I like to sing. I can’t sing parts, but I can usually keep to the melody (if not on key). But I can never remember the right words. So I make my joyful noise. And I mix up the lyrics and verses and put them in the wrong spot in the song altogether. And as…
Sometimes the biggest truths come in the smallest packages. Often some of the most important stories are found in children’s books. It’s no wonder He told us to become like little children. “He chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27). Always Plenty is a little story written for…
What’s not to love about tales of little people? John Peterson’s The Littles. Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. And of course, E.B. White’s famous little mouse adopted by big people, Stuart Little. But The Tales of Larkin by Alan W. Harris are our family’s favorite. The Larkin aren’t just little people. These books are about little people with a big…
She should have known it would be a storybook romance. From the time she learned to read, she immersed herself in the best of love stories, fiction and non. From Little Women and The First Four Years to Anne’s House of Dreams and The Twenty-Fourth of June, she knew what it should look like when The…
I’m going to pretend that it is a sign of a balanced literary diet for the list of books I’ve been reading this month to be entirely eclectic. There’s not a bit of rhyme or reason to the titles below except that I’ve enjoyed them lately. (And their colors coordinate beautifully. A fact I just…
It’s that time of year when it gets dark before dinner and I just want to curl up with a good book the moment the dishes are done and the kids are in bed. At this stage of motherhood, I’m running low on sleep and short on time, so my favorite reads aren’t thick tomes…
It seems that each year it gets harder. The calendar gets full and the days get fuller. All this hustle and bustle in a season that is supposed to be about waiting and watching–for the King Who came and is coming. I got out the Christmas books early this year. An ever-changing stack of them is on…
I like old things. Old furniture, old books, old authors. Austen, Bronte, Alcott, Montgomery, Stratton-Porter, Wodehouse. We’re well on our way to having a personal library stocked with the finest in vintage fiction. It isn’t often that I find a “new” author I like. It is even more rare when I find a modern-day author…
We were the couple buying vintage children’s books on our honeymoon. We had to laughingly explain to the clerk at the used book store that we didn’t have any children yet; we just liked children’s books. Nine years and four children later, our collection of children’s books has grown exponentially. And even though we may choose the board books…
They say that “September is the new January.” Perhaps that would be why September found me with a stack of non-fiction books sitting on my nightstand. With a new homeschool year underway and an ever-changing host of responsibilities to juggle, I knew I needed a big dose of perspective. And it had to come my way long…
As a farmer’s wife, the idea of summer reading programs always makes me laugh. Summer on the farm rarely has anything remotely resembling leisure time. And since a certain little person is sleeping so many hours at night, I don’t have much middle-of-the-night reading time either (you won’t hear me complaining about that). But thanks…
I spent six weeks on bed rest this spring. It should have been the perfect time to read that stack of books I’d been waiting for a chance to devour. But I couldn’t concentrate on any form of literature, fiction or non! It took me ages to finish just one title (that alone should have been…
The End.
The End.