Category: Favorite Authors

Autumn Reading

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 2 Comments

We are at the start of my favorite season. I love the golden light, the crisp evenings and mornings, the bright blue sky, the sounds of birds flying south, and the smells of bonfires and falling leaves.

My reading in the fall tends to be focused on reflective novels and books that warm my heart and soul. I’m always seeking new titles to read, but in autumn, I do a lot more rereading. Here are some of my favorite books to read this time of year.

Persuasion by Jane Austen – My favorite Austen novel, Persuasion is perfect for reading in the autumn as it talks about second chances later in life. I like to reread this one every few years and always in October.

September by Rosamund Pilcher – The title speaks for itself as it is set in September, but I love that most of the characters are in middle life, thinking about their lives, their choices, and where to go from here.

Possession by A.S. Byatt – An intellectual mystery, this novel follows a set of scholars as they seek the truth of the relationship between two Victorian poets – for those who enjoy an academic puzzle and unraveling historical mysteries

Anne of the Island or Anne of Windy Poplars by L.M. Montgomery – School stories always seem appropriate to read at the start of a school year and either of these work for that although Anne of Windy Poplars seems a bit more “fallish”.

Autumn Story by Jill Barklem – If you have not yet read any of Jill Barklem’s stories about the mice in the hedgerow over the various seasons, go immediately to your library and pick one up. The drawings are enchanting and the stories sweet without being cloying. The tale reads quickly but you will want to pour over the illustrations to look at all of the details of country English life.

Vittoria Cottage by D.E. Stevenson – This title by Stevenson is another book about second chances, this time for a woman in middle life with grown children.

Fresh From the Country by Miss Read – Another school story, this one describes the life of a brand new teacher. Miss Read’s Fairacre Series is also great for school-story lovers.

Pilgrim’s Inn by Elizabeth Goudge – Many of Elizabeth Goudge’s books are thoughtful and reflective, but this one is a favorite of mine with many descriptions of cozy home scenes.

Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struthers – Always good for a reread but especially great in fall and winter, each essay covers a small portion of Mrs. Miniver’s life in a way that can lead you to think more closely about the ordinary things in yours.

Books I’ve read that would make perfect fall reads:

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield – This gothic tale about an old woman who wants to tell the truth of her life after many years of hiding it away is perfect for fall reading.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen – Austen pokes fun at gothic tales while telling one of her own. Delightful.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving – The classic story of Ichabod Crane and his night ride is spooky without being horror.

Early Days by Miss Read – Miss Read recounts her early childhood in this lovely memoir.

Books that are on my to-read list that would fit into fall reading:

Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope – I’m slowly reading through Trollope’s Barchestershire series, and anything by him has one thinking about the human condition and the choices we make.

September Moon by John Moore – I found a copy of this after reading about it at a bookish Instagram account I follow. It’s set in hops-picking time in England, a time I’ve always been intrigued by after reading about it other books. I’m looking forward to picking this up soon.

The Headmistress by Angela Thirkell – Anything by Angela Thirkell is good cozy reading and being about a school is an added bonus.

The Last Bookshop in London by Madeleine Martin – This book about a bookshop in World War II may not appear cozy at first glance, but I find any book set in London involving books takes me away to another world so it qualifies for me.

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee – Memoirs about childhood memories are always good for fall, and this one has long been on my to-read list so I’m hoping to finally get to it this year.

The Cottage Kitchen: Cozy Cooking in the English Countryside by Marte Marie Forsberg – Cool nights and earlier evenings call out for spending time in the kitchen. I love to read cookbooks and this one just seems perfect for this time of year. I have certain things I always make in autumn and am hoping to find another favorite.

Autumn from the Heart of the Home by Susan Branch – I loved her memoir about her trip to England and hope to find an affordable copy of this book for the drawings and recipes.

Do you have a favorite book to read this time of year? Please share it in the comments. I love to add books to my autumn reading list.

Reading in 2021

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 4 Comments
February Choices. Not pictured: Wintering by Katherine May, an ebook.

One of my goals for 2021 is to be more intentional in my reading. Last year, along with many others, I did a lot of comfort reading. That was fine, and I don’t regret it, but there are areas in which I’d like to grow in my reading life. Growth will only occur if I’m deliberate since I’d much rather just pick up one more murder mystery.

