Weekly Links: The It's-Still-Christmas Edition

~ Links to some interesting reading, FOR What's left of your weekend ~

- "Twelve Days of Christmas Jollification"  - A primer on when the Twelve Days of Christmas actually started.


- "The Prophetess Anna Praises Christ": a beautiful meditation on Anna meeting the Christ child.


- "Aspire to be Fezziwig: Isn't It Time to Grow Up?"


-"People Disagreed with Jesus About the Bible Too"


-"Mary and Jesus and Me"


-"'An Odd Sort of Mercy': Jen Hatmaker, Glennon Doyle Melton, and The End of the Affair"



-"I'm On the Lookout for the Next Great Christian Novel"


-"How to Parent Without Regret": I needed to read this one this week.


-"The Bloody Attempt to Kidnap a British Princess"


-"Rules for Writers: Be Imperfect"


-"Why Can't We Read Anymore?"


-"It's Not Just You: Garfield Is Not Meant to Be Funny"



And, because I was reminded recently that if you've published a book, you ought to remind people of it every once in awhile...

-"Let Us Keep the Feast: Living the Church Year at Home" - a good resource if you want to learn more about why it's still Christmas, or if you want to learn how to celebrate any of the seasons that are coming up soon.


And that's it! I hope you have a lovely New Year's Day, and a good first week of 2017!


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell


This post contains Amazon affiliate links; if you purchase a book from this link, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.  (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Weekly Links! Welcome-to-Advent Edition

SOME INTERESTING LINKS FOR YOUR SUNDAY AFTERNOON, SET OUT IN MY USUAL CATEGORIES OF FAITH, FAMILY, AND FICTION.

Faith 

-"The Advent Project": Biola is hosting The Advent Project again. Every day during Advent (and also, I think, every day of Christmas), they'll be posting a seasonal devotion with scripture, written meditation, art, and music. Recommended!

-My Advent Pinterest page: As I said on Twitter, this is really a "baby" Pinterest board, in that I have fewer than twenty pins so far. But it's growing, and the stuff that's already there is pretty good! Take a look, and let me know if you know of any pins I should add.


-"How to Deal with Erratic Corpulent Ginger Authoritarian Much-Married Rulers: Options for Christians in Public Life": This is very clever.


-"The Virtue of Tolerance"


-"The Bravery of Glennon Doyle Melton"-a snippet:

No amount of embracing the self will cure the ills of the soul. No Amount. There is nothing you can do to love yourself enough to rescue your soul from death. You can’t. 

-"The Church's Outsourcing of Women's Discipleship"


-"The Great War's damage to the English soul and the church": I've never read this perspective before. It was interesting.

Family 

-"Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It."


-"Advent Reading": a fantastic list of books to read to children this Advent.

Fiction 

-"How Realistic is the Way Amy Adams' Character Hacks the Alien Language in Arrival? We Asked a Linguist."

-"Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, with Horrifying Book Curses": Relevant to the interests of all devoted readers.


Have a lovely Sunday evening!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Book Notes: "The Dean's Watch", by Elizabeth Goudge

"The Dean's Watch", by Elizabeth Goudge, is a historical novel set in a cathedral city and, as such, it reminded me very much of Susan Howatch's Starbridge series. 

But Goudge is so much warmer, so much truer, so much more joyful.

You can read my commonplace entry for some quotations that might give you an idea of Goudge's style, but here's a short summary of the plot: 

Mr. Peabody is a watchmaker who has scratched together a creative and satisfying work life while still suffering the depression and spiritual terror that is the legacy of his abusive father. The Dean is a powerful, intelligent, and yet socially shy man who serves God with dedication while lacking (or denying himself) the human connection he craves. Miss Montague is a disabled old woman who has learned how to love, and so changes almost everyone she meets. These cathedral town denizens -- and many more beautifully drawn characters -- all interact in a drama of pain and redemption and sorrow and joy.

I loved this book. 

I have to start with that, because anything else would be less than honest. I didn't know Christian fiction could do this. I didn't know it could be this honest, this real -- and by that I mean that it could be this truthful both about the weird, twisted ways sin hampers and distorts us, while also being gloriously, beautifully honest about the transforming, transporting love of God.

The characters are recognizable. Sometimes even painfully so. Goudge's portraits of unhappy families, and the ways they are unhappy, are so true to life. The big and the tiny things that keep us separated from each other. The ways that we long for each other but just cannot get past ourselves.

The way God sometimes helps us to get past ourselves anyway.

I loved the Dean and his earnest, courageous courtesy. I loved Miss Montague and her endurance.

