We asked around St. Luke’s and the Barn for some suggestions for reading while we are stuck at home during the pandemic.

Whether you wish to be amused, entertained, comforted, or inspired by spiritual or secular reading, here’s the list we put together:

Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine, Last Chance to See

Richard Adams, Watership Down

Maya Angelou. ‘On the Pulse of Morning’

Angela Ashwin, Prayer in the Shadows

Jane Austen’s novels

W.E. Bowman, The Ascent of Rum Doodle

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya (especially Sonya’s final monologue) 

Gillian Clarke, ‘Letter from a Far Country’

Dalai Lama & Desmond Tutu, The Book of Joy

Richard Daly, God’s Little Book of Peace

Emily Dickinson’s poems

Christopher Douglas and Andrew Nickolds, Ed Reardon’s Week

Carol Ann Duffy, The World’s Wife

George Eliot, Middlemarch

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Andy Friend, Ravilious & Co.: the Pattern of Friendship

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

George & Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody

George Herbert, ‘Prayer’ (1)

Isaiah 40

Tove Jansson, Sculptor’s Daughter

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

Louis MacNeice, ‘Autumn Journal’, XXIV

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Matthew  11:28

McGough, Patten and Henri, The Mersey Beat

Delia Owens Where the Crawdads Sing

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels

Psalm 23

Psalm 121

Denise Pugh, “Sometimes”

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29

R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

Nina Stibbe, Man at the Helm

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Dylan Thomas, ‘Fern Hill’

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

John Greenleaf Whitter, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ (taken from a longer poem. ‘The Brewing of Soma’, but best read out of context!)

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

William Wordsworth, ‘Lines composed above Tintern Abbey’

With thanks to Harry Charrington, Paul Gregorowski, Beverley Hart, Peter Hart, Chris Lynch, Faith Polya & Ali Rowley