“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” -Henry Ward Beecher

I prove this quotation true at the start of just about every season. I simply cannot enter a fresh spate of months without a stack of doughty books to march down the road of those vast and undiscovered days beside me. I'm a happy woman today because I've found my companions. My summer list is set. Glory be.

This summer, I feel that I am walking with a faerie host. There is such richness in the books pictured below. I must admit, I always feel a little like one of those clever heroes in a folk tale who manages to win the favor (and the secrets) of some fantastic faerie personage. It is so vastly satisfying to hunt down and corral all the books I want to read, stack them high, and know that they will soon yield their comradeship and courage to my hungry mind. The hunt for the out-of-print books I want, the scouting of just the right titles, it feels like a contest and a game to me. A pile like this means I've won something rich.

Now, as soon as I posted this picture, I realized that I needed a bit more fiction and poetry. So I begged the advice of my friends and they fleshed out my list. The new books aren't pictured yet, but here are the suggested titles, for those who want to know. For fiction, The Trunk by Elizabeth Coatsworth, The Faraway Tree Stories by Enid Blyton, Descent into Hell by Charles Williams, The Invisible Bridge, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. For poetry (I always go to my expert friend Ruth),  I was pointed toward the Collected Poems by R.S. Thomas, and the poetry of A.E. Stallings.

And NOW, I want to know what's on your summer reading list. One, two, three... go!