This Week's Miscellany (05/27/23)

Home Office Tour, Laurus, Best Children's Books, Martin Amis on Jane Austen

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.

Hello from the other side of Maycember chaos. I chaperoned a 4th grade school trip to St. Augustine (my favorite Florida city) and we survived all the last week of school events—barely.

We also sent our 14yo on a plane to visit the grands in Tennessee. It wasn’t his first time flying unaccompanied but it’s always a weird experience for me. He’s never nervous! He decided to apply for his first job at a fast food restaurant for the summer. He interviewed, was offered the job, and starts today! We’ll drive up for a visit in four weeks to see how it’s going.

Home Office Tour

Last weekend after our house was tidied for a gathering, I did a little Instagram house tour. I thought a tour of our new place on Substack might be fun, starting with my first ever home office.

I became a plant lady during Covid. No regrets about my mini jungle.

I’ve always struggled to write without natural light. I know that makes me sound like a diva, but I get headaches with artificial lighting. My favorite writing spots have always been cafes and bookshops with good lighting (miss you, Pinewood Roasters and Fabled in Waco!). But after 14 years of being a writer, I have a room of my own in my house—with two walls of windows. And I am obsessed with it.

It’s rarely tidier than this on my desk so I won’t pretend.

One wall is bookshelves because I didn’t want to put shelves in front of windows. The rest of our books are in the hallway, living room, and bedrooms.

Quote

“Love, beauty, truth, all the attributes of God which we see reflected about us in creatures, in the very works of man himself, whether it is bridges or symphonies wrought by his hands, fill our hearts with such wonder and gratitude that we can not help but obey and worship.”

-Servant of God, Dorothy Day

Literary Links

The BBC offered a list of the 100 best children’s books of all time.

This piece on one of my favorite novels of all time, Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin, is a great read:

Product of Divine Will by Blake Randolph for Ekstasis Magazine

As those who live in finitude, under the sun, we teeter on the brink between Existentialism and Nihilism because our reading of our lives is too close. We misread Ecclesiastes and bemoan vanity. The mosaic looks ugly and distorted to us because our noses rest against the tiles. Like Adam and Eve, our relationship with God is subjected to exile through Adam, so also the relationships between one point in time and another also feel the curse. The connection between the points seems broken. Yet these relationships have an ultimate connection in the Triune God. How do we broaden our perspective? How can we step back to see more of the mosaic? Providential action, the Divine Will in motion, is the thread of connections, and it is revealed by the grace of God through the pages of Holy Scripture.

Absolutely delightful piece from the late Martin Amis on my favorite gal:

Martin Amis on the Genius of Jane Austen (and What the Adaptations Get Wrong)

And I quite understood why the Pride and Prejudice video, released midway through the run, sold out in two hours. When I was introduced to the novel, at the age of 15, I read 20 pages and then besieged my stepmother’s study until she told me what I needed to know. I needed to know that Darcy married Elizabeth. (I needed to know that Bingley married Jane.) I needed this information as badly as I had ever needed anything.

Not particularly literary, but an interesting conversation between Jean Twenge and Ezra Klein in teen mental health and smartphone/social media use.

And in case you missed it, my new book is coming out in just two weeks and is available for pre-order:

Pre-order from my publisher, Pauline Books and Media or from Amazon.

The Year of Jane

We wrapped up Emma and are reading Mansfield Park! Here’s why I think it’s such an excellent novel.

And that’s all folks! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. This email is free to receive but time-intensive to produce, so I want to offer a huge thank you to Robin 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.

And if you’re not in a position to pledge a monthly subscription but you enjoyed this post, you can always just throw some change in the tip jar.

Thanks for reading!

Haley

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

Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns

Haley’s Book on Jane Austen’s Novels

Haley’s Book about Radical Simplicity