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IN ASSOCIATION
WITH
Honey for a Child’s Heart
Gladys Hunt
Subtitled: the imaginative use of
books in family life. This is the most important book on this page for parents,
homeschooling or not. Mrs. Hunt discusses the topics of the Bequest of Wings, Milk &
Honey, What Makes a Good Book, Fantasy and Realism, Poetry, The Pleasure of a Shared
Adventure (an important chapter for families), Honey From the Rock, Who Influences Your
Children?, and Making Decisions About Books, all from an unashamed Christian perspective.
Her graded and annotated bibliography is frosting on the cake. Mrs. Hunt says, “That
is what a book does. It introduces us to people and places we wouldn’t ordinarily
know. A good book is a magic gateway into a wider world of wonder, beauty, delight, and
adventure. Books are experiences that make us grow, that add something to our inner
stature. Children and books go together in a special way. I can’t imagine any
pleasure greater than bringing to the uncluttered, supple mind of a child the delight of
knowing God and the many rich things He has given us to enjoy. This is every parent’s
privilege, and books are his keenest tools. Children don’t stumble onto good books by
themselves; they must be introduced to the wonder of words put together in such a way that
they spin out pure joy and magic.” Parents, in this day and age, don’t stumble
onto good books by themselves either, and Honey for a Child’s Heart shows them
the way.
Books Children Love
Elizabeth Wilson
Subtitled: A Guide to the Best
Children’s Literature. This book is one big annotated listing of real,
“living,” twaddle-free books and literature for homeschoolers who like to use
real books first and textbooks second in their curriculum. The listings are graded by
reading levels. The subjects covered include: animals, art and architecture, Bible &
spiritual teaching, biography, crafts, hobbies & domestic arts, dance, drama,
geography & history, handicaps, horticulture, humor, language, literature,
mathematics, miscellaneous, music, outdoor activities, physical education, reference &
research, science & technology, special days & seasons, and concludes with a
section on supplemental teaching resources. The majority of the books listed are for the
grammar stage.
Read for Your Life
Gladys Hunt & Barbara Hampton
Subtitled: Turning teens into readers. This
sequel to Honey for a Child’s Heart focuses on teen readers and more mature
books, and even adults who don’t like reading. The authors discuss the topics of:
Three Cheers for a Good Book, Is Imagination Going Down the Tube?, How to Read a Book,
What Makes a Good Book, What is Happening to Books, Fantasy in a Real World, Read for Your
Life, Feed Your Heart, and A Word for the College-Bound. The book again concludes with a
rich annotated bibliography for teen and mature readers, divided into the genres of
adventure, animals, contemporary, fantasy, historical, mystery, nonfiction, science
fiction, and tried and true.
How to Read a Book
Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren
Subtitled: the
classic guide to intelligent reading. The second absolutely invaluable book on this page, How
to Read a Book illuminates the activity and the art of reading the great books: how to
read a book that has something to teach us, how to let the great writers of the past reach
across the centuries and become our (and our children’s) present teachers. Dr. Adler
discusses the activity and art of reading, the four levels of reading: elementary,
inspectional, analytical, and syntopical; different kinds of reading matter, from
non-fiction to imaginative literature to philosophy to history to poetry; and reading and
the growth of the mind. Along the way we learn how to be a demanding reader, how to take
notes, how to determine the author’s message, how to judge the author’s message,
and much, much more. Includes a recommended reading list and exercises and tests for each
of the four levels of reading. In the dialectic stage our children will be mostly learning
to take notes on the books they read, and in the rhetoric stage be more actively involved
in analytically reading and judging each book.
How to Read Slowly: Reading for Comprehension
James W. Sire
Previously subtitled “A Christian Guide
to Reading with the Mind,” which goes a long way toward explaining the purpose of
this book. Sire picks up where Adler leaves off in that he addresses how to read a book
from a distinctively Christian perspective. He provides specific help in determining an
author’s assumptions and worldviews, and goes into detail with the various genres of
literature: nonfiction, novels, poetry, and so on. This book is the next logical step for
Christian homeschooling parents to take after Adler’s How to Read a Book.