One thing that helped a lot in my planning was listening to Episode 265 of the What Should I Read Next podcast. Anne’s guest Laura Tremaine had ten questions to ask about your reading life. I journaled through these questions and came up with some ideas on how I wanted to approach my reading in 2021.

Also, I downloaded the Literary Life podcast 19 in 2021 reading challenge and the Modern Mrs. Darcy reading challenge. Since the MMD challenge was more of a worksheet on how you want your reading life to look, I was able to combine the two challenges to give me a good list of areas in which to read this year.

Here are the categories I hope to tackle in 2021. These include both challenges plus some work reading:

  • Poetry – They suggested an anthology, of which I own several. Normally I don’t read one straight through but dip in and out.
  • Letters – These would be real-life letters, which I love to read. I may combine this category with the next one and read the last book of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s letters that I’ve owned for several years but not yet read.
  • A book from my To-Be-Read stack – Lots to choose from here!
  • Old Books – My cut off is anything pre-1950
  • A Shakespeare play – I’ve read about three fourths of his plays and plan to read one new to me.
  • A book that requires jumping a hurdle. Either because it’s difficult to read or long or I’m avoiding it for some reason.
  • A book I started but never finished – There are several possibilities for this category.
  • Something Russian – Perhaps I should combine the previous category with this one and finally finish Anna Karenina!
  • Biography and Memoir – This is one of my favorite categories so I’ll have fun choosing a book for this one.
  • Something Local – I can read a book set in my area or by a local author. Since I work with the local authors at my library, I have many possibilities.
  • Reading Outside My Comfort Zone – This is a work category and part of the challenge.
  • Travel Books – I have a couple on my shelves that I’ve been meaning to read.
  • A Re-Read – I re-read regularly so this will be easy.
  • A Favorite Topic – I could choose several areas here–writing, genealogy, cooking, needlework, English history, or theology.
  • Focusing on an author – The idea is to read three or more books by the same author. I hope to choose a non-mystery author to stretch me.
  • Multicultural/#OwnVoices novel or memoir – This is for work and part of the challenge – I completed this one by reading The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper.
  • Theology and Christian Living – At least two of each this year.
  • A Winter Reading Challenge badge – Our library has a winter reading challenge each year, and you can earn badges by reading books in different categories. I earned the Surviving Winter Challenge by reading Snow by John Banville, A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow, and Crossed Skis by Carol Carnac.

My January reading was very satisfying in comfort although not so much in the challenge. I read three nonfiction, one of which was poetry, fifteen fiction books, and one children’s book. Of the fiction, only three weren’t mysteries. As much as I love mysteries, I need to be more adventurous in my reading.

I re-read several Hercule Poirot novels, which could count in the rereading category as well as the focus on a single author category, but they aren’t really stretching my reading life so I won’t count them toward the challenge.
Waiting on the Word was poetry and devotional, but since I started it in December, I don’t plan to count it on this list. Also, I finally finished Union with Christ, which I started last year, too, so I’m not counting it either.
Business as Usual by Jane Oliver was a delightful novel in letters. It doesn’t count for the challenge since that’s supposed to be real life letters, but it was so wonderful that I don’t care. I loved every second of it and will most likely read it again in the near future.

February is off to a better start as I intentionally chose books to read and am setting aside time daily to make progress in them—theology, nonfiction, and a book on literature. I’d like to add a book on writing and some poetry. I’ve almost decided which poetry anthology to read. In the meantime, I’m listening to a podcast on poetry and one on writing.

Do you plan to read intentionally in 2021? What’s the best book you read in January?

Just around the corner

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 3 Comments

March is here along with the birds and the budding trees and flowers. Bulbs I planted last autumn are pushing up out of the ground. I can hardly wait to see what colors they will be!

Little birds twitter from the trees and hop along the ground in search of food while the geese are flying home. I see them resting in a nearby field as they stop on their long journey north. The air may be chilly yet, but the sun is warm, and the whole world is waking up.

