This week on The Literary Life podcast our hosts introduce the 2023 Reading Challenge! Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are excited to share with you about all the categories on this year’s Literary Life Bingo Reading Challenge! You can download your own copy of the challenge here, as well as check out our past reading challenges. Scroll down in the show notes to see a list of the links and books mentioned in this episode. You can use the hashtag #LitLifeBingo on social media so we can all see what everyone is reading in 2023! Don’t forget to shop the House of Humane Letters Christmas Sale now through the end of the year. The Literary Life Back to School online conference recordings are also on sale at Morning Time for Moms right now. Commonplace Quotes: Much that we call Victorian is known to us only because the Victorians laughed at it. George Malcolm Young, from Portrait of an Age I think that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body. Joseph Addison Thunderstorms by William H. Davies My mind has thunderstorms, That brood for heavy hours: Until they rain me words, My thoughts are drooping flowers And sulking, silent birds. Yet come, dark thunderstorms, And brood your heavy hours; For when you rain me words, My thoughts are dancing flowers And joyful singing birds. Book and Link List: Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie Episode 14: “The Adventures of a Shilling” by Joseph Addison Episode 3: The Importance of Detective Fiction Episode 16: “Why I Write” by George Orwell Reading Challenge Downloads The Letters of Jane Austen by Jane Austen Abigail Adams: Letters ed. by Edith Gelles The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple ed. by G. C. Moore Smith Few Eggs and No Oranges by Vere Hodgson Letters to an American Lady by C. S. Lewis Letters of C. S. Lewis by C. S. Lewis Letters from Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor ed. by Sally Fitzgerald Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman by Lord Chesterfield The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer The Aeneid by Virgil The Saga of the Volsungs by Anonymous The Vision of Sir Launfal by James Russell Lowell Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Ramayana of Valmiki ed. and trans. by Robert and Sally Goldman The Prelude by William Wordsworth Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton P. D. James Edmund Crispin Alan Bradley Patricia Moyes Peter Granger Rex Stout Sir Walter Scott The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke Mythos by Stephen Fry The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell Coming Up for Air by George Orwell P. G. Wodehouse The Last Days of Socrates by Plato The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis Champagne for the Soul by Mike Mason Edges of His Ways by Amy Carmichael The Footsteps at the Lock by Ronald Knox Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey Jane Austen Patrick Leigh Fermor Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson Heroes by Stephen Fry Troy by Stephen Fry Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman The Mabinogion trans. by Sioned Davies The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson Cindy’s List of Literature of Honor for Boys (archived webpage) Bleak House by Charles Dickens David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens The Man Who Knew Too Much by G. K. Chesterton The 39 Steps by John Buchan Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith The Well Read Poem An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis The Truth and the Beauty by Andrew Klavan The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill Jacob’s Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill The Medieval M