Summer Reading Challenge: The Finale

Done:

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Murder at Markham by Patricia Houck Sprinkle
The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne
When All the World Was Young by Barbara Holland
Romeo and Juliet
The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition by E. Christian Kopff
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde
Blue Shoes and Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith
Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Thanks to Staci from Writing and Living for introducing me to Anne Tyler. I've happily read a handful of her books, and I find her characters to be very real and often people I would love to meet. Okay, perhaps not become closely acquainted with...some of them are odd...but the kind of folks I would love to observe at the coffee shop on a Saturday morning. Digging to America was a favorite.

Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine by Dorothy Sayers

"I loved reading these essays throughout the summer. She saved the best for last in her essay Problem Picture:

The disastrous and widening cleavage between the church and the arts on the one hand and between the state and the arts on the other leaves the common man with the impression that the artist is something of little account, either in this world or the next; and this has had a bad effect on the artist, since it has left him in a curious spiritual isolation. Yet with all his faults, he remains the person who can throw most light on that creative attitude to life to which bewildered leaders of thought are now belatedly exhorting a no less bewildered humanity.

Nor is the creative mind unpractical or aloof from that of the common man. The notion that the artist is a vague, dreamy creature living in retreat from the facts of life is a false one - fostered, I shrewdly suspect, by those to whose interest it is to keep administrative machinery moving regardless of the end product. At the irruption of the artist into a state department, officialdom stands aghast, not relishing the ruthless realism that goes directly to essentials. It is for the sacrilegious hand laid on the major premise that the artist is crucified by tyrannies and quietly smothered by bureaucracies. As for the common man, the artist is nearer to him than the man of any other calling, since his vocation is precisely to express the highest common factor of humanity - the image of the creator that distinguishes the man from the beast."

Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education by David Hicks
A Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason

What is left on the summer's list:

On the Art of Writing by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis
The Iliad by Homer

Quiller-Couch and I will visit semi-weekly as I did with the Sayers book. I cannot rush it. Homer and I are plugging along, but I am back to chapter one this week to discuss it with my son (starting Great Books and the Iliad next Monday.) I won't rush Homer either. Ellis will have to wait for another time. Sad, but true.

Many thanks to Amanda for providing the Summer Reading Challenge. I thoroughly enjoyed my reading, learned a ton and look forward to continuing throughout the autumn.