth Goudge for months now, and I wanted to pause and reflect a bit… First, why have I been reading (and rereading) her books? And second, what attracts and…

  • Novels

    The First Men in the Moon

    I read H.G. Wells’s First Men in the Moon while creating a course on C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in Lewis’s Ransom trilogy. Lewis was a fan of…

  • water droplet on green leaf
    Fiction

    Leaf by Niggle

    I struggle to find the time to write about my reading these days. I’ve been rereading, as always (Safely Home, Love Thy Body), and reading (The Mabinogian, Le Morte d’Arthur, The Inklings and…

  • Christianity,  Current Events,  Novels

    Be not conformed

    Yesterday, I revisited my favorite discussion of Lewis’s space trilogy, David Downing’s Planets in Peril. A book-length critical study, it draws together numerous perspectives on the novels, includes a lengthy bibliography, and gives…

  • opened book on tree root
    Fiction

    Book Review: How It Went

    As I read Wendell Berry’s latest collection of short stories How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership, I thought often of a passage from his Memory of Old Jack.…

  • Novels

    Klara and the Sun

    Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel probing our ambivalent relationship with artificial intelligence reminded me of something a favorite college professor once said about Emily Dickinson’s poems: she places her subjects under a microscope and examines…

  • Fiction

    The Bronze Ring

    This morning, before anyone else was up, my Kindle Fire went berserk. I was checking news headlines when suddenly an audio clip began playing. I tried to turn down the volume, then turn…

  • Nonfiction,  Novels

    Recent Reading: 6 Books

    It’s tough to recall what all I’ve read since April, when I last posted on books. I’ll begin with Hollowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation, by Jeremy S. Adams. Written by…