We continue with this second week in our Summer Reading series with Part Two of “Some of My Best Friends are Books” as Elisabeth chronicles her early formation through books. To learn more about Elisabeth’s home life, referenced in this devotional, we recommend reading “The Shaping of A Christian Family.” For more of Elisabeth’s recollections of “The Cottage”, we invite you to visit our summer devotional series from 2023.
Evenings at home were often spent with the whole family sitting together, each with his head in a book. Or at times my father would read aloud. He bored us to death reading passages from Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, or George Borrow. The Bible in Spain was “good writing,” he said, and he wanted us to hear it. He loved good writing, and as an editor had to read an awful lot of appallingly bad writing, but I am grateful now for his efforts to teach us the difference. He also read sometimes to us from Henry A. Shute’s Real Diary of a Real Boy, which got the closest thing to a belly laugh I ever heard out of my sedate father.
A big dictionary was always within reach of the dining room table because it was there that arguments most frequently arose over words. He wanted them quickly settled, and made us lookup the words in question.
A part of each summer was spent at ”The Cottage,” a big old lodge-type house in the White Mountains built by my great-great uncle, who was, among other things, editor of the New York Journal of Commerce and a writer of books. His bedroom on the second floor, an enormous paneled one with a huge fireplace, had hardly been rearranged at all since he died, and one wall was still lined with crumbling leather-bound books. A rainy day in the mountains was a chance for me to pore over field manuals from the Civil War, great volumes on law, Mrs. Oliphant’s novels, or a tiny set, tinily printed, of the unabridged Arabian Nights.
There were magazines on the bottom shelves, too-old ones, with advertisements of Pear’s soap or Glen kitchen ranges, and I found in them serialized stories by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Continued next week
**Excerpt originally published in All That Was Ever Ours, p. 89-90