Thankful Thursday

As I am going through a phase of living up to my blog name (after a long spell with few book oriented posts), my Thankful Thursday list this week is a literary one. I want to take the opportunity to express my thanks for my favourite authors ...

1. C.S.Lewis, for his way of getting to the heart of Christianity and writing about it with such clarity, and because one of my roads to faith was through Narnia.

2. J.R.R.Tolkein, for being inspired to use his deep understanding of myth to create a masterpiece of the mythological imagination and the greatest fictional battle between good and evil.

3. G.K.Chesterton, who makes me proud to be English and Catholic, whose incisive insights and wit make his work such a pleasure to read, and who demonstrated in both his life and his writing that Catholicism and joy are inseparable.

4. Charlotte Maria Shaw Mason, whose habits of thought and study combined with a deep love of children to produce a philosophy of education that is as inspirational today as it was one hundred years ago.

5. Elinor M. Brent Dyer, whose Chalet School books gave me an imaginary but far more satisfying alternative to real life school, bringing to life a place where children enjoyed good, clean fun, where there were wonderful examples of large, happy families, where faith, principles and responsibility were all pre-eminent, and where many favourite characters were Catholic.

6. Elizabeth Goudge, for books in which adversity is overcome by good moral choices, and which leave behind a glow of satisfaction.

7. Jane Austen, whose gentle humour has kept alive a lost world for two hundred years, showing that the essence of humanity doesn't change.

8. Gerard Manley Hopkins, for being the first poet I discovered for myself, rather than as an assignment for an English literature class. His poems opened my eyes both to ways in which language could be used, and to a Catholic world that hovered attractively somewhere on my horizon.

9. A.A.Milne, for Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends, who I loved with a passion as a child. I even had Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper. And this was long before the days of Disney and children's book characters as marketing opportunities.

10. Gloria Whelan, who may not be in quite the same literary league as the others, but whose books have brought history and geography to life for us this term.