A favorite book of mine is The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, one of the loveliest nature journals ever created. Each month has it’s own watercolor drawings and poems and notes on what is growing. I read this bit of verse this morning and thought it apt for the day: 

Now the North wind ceases;
The warm South-west awakes;
The heavens are out in fleeces
And earth's green banner shakes. 
--Geo. Meredith

Spring is just around the corner. What harbingers of the new season do you see today? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

What Does Your Business Card Say?

~ Joy O'Toole ~ Leave a comment

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I’ve been making my way through the backlist of the Out of the Ordinary podcasts. After listening to Episode 6 last week, I created a “business” card to take with me to a writers’ conference I will attend this month.

In the podcast, Lisa-Jo Baker and Christie Purifoy discussed how we need to be careful about how we identify ourselves since our roles may change because of life’s circumstances. At the end of the podcast, they suggested that you write a “business” card for yourself, starting with your name and title, Beloved Child of God. Then you can add whatever roles you have underneath, remembering always that first you are God’s beloved child and that everything else flows from your identity in Christ.

When I thought about what to write on my new business card, I started with the idea that my life is hidden in Christ, I am His child, and He has given me all of the things I do each day. Then I wrote these words to describe my current roles outside of my full-time job:

Writer, Thinker, Researcher

What would you write on your “business” card?

Favorite Authors: Madeleine L’Engle

~ Joy O'Toole ~ Leave a comment

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Last week I finished A Circle of Quiet, the first in the Crosswicks books, by Madeleine L’Engle. It has been on my “to be read” list for years. However, I had never found the right time or been in the right mood for it until now. What a lovely book! L’Engle talks about the writing life, family, community, God, and many other things. It’s a memoir of sorts but so much more. Listening to her voice, I heard echoes of ideas I have pondered, events I have meditated upon, and values I also hold dear. It gave me hope that my writing is not in vain and that I must continue to pursue it as long as I am called to put words on paper.

This is not the first time that L’Engle has written something that filtered into my mind as sunlight filters through the branches of a stand of trees. In my early teens, I read A Wrinkle in Time for the first time. The protagonist, Meg, was so like me—nerdy, misunderstood, thoughtful, awkward. I had braces but no glasses at that point in my life. Instead, I had wild, curly hair in a time when everyone had straight hair, “feathered back”.  My nose was stuck in a book every possible moment, I spent hours writing in journals, and I was still fond of my dolls, although I’d never dream of letting anyone at school find out.

I loved Meg and her search for her father, the quirky Mrs. Whatsit and the adventure. When Meg found a friend in Calvin, who seemed out of her reach, I realized that I might not always be weird and misunderstood. Her little brother Charles Wallace, her mother’s lab at the house, and making spaghetti sauce while doing research charmed me.

The sequel, A Wind in the Door, was another favorite. Looking back, I suspect it had something to do with my love of biology in high school and choice of a major in biochemistry. I spent many hours in the library after finishing A Wind in the Door, reading about mitochondria and wishing that farandolae existed so I could discover them.

Both of the books helped form my thinking as a teenager. I learned that being odd was okay, that big thoughts were allowable, and that someday my outer and inner lives would reach an equilibrium of some sort.

I read many of L’Engle’s adult fiction years later including one of my favorite books, A Small Rain, and its sequel, A Severed Wasp. As I read these two books I realized how L’Engle incorporated her belief about God throughout her books, which caused me to view her writing in a new light.

Five years ago, I first picked up one of her nonfiction books, The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth. I marked so many of the thoughts, it’s almost a solid underline. I did the same with Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art a couple years later.

I plan to read the rest of the Crosswicks quartet soon and someday finish the Austin books (I’ve only read the first). I know that Madeleine L’Engle’s books have much more to say to me as a writer, as a human being, and as a Christian. It is a delight to know there are so many of her works I have yet to read for the first time. I look forward to learning much from them as well as enjoying her prose and sampling her poetry.

Favorite Authors: Dorothy L. Sayers

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 2 Comments

Dorothy_L._Sayers

While I read widely and in a variety of genres, my favorite fiction books are invariably British detective stories, and the author I like best of all in that genre is Dorothy L. Sayers. I first discovered the Lord Peter Wimsey novels just after I graduated from university. I don’t remember now just how I found them, but I suspect that I was wandering in the public library after work one evening and picked one up. Or it could be that someone recommended them to me, knowing I enjoyed Agatha Christie. At that point, I had read most of Christie and was looking for a new author.

