A Christmas Book

By -
Not the right book, but it's excerpted.
A Christmas Book, by Elizabeth Goudge

I really like Elizabeth Goudge; I wish my library had more of her books.  And a couple of the ones it does have are anthologies of bits taken out of larger books.  This is one of them, but there were at least some stand-alone stories as well.

There were two short stories, several excerpts from longer novels, and one account of the birth of Christ that seems to be taken from a longer work (perhaps for older children?) that probably covered the entire life of Christ.  The short stories were very nice, and I admit that I skipped some of the excerpts if it seemed like they wouldn't make enough sense, but I read some of them too--I quite enjoyed the ones from City of Bells and Pilgrim's Inn, which I've read.  Then the story of Jesus' birth was very well-done; I'd let my kids read it.

Some are funny, some are melancholy, most revolve around the lives of churchpeople (rather like Barsetshire books that way).  Though the excerpts annoy me a bit, I can see where if you were a big Goudge fan and had already read all of her books, you'd love to be able to visit your favorite Christmas scenes.

This was a lovely book to read at the beginning of the Christmas season.

Comments

  1. hopeinbrazilDecember 19, 2012 at 3:38 AM

    I am a Goudge fan and didn't know about this collection. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I popped in because I heard you were connected to the Classic Children's Literature Challenge.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more