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