An Experiment in Criticism
C. S. Lewis
“Why do we read literature and how
do we judge it? C.S. Lewis’s classic analysis springs from the conviction that
literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of
reading they invite.” --Publisher. Dr. Lewis discusses the Few and the Many, Fake
Characterisations, How the Few and the Many use Pictures and Music, The Reading of the
Unliterary, On Myth, The Meanings of Fantasy, On Realisms, On Misreading by the Literary,
Survey, Poetry, and the Experiment.
How to Read a Poem
Burton Raffel
Burton Raffel is well-qualified to write this
volume, as student, professor, translator and commentator on classic and obscure poems
from Old English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese (and maybe I have left
some out); author of critical editions not only on classic poetry (Beowulf, anyone?) but
that guide other professional poetry translators, and author of critically-acclaimed
original poetry himself. In this volume he discusses poetic meaning, metaphor, technique,
poetic devices, and poetic forms; all illustrated with well-known classic poetry.
Reading Between the Lines
Gene Edward Veith
The previous books teach how to read
books and poetry: any book and any poem, without getting so much into specific books and
poems. This book and the following one are different in that they do get into specifics.
Veith discusses what constitutes good literature, and attacks “literary
deconstruction:” the idea that any book can mean anything, depending on what the
reader or literary critic want it to mean. (Another way to look at this problem is: whose
intrepretation is the valid one? The author’s, or the reader’s? Literary
deconstruction believes the reader’s interpretation carries more weight. Literary
deconstruction has plagued the interpretation of the Constitution for several decades.)
Veith explores the history of literature and the effects of prevailing worldviews on
literature; the major genres of literature; and how various literary forms have been used
to present the Christian worldview throughout history.
Invitation to the Classics
Louise Cowan & Os Guinness
The third indispensable book on this
page. Cowan and Guinness examine 50 of the great classic texts of Western literature from
a Christian perspective, using “... essays by a number of respected Christian
literary scholars that extend invitations to readers to experience ... the wonder and the
beauty of selected classics. Each essay contains a biographical and historical sketch, a
summary of the work being considered, suggestions and bibliographies for further study,
and questions raised by the text about the interaction of Christian faith and society. The
selections range from the Iliad to Machiavelli’s The Prince,
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Genres
covered range from Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s epic poetry to Martin
Luther’s theological writings and Alexis de Tocqueville’s travel writings.”
--Publisher’s Weekly.
Heroes of the City of Man
Peter Leithart
Anyone that has read or used
Leithart’s work illuminating Shakespeare, Brightest Heaven of Invention, will
appreciate this newest book shedding light on the sweeping classics of ancient literature.
Discussing The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and more, like Brightest
Heaven each chapter contains questions for discussion and further study.
The Discarded Image
C. S. Lewis
“Hailed as the
final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind, this
work paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, as historical and cultural
background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” --Publisher. Dr.
Lewis discusses the Medieval Situation, Reservations, Selected Materials: the Classical
Period, Selected Materials: the Seminal Period, the Heavens, the Longaevi, the Earth and
her Inhabitants, which includes a discussion on the seven liberal arts (three formed the
trivium, four the quadrivium), and concludes with the Influence of the Model.
Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Literature
C. S. Lewis
An important
collection of essays on the Medieval and Renaissance periods, with special concentration
on Dante and Spenser. “This present volume is composed of all the studies in medieval
and renaissance literature I have been able to find and which Lewis, for various reasons,
never published in his lifetime.” --Walter Hooper, editor. Dr. Lewis discusses De
Audiendis Poetis, the Genesis of a Medieval Book, Imagination and Thought in the Middle
Ages, Dante, the Morte d’Arthur, Tasso, Spenser, On Reading The Faerie Queen, and
Comas.
Brightest Heaven of Invention
Peter Leithart
Subtitled: A Christian Guide to
Six Shakespeare Plays. “Shakespeare was a great observer, who was able to see into
the patterns of human character. Dare anyone say that these insights are irrelevant to
living in the real world? For many in an older generation, the Bible and the Collected
Shakespeare were the two indispensable books. Leithart’s perceptive walk through
these plays (Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, The
Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing) is written especially for a
high-school level course, but older students will benefit as well.” --Publisher.
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