For May: Cold Sassy Tree

Cold Sassy Tree

by Olive Ann Burns

From Barnes & Noble:

"On July 5, 1906, scandal breaks in the small town of Cold Sassy, Georgia, when the proprietor of the general store, E. Rucker Blakeslee, elopes with Miss Love Simpson. He is barely three weeks a widower, and she is only half his age and a Yankee to boot. As their marriage inspires a whirlwind of local gossip, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a family scandal, and that’s where his adventures begin.

Cold Sassy Tree is the undeniably entertaining and extraordinarily moving account of small-town Southern life in a bygone era. Brimming with characters who are wise and loony, unimpeachably pious and deliciously irreverent, Olive Ann Burns’s classic bestseller is a timeless, funny, and resplendent treasure.

A timeless, funny, resplendent novel about romance and adolescence, and how people lived and died in a small Southern town at the turn of the century."

Analysis of Middlemarch

Why read Middlemarch? A patheos blog...

Middlemarch...for the middle of March

 "Middlemarch is a highly unusual novel. Although it is primarily a Victorian novel, it has many characteristics typical to modern novels. Critical reaction to Eliot's masterpiece work was mixed. A common accusation leveled against it was its morbid, depressing tone. Many critics did not like Eliot's habit of scattering obscure literary and scientific allusions throughout the book. In their opinion a woman writer should not be so intellectual." From SparkNotes.

For those SmartGirls rendered helpless by Eliot's prose, fear not! The miniseries streams on Netflix. Here's a sample: 

With God in Russia

With God in Russia is a memoir by Walter Ciszek (1904–1984), a Polish-American Jesuit priest known for his clandestine missionary work in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1963. Since 1990, the life of Fr. Ciszek has been considered by the Roman Catholic Church for possible beatification or canonization.

We are meeting at Lisa's house on Thursday, November 7.

Tax Policy and Large Families

"Our entitlement system in particular depends on future taxpayers, and over time amounts in effect to a transfer of wealth from larger families to smaller ones."

Read more from Yuval Levin here.