Reading aloud offers us a chance to be fully present with our children. It also increases our kids’ academic success, inspires compassion, and fortifies them with the inner strength they need to face life’s challenges. As Sarah Mackenzie has found with her own six children, reading aloud long after kids are able to read to themselves can deepen relationships in a powerful way.Founder of the immensely popular Read-Aloud Revival podcast, Sarah knows first-hand how reading can change a child’s life. In The Read-Aloud Family, she offers the inspiration and age-appropriate book lists you need to start a read-aloud movement in your own home. From a toddler’s wonder to a teenager’s resistance, Sarah details practical strategies to make reading aloud a meaningful family ritual. Reading aloud not only has the power to change a family—it has the power to change the world.

    Gatlin is a dead-ringer for Jim Walker, who, like Cary, wants control of the XY. Gatlin is thrown into a situation in which all he can do is fight for his life. Seventeen-year-old Shandy Gamble in "Gamble of the KT" is in Perigord with plans to buy a new saddle and bridle with the $500 in reward money he had received for catching two horse thieves, but instead he gets conned out of the money. He returns to the KT Ranch never mentioning what happened. But when he learns the con man is back and hanging out with the June gang, he decides it's time to get his money back and even the score. Always a fighting man, both for the US Army and in battles across the ocean, Tom Kedrick in "Showdown Trail" has been hired to help run off the squatters and outlaws occupying a strip of land claimed to be unusable swamp. When he learns that he is being misled by his new bosses and that the squatters are honest and hardworking settlers, including one of his father's old friends, he has to determine which side he will fight for.Louis L'Amour is the most decorated author in the history of American letters, and his stories are loved the world over.

    Weathering HeightsThis is the retelling of the classic in its original form and verbiage but with a twist, the characters are gay, fall in love and mingle in the most extraordinary way that adults do, they have sex.This book takes great liberties with the original and yet, here we have an entirely new and compelling story of what might have been, what it might have been like to be gay and in love in the 1800’s.If you are easily offended, or simply offended by gay sex, or relationships, nudity, or illustrations of males having sex, then do not purchase this book.This is however, my unedited Proof, you will find errors.

    Tolkien and C. S. Lewis C.S. Lewis is the twentieth century’s most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis’s Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times.In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings’ lives and works. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis's favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow's chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of "supernatural shockers," and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant.Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years--and did so in dazzling style.

    In the words of Kirkus, it is a novel "as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering." GILEAD tells the story of America and will break your heart.

    If they’d only known. This cleverly designed book published in conjunction with Focus on the Family shares heartwarming and vulnerable experiences from well-known moms and dads. Readers will love the upbeat, surprising, sometimes humorous stories of their toddlers, grade-schoolers, tweens and teens. All parents can relate.

    J. Fikry, the irascible owner, is about to discover just what that truly means.A. J. Fikry’s life is not at all what he expected it to be. His wife has died, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. Slowly but surely, he is isolating himself from all the people of Alice Island—from Lambiase, the well-intentioned police officer who’s always felt kindly toward Fikry; from Ismay, his sister-in-law who is hell-bent on saving him from his dreary self; from Amelia, the lovely and idealistic (if eccentric) Knightley Press sales rep who keeps on taking the ferry over to Alice Island, refusing to be deterred by A.J.’s bad attitude. Even the books in his store have stopped holding pleasure for him. These days, A.J. can only see them as a sign of a world that is changing too rapidly.And then a mysterious package appears at the bookstore. It’s a small package, but large in weight. It’s that unexpected arrival that gives A. J. Fikry the opportunity to make his life over, the ability to see everything anew. It doesn’t take long for the locals to notice the change overcoming A.J.; or for that determined sales rep, Amelia, to see her curmudgeonly client in a new light; or for the wisdom of all those books to become again the lifeblood of A.J.’s world; or for everything to twist again into a version of his life that he didn’t see coming. As surprising as it is moving, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is an unforgettable tale of transformation and second chances, an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love.

