This Week's Miscellany (01/06/24)

The Muppet Christmas Carol, American Parenting, the Magic of Second-Hand Bookshops, The Crown

Hi, I’m Haley! Book midwife (editor) and author. Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.

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Three Wise Men by Eyvind Earle

Happy New Year and a Blessed Epiphany!

I’m currently snuggled up with my feverish five-year-old daughter who’s suffering an ear infection and ruptured ear drum which is the last vestige of post-Covid/Strep/Flu ick. It’s been eighty-four years three and a half weeks since the whole family was healthy but we did finally get to celebrate Christmas with extended family on New Year’s Day.

My brain is still not as clear as I’d like it to be which is probably due to a combination of Covid infection and Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups (no regrets). But I’m also bursting with writing ideas with not enough time to write them all out.

Topics currently in my brain:

• Favorite books from 2023

• Books I want to read in 2024

• Mini Reviews of Wonka and The Boy and the Heron

• Thoughts on Monetized Tradwifery Instagram and the 1950s Fantasy

Listening

Daniel and I chatted with our dear friend Fr. Harrison on Clerically Speaking to talk about the upcoming pilgrimage this summer that we’re co-leading! (The pilgrimage chatter begins around minute 5:20.)

I joined Tod Worner on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast (fondly known as the Todcast) to talk about why children’s literature matters so much. I really enjoyed this conversation.

And I continue to enjoy Elena & Joy’s journey through The Artist’s Way which they influenced me to read. I lost the book for a few weeks but am now back in business and working my way through it. I will share a review when I finish because there’s things I love and things I hate. You can find links and notes for the podcast over at

Joy Marie Clarkson ☀️

‘s Substack.

Reading

I’m reading The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis aloud to Hildie while she recovers. The absolute delight when she realized Father Christmas had come! A joy.

Confessions by St. Augustine

Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Writing

I have the plot mapped out for my next Sister Seraphina mystery. I also have two other big projects waiting to be tackled once mouse nuns 4 is complete, but I think I’m on a roll now that I have an outline. I typically don’t work with an outline (because my brain isn’t organized enough, I have to follow ideas around and then restructure later) so we’ll see how this goes. I was delighted to see so many pictures on social media of kids reading my series over the holidays!

Quote

From Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, who owned 50,000 books:

"It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones. There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion. If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the 'medicine closet' and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice! Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity."

Links

Why Parent Struggle So Much in the World’s Richest County by Stephanie H. Murray

His wife had recently been offered a job in America. “It would have been great for her career,” he said, “but we figured it would be too dangerous for the kids.”

Shelf Haunting by Jeremy Wikeley

Why would someone rather hunt around in a second-hand shop than a new one? Is it just nostalgia? Fear of the present? If Instagram is anything to go by, what people want from a second-hand shop is a quirky sub-Tolkien hovel full of comfy moth-eaten armchairs and overflowing bookcases. The aesthetic is everything. But then, second-hand shops simply are more ‘homely’ than other shops, because they are less commercial. The second-hand shop hasn’t decided in advance what it wants you to read. It knows that you want to buy something, but it wants you to find that thing for yourself. Second-hand shops, junk shops, car boot sales: what all these spaces have in common is they offer all the joy of shopping (the anticipation, the surprise, the exercise for the roving magpie eye) alongside a feeling that you have somehow sidestepped consumerism.

The Muppet Christmas Carol is one of our family’s most beloved films. It is the best adaptation of Dickens’ story. Two stand out reasons are that by having a Charles Dickens character (Gonzo), the films doesn’t lose the charm and delightful language from the narrator that makes A Christmas Carol such a wonderful book. The Muppets also stand in really well as Dickens characters because he uses so many archetypes. Fozzi Bear is no easier to accept than the unbelievably jolly Fezziwig. It just works.

on the Muppets: notes on nineties romanticism by

Tara Isabella Burton

The Muppet Christmas Carol works as well as it does, as a movie, precisely because of its moral universe: a vision of both earnestness and deeply human goodness that links the Victorian Christianity of Dickens to the unheralded efforts of the Muppets’ invisible puppeteers: we are all messy, self-destructive human beings, who in our desire to communicate something of ourselves to one another might be able to lift ourselves out of our solitude.

Tara also has a new novel out and you can read a bit about it here.

What Was ‘The Crown’ All About Anyway? by Ross Douthat

And if “The Crown” ended with a whimper because it didn’t know what it wanted to say about its subject, history may be writing a more interesting last word.

The questions Douthat brings up about the monarchy are interesting. But for me, the later seasons of The Crown were a failure in good storytelling. What made the early seasons so splendid (in addition to Claire Foy’s incredible portrayal of the young Queen Elizabeth II) was always that the interesting inner life of the royals was only the starting point to tie together fascinating history and the human experience. The best episode didn’t even focus on the royal at all, it told the story of Winston Churchill’s later years and through that story, the nature of grief and how it forms us in ways we don’t grasp at the time as it weaves through our lives and creativity. The scandals of the royal family has always been the least interesting part of the show. By focusing more and more on the tabloid coverage of the royal family in the late 20th century, The Crown lost what made it great storytelling in the early seasons.

Come to Belgium and Germany!

My husband and I are leading our second pilgrimage with Fr. Harrison Ayre, a trip that he’s been dreaming up for several years. Beautiful abbeys, amazing breweries, daily Mass and a small group of pilgrims.—we’ll close the trip at 30 pilgrims and we’re 2/3 full. Last year’s pilgrimage to Scotland with Fr. Harrison was an experience I’ll treasure forever (and half of our pilgrims from that trip are already signed up for Belgium, so I’m not the only one who found it life-changing!)

You can check out the registration page: Heavenly Hops Pilgrimage with Fr. Harrison Ayre to Belgium and Germany.

Or listen to us share all about the details with Fr. Harrison on his podcast.

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Wishing you all a wonderful week! And a huge thank you to Kayla, Joan, Kennedy, , Mary, Martha, Brian, Silvia, Meg, AnnClaire, Beatrice, Merideth, Jamie, Morgan, Beth, Irina, Daughter, Tamatha, Alena, Lauren, Thomas, Gretchen, Anna, Amanda, Sylvia, Olivia, Stephanie, Amy Colleen, Shelly, Sophie, and Maureen and the good folks of Plough for upgrading to a paid subscription. This is a reader-supported newsletter so if you enjoy getting these emails, please consider supporting this Substack by upgrading to a paid subscription with the button below.

Thanks for reading!

Haley

(Editor of Word on Fire Spark, Author, Former Podcaster)

Haley’s books

Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns

Haley’s Book on Jane Austen’s Novels

Haley’s Book about Radical Simplicity