Do you ever look at your bookshelves, desk, and night table and think, “I may have a problem here”? Welcome to my life. I do that practically every day.
Don’t get me wrong: Life surrounded by books—or maybe “buried under books” would be more accurate—is good. But sometimes it’s also a little daunting. I catch myself calculating exactly how long I’ll have to live to get all of my books read, and the number is starting to reach Old Testament proportions.
Hence this newsletter. I’m hoping that setting up a space for book reviews, and inviting others to follow along with my reading journey, will encourage me to push through the 10 or 15 books I’ve got going at any one time (you think I’m kidding) and not get bogged down. I hope it’ll also help you find recommendations for your own reading journey. Eventually I may start a paid subscription that will give you access to extra essays, author interviews, and so forth, but for now everything is free.
Why “Dear, Strange Things”?
My title comes from the following passage from a book review by Dorothy Parker:
I have been faithful to my duty, in my fashion. I have read the book. But I did not behave like a regular little soldier about it. I did not sit me down in a hard, straight chair, and read it sternly through at one stretch. I kept putting it down, and sneaking off to the dear, strange things I truly ached to read and to ponder.
(From “A Good Novel, and a Great Story,” in The Portable Dorothy Parker, 1976 edition. The book she was reviewing, in case you were wondering, was Ford Madox Ford’s The Last Post.)
That wonderful turn of phrase has stayed with me over the years, as a handy description of the words and stories of all kinds that call to us from libraries and bookstores, demanding our attention and capturing our imaginations.
Expect the Unexpected
My taste in books is, in a word, eclectic. I love biographies of Beethoven and YA Beauty and the Beast retellings. I gobble up historical novels like candy. My shelves are full of middle-grade fiction, popular theology, and academic tomes dealing with every aspect of Charles Dickens’s career.
In short, what we have here is a grab bag. I’m hoping that my refusal to be pigeonholed as a reader will lead to a wonderfully unpredictable (not to say wildly disconcerting) reading experience for you.
A Word about Me
For those who don’t already know me, here are a few other places you can find my writings:
Last year I released two books: Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis (Baker Books), and The Gospel in Dickens: Selections from His Writings (Plough Publishing, with a foreword by Dr. Karen Swallow Prior).
I also write freelance articles, most frequently for Christ and Pop Culture. (Here’s my most recent piece there.)
And in the spare moments I have left over, I blog about Dickens.
My goal is to put out a new issue of this newsletter every two weeks. My first review, coming up very soon, will be of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. Stay tuned!