Welcome to the official sign-up post for a very special 2024 Chapter-a-Day Read-along! This year we we will be reading some of the most beloved modern classics in all of literature: The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and the entire Harry Potter series. All three series are in the top ten of the PBS list of America’s 100 most-loved books, and are adored by readers the world over. And, since 2024 is a leap year, we get an extra day to read! Long-time participants will notice a couple of changes to this year’s read-along. First, I normally like to choose books that are in the public do ..read more

We are given very powerful readings today, powerful individually and powerful collectively. And at the heart of them all is a line by St. Paul in his letter to the Romans: “…be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.” So today we’re given three challenges: transformation, renewal, and discernment. First Paul says, be transformed. This is what Jesus is trying to help Peter do in today’s Gospel. When Jesus explains what it means to be the Messiah — that it means suffering, death, and resurrection — Peter rebuk ..read more

The George Eliot Chapter-a-Day Read-along continues this week with a book that some call the greatest novel in the English language, Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life. I have wanted to read Middlemarch for many years, having started it several times, but I was never able to make it very far. A book like Middlemarch is exactly the reason I began the chapter-a-day read-alongs, and I look forward to finally engaging with Eliot’s masterpiece. If you’ve been following this year’s reading schedule, then you know that tomorrow you will read the Epilogue to Romola and then on Thursday, July 27 ..read more

It’s a sad fact of history that the largest religious community that ever lived together in the same place in the history of the Catholic Church was at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany during World War II. Over 2,500 Catholic priests became prisoners in Dachau, in Cellblock 26, known as the Priestblock. They were from 144 dioceses and 25 countries, and they made up about a third of Dachau’s total population. While they were there at Dachau, the priests ministered to the other prisoners the best they could, and they tried to strengthen each other, and give each other hope. As the days ..read more

The feast of the Epiphany commemorates the arrival of the magi, and their journey to find Christ can inspire us to reflect on our own journey to encounter Christ in our lives. Each of our journeys is unique, and no one finds Christ in the quite the same way as anyone else. The magi in the Gospel of Matthew found Jesus in their own way. The names and numbers of the magi are not given in Matthew’s gospel, but we think of them as a group of three, probably because of the three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Our tradition gives them the names Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior. These three ..read more

With the new year beginning today it’s time for my annual list of favorite reads from the previous year. As I look back on 2022, I see that I definitely did not stick to my plan to read books from my greatest books list. Nonetheless, I still had a fruitful year of reading. My intention was to begin with a re-read of the Iliad and the Odyssey and then move on to other epics like the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, but my reading philosophy began to change in the middle of last year. More on that later. First, here are my favorite reads from 2022: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare A L ..read more

It’s been over fourteen months since we first began our journey with D’Artagnan and the rest of his musketeer friends, and today we reach the end of their story. Even though I finished my first reading of the series just three years ago, I still enjoyed reading it again, especially getting to revisit such interesting and noble characters. One of the things I appreciate most about the them is how they stayed true to their friendship even when they were on opposite sides politically. Looking back over my experience with these books, D’Artagnan remains one of my favorite characters in all of lit ..read more

The 2023 George Eliot Chapter-a-Day Read-along begins in just two days with Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede. Mary Ann Evans wrote Adam Bede when she was close to 40 years old. She had already been fairly successful as a non-fiction writer, translator, and editor up to that time, but she had resolved to become a novelist. Her first published fiction in book form was a set of three short stories collected in Scenes of Clerical Life. This was also the first time Evans used George Eliot as a pseudonym: “She also adopted a nom-de-plume, George Eliot….Although female authors were published under the ..read more

As the new year approaches, I’m getting more and more excited to begin the 2023 George Eliot Chapter-a-day Read-along. Not only am I looking forward to spending an entire year immersed in the fiction of Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot), but I’m also excited to read the the vintage set of her works that I found at a used bookstore this past year. Just as George Eliot has stories to tell through her novels, so this antique set of her works has stories to tell. While I’m not a serious book collector who knows all about rare books or first editions, I do love beautiful vintage books and the myste ..read more

This is the official sign-up post for the 2023 George Eliot Chapter-a-Day Read-along. It’s hard to believe, but 2023 will be the sixth year of my hosting chapter-a-day read-alongs. To celebrate this sixth year, I am very excited to announce that we will be reading six major works by George Eliot. Why George Eliot? Two main reasons: First, I have long wanted to read Eliot’s Middlemarch, the novel that Martin Amis and Julian Barnes call the greatest novel in the English language. Second, this past year I purchased a vintage set of the works of George Eliot from my local used bookstore, and it i ..read more