A Post for Bookworms -- Can You Share a Favorite Title?

I love to read and am always looking for the next good book to pick up. This morning I read a substack post by George Grant that gave me a host of authors to inspect. Some I'm familiar with (Ellis Peters, Mary Renault, Bernard Corwall), but a few are new to me. I've never read anything by G.A. Henty a Victorian novelist and war correspondent, who began his career telling stories to his children around the dinner table. In fact I've never heard of him before. Perhaps it's because he wrote adventure stories "for boys."

Every other Tuesday afternoon I volunteer at our little independent library in town. It began in the early 1900s when some women of Woodstock who loved to read banned together to found it. I'm betting they will have some of Henty's books. I will be happy to be introduced to him. I sometimes browse the stacks when I'm there. We have many old books that would no doubt be discarded by the country library. If the book looks old, I'm likely to pick it up and dip in.

Grant mentioned a number of other authors besides Henty in this paragraph which gives me a few others to look up:

Often called “the boys’ own historian” or “the prince of the story-tellers,” Henty was a Victorian literary phenomenon whose 144 books and myriad of short-stories have long enthralled adults and children alike. His fiercely accurate narratives range across the whole spectrum of human achievement, highlighting the greatest characters and the most decisive moments in history. Other writers have succeeded admirably in capturing a single culture or era—Mary Renault in ancient Greece, Ellis Peters in medieval England, Walter Scott in Jacobite Scotland, Bernard Cornwall in Anglo-Saxon England, Cecelia Holland in Teutonic Europe, or Andrew Lytle in the ante-bellum South—but Henty was equally adept at telling the story of the Crimean War as of the Peloponnesian War, of the Franco-Prussian conflict as of the Norman conquest, of the adventures of the Conquistadors as of the trials of the Pharaohs. Apparently, his careful research and historical virtuosity knew no bounds.

One book he describes intrigues me and I will definitely search for it:

For the Temple is an account of the fall of Jerusalem to the legions of Rome under the command of Titus. I have to confess that the official histories of Josephus have always been a bit difficult to plow through, but here Henty makes Josephus come to life like never before. The sieges of Jotapata, Gamala, and Jerusalem are transformed into page-turning dramas of the highest order.

Let us celebrate good books and great authors. I've been re-reading Owen Francis Dudley's novels, but I think I'll take a break and dip into some of these other authors. Good fiction often leads me to meditation. I sometimes stop in the middle of a chapter to reflect on a thought inspired by the story. Michael O'Brien's books do that, but one novel I particularly remember is A Canticle forLeibowitz by Walter Miller. If you've never read it I heartily recommend the book. It starts in a post nuclear war world that has returned to life as lived in the Middle Ages. The setting is a monastery of monks and a novice preparing for ordination by prayer and fasting in the desert like Jesus. It goes on through centuries as the world rebuilds and repeats the sins of the past. 

I once read a comment that the only books worth reading are those worth reading twice. True wisdom I think. If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book (besides the Bible), what would you want in your bookbag? 

Happy reading!