However it came about, I soon discovered how much I liked Sayers. Her plots were clever but fair. The clues were always there if you looked hard enough for them, but she didn’t make it easy for you. The first several Lord Peter novels are not great character studies. As much as I enjoyed them, Peter seemed a bit too good to be true and Bunter was almost too perfect. The mystery plots are gems though. Where else would you read about advertising agencies or change ringing (ringing of the bells in church towers)?

In each book, there is a depth of knowledge that enhances the reader’s experience. There is something to learn, something to dig into, something to be exposed to for the first time in such a way that your interest is grabbed and you can’t wait to find out more.

For instance, I had never read much about the fens and how they flood. A cricket match was a plot point in one novel, and I’ve been intrigued by the game ever since I first read about bowling and achieving a century. I suspect that Bellona Club is the origination of my interest in World War I and Remembrance Day is now a date on my calendar (Veteran’s Day for us in the U.S.). I learned that Dukes were tried by the House of Lords rather than in a regular court so that they could be tried by a jury of their peers (this right was abolished in 1948). Lord Peter novels first introduced me to first editions, the color primrose, shell shock, and the lot of a generation of unmarried women due to the numerous casualties in the Great War.

My favorite books are those with Harriet Vane. She was introduced in Strong Poison. Shockingly for the time period, she was on trial for the murder of her lover. In the 1930’s, good girls didn’t live with men who weren’t their husbands, and Harriet’s background (daughter of a country doctor) seemed to indicate that she was one of the good girls.

However, she lived in Bloomsbury and had picked up some of the Bohemian ways of that set. For a time she had set up house with an artist, but broke off with him several months before the events in Strong Poison took place. Her ex-lover was murdered, she was accused, and Lord Peter first saw her in court while she was being tried for the crime.

Harriet brings a three-dimensional character to the Wimsey books that makes them good novels as well as great detective puzzles. Her inner dialogues, choices, and interactions with Peter help to elevate the books to a higher level than most other mysteries. Gaudy Night, one of my top five favorite novels of all time, is a masterpiece of learning, character, plot, and description. When I finally had the opportunity to go to Oxford for the first time not many months after reading Gaudy Night, I walked the streets with Harriet beside me.

Busman’s Honeymoon introduced me to poetry and one of my favorite poets—John Donne. I especially enjoyed the quote game Harriet and Peter play with the police inspector. My school French was required to translate a letter written to Peter in that language. There is no translation because Sayers assumed that her readers spoke that language as many educated people did in her day.

If Sayers had just written these detective stories, she would be remembered as an author. However, she also wrote plays, essays, and produced an excellent translation of Dante. In fact, her translations of Purgatorio and Paradiso were the first I encountered and they still have a special place in my heart. Her essays are amazing, and one of my favorites, The Dogma is the Drama, is a first rate defense of the importance of theology to the Christian.

Reading Dorothy L. Sayers’s works and about her life helped me to realize that Christians can be intellectuals. I found many more Christian intellecturals afterwards, but her top notch scholarship combined with her strong Christian faith  gave me “permission” to be a thinking Christian.

I had been surrounded by Christians all my life but it was mostly those who weren’t Christians who read the Great Books and wrote strong essays and became scholars. Sayers introduced me to the grand tradition of the Christian scholar and the fact that women can be scholars, too.

Her study of medieval Italian during the air raids of World War II sent me back to my Latin and gave me the desire to read medieval literature. Her theological essays gave me the impetus to go deeper in my own theological studies. And, of course, her essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, was one of the main starting points to the eighteen years of homeschooling I did with my children. I wanted that kind of education for them. I wanted them to be as learned, as tough-minded, and as logical in their thinking as she was.

I became a scholar, a thinker, a true reader, a lover of poetry, and a writer as a result of my first picking up a mystery novel. That’s an amazing influence and the reason I place Sayers in the top five of all time best mystery novelists. She certainly earned her title as one of the Queens of Crime. I highly recommend her novels for anyone who likes detective fiction or just wants a good book to read. Who knows? You may be inspired to go off on an intellectual journey of your own as a result.