    It's a book that has remained current for over half a century, fighting off critics and changing tastes in fiction. But do even its biggest fans know all there is to appreciate about The Great Gatsby?Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for "Fresh Air" and a Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out that while Gatsby may be the novel most Americans have read, it's also the ones most of us read too soon -- when we were "too young, too defensive emotionally, too ignorant about the life-deforming powers of regret" to really understand all that Fitzgerald was saying ("it's not the green light, stupid, it's Gatsby's reaching for it," as she puts it). No matter when or how recently you've read the novel, Corrigan offers a fresh perspective on what makes it so enduringly relevant and powerful. Drawing on her experience as a reader, lecturer, and critic, her book will be a rousing consideration of Gatsby: not just its literary achievements, but also its path to "classic" (its initial lukewarm reception has been a form of cold comfort to struggling novelists for decades), its under-acknowledged debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its commentaries on race, class, and gender.With rigor, wit, and an evangelistic persuasiveness, Corrigan will leave readers inspired to grab their old paperback copies of Gatsby and re-experience this great novel in an entirely new light.

    (The Great Courses #302)Keats compared discovering Homer to "finding a new planet." What is it in Homer's great works—and especially the Odyssey—that so enthralled him? Why have readers before and since reacted the same way?By joining award-winning classics professor Elizabeth Vandiver for these lectures on the Odyssey, you can get answers to these and hundreds of other questions.

    Since her eccentric father’s untimely death, she is the presumed heir to a long-rumored trove of diaries, paintings, letters, and early novel drafts passed down from the Brontë family - a hidden fortune never revealed to anyone outside of the family, but endlessly speculated about by Brontë scholars and fanatics. Samantha, however, has never seen this alleged estate and for all she knows, it’s just as fictional as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights.But everything changes when Samantha enrolls at Oxford University and long lost objects from the past begin rematerializing in her life, beginning with an old novel annotated in her father’s handwriting. With the help of a handsome but inscrutable professor, Samantha plunges into a vast literary mystery and an untold family legacy, one that can only be solved by decoding the clues hidden within the Brontës’ own works

    It is a story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Lily Sabbath. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawkes, Hazel Motes founds The Church of God Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child, and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Hazel's existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdoms gives us one of the most riveting characters in twentieth-century American fiction.

    

    For Jay, a retired research scientist this return to the classroom is his "one last chance" to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth--and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist. But through the sometimes uncomfortable months that the two men explore Homer's great work together--first in the classroom, where Jay persistently challenges his son's interpretations, and then during a surprise-filled Mediterranean journey retracing Odysseus's famous voyages--it becomes clear that Daniel has much to learn, too: Jay's responses to both the text and the travels gradually uncover long-buried secrets that allow the son to understand his difficult father at last.

    K. Chesterton, the "Prince of Paradox," is at his witty best in this collection of twenty essays and articles from the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on "heretics" — those who pride themselves on their superiority to Christian views — Chesterton appraises prominent figures who fall into that category from the literary and art worlds. Luminaries such as Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and James McNeill Whistler come under the author's scrutiny, where they meet with equal measures of his characteristic wisdom and good humor.In addition to incisive assessments of well-known individuals ("Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small" and "Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants"), these essays contain observations on the wider world. "On Sandals and Simplicity," "Science and the Savages," "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family," "On Smart Novelists and the Smart Set," and "Slum Novelists and the Slums" reflect the main themes of Chesterton's life's work. Heretics roused the ire of some critics for censuring contemporary philosophies without providing alternatives; the author responded a few years later with a companion volume, Orthodoxy. Sardonic, jolly, and generous, both books are vintage Chesterton.He is criticizing those who hold incomplete and inadequate views about "life, the universe, and everything." He is, in short, criticizing all that host of non-Christian views of reality, as he demonstrated in his follow-up book Orthodoxy. The book is both an easy read and a difficult read. But he manages to demonstrate, among other things, that our new 21st century heresies are really not new because he himself deals with most of them.

    In a perfect fusion of treatment and theme, this powerful novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the fearful persecution of the small Christian community.