And for their sakes I even loved the poor Mr. and Miss Peabody.

There were a few weird details that reminded me that I was reading a book from a different time and place, but that's to be expected when you're reading an author who isn't looking through the lens of your own cultural concerns.

But that's the only sour note I can think of, and it isn't even that sour. This is just a spectacular book. I read it slowly, and savored it, because every time I opened it, I felt like I had walked outside into the fresh, rain-washed air. I borrowed it from the library, but I don't think I was even halfway through before I ordered my own copy. It was that good.

Go read it! And be refreshed.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

This post contains an Amazon affiliate link; if you purchase a book from this link, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.  (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Weekly Links - All Saints' Day Edition!

My weekly* round-up of interesting reading from around the web:

-As a Christian who appreciates science (and science fiction!), I enjoyed reading this interview with the Pope's astronomer.  A highlight of it:

Rather than learning something theologically new, what I take from my discoveries is a more general sense of the “personality” of the creator. It might be compared to discovering a trove of old manuscripts where you think one of them might be some unpublished play of Shakespeare. You’d be excited because it might be a wonderful new work, or even just a window into what he was thinking while he was writing. But you also need to be sure it really is Shakespeare that you’re reading, not some other writer.

- Our family loves the show "Mythbusters", and so I enjoyed this article: "The Craziest Myths the Mythbusters Have Tackled, According to the Mythbusters".


- Now onto religion and society: "This Is Your Wake-up Call" is a sober reflection on abortion and one of the hardest stories in the book of Judges.


- Simcha Fisher on "Rogue Laughter in a Flippant Society" - I especially liked this paragraph:

. . . think of the difference between an eleven-year-old boy laughing about sex, and a forty-year-old married man laughing about sex. The grown man has probably earned his laughter; the boy can't have done so, and is laughing partly because he wants to look more experienced than he really is. True laughter, and the best jokes, come when we have some experience with the subject matter -- when we've faced something big and have survived.

- Anne Kennedy on "Celebrating the Reformation". Good, timely stuff:

The church cannot go beyond the gospel. The Christian doesn’t graduate from a saving knowledge of Jesus into something better later on. So also, the Christian cannot ascend to something higher, cannot move on to some better, fancier doctrine. From the moment of Jesus’ first infant cry, to his sorrowful and painful death, to his rising again, to his crushing of his enemies under his feet those who love him can never cry out someone else’s name for help, they can never give glory to themselves or to another, they can never be sustained by some other grace, they can never lean on and be ruled over by some other authority than Jesus’ own Word, they can never be tethered by some other faith.

-Reformation Day yesterday, All Saints Day today - and yet it's still Ordinary Time!  So, here's Anna Gissing on "Living in Ordinary Time":

. . . many Protestant Christians have been re-learning the rituals and habits of living into these churchy seasons as a way to inhabit the gospel and to structure our lives in a way that helps us remember that God is the author of time.

-Speaking of Reformation Day, I enjoyed this dense bio on "Katherine Parr: Reformation Queen of England and Ireland".


-AND, speaking of All Saints' Day, here's a lovely sonnet by Malcolm Guite for All Hallow's Eve.


- Tim Challies is Canadian, but I think his wise words are a comfort in any political climate: "I Went Away for Just 6 Days":

The temptation is not only to put my hope in politicians but to put my despair in them as well. I will be tempted not only to find too much joy in the election of the person I voted for, but also to sink too far into despair in the election of the person I did not. Either way, whether I soar too high or sink too low, I am declaring that I have put my trust in a man more than in God. I have forgotten that, ultimately, it is God who rules over and through earthly rulers.

-Finally, my friends and family and I found this article on "The Things that Drain Each Personality Type Most" scarily accurate.



Happy All Saints' Day, folks!
-Jessica Snell



*Or, if we're honest, biweekly.

Weekly Links: Language, Nerds, History, and more!

My weekly round-up of interesting reading from around the web:

-When my babies were still actually babies, I remember noticing that "ma" meant "mama", "milk", and "more", and that all of those things were pretty much the same thing in their little minds . . . if you've noticed the same thing, you'll probably enjoy this article: "Why the Words for 'Mom' and 'Dad' Sound So Similar in So Many Languages".

-I've heard people talk about "pastor theologians" a lot recently; here's the flip-side: "Pastoral Theologians".

-"We Have Met the Nerds, and They Are Us: Fandom, Fanfic, and the Landscape of Desire". This article goes from cultural phenomena to a Christian insight. I appreciated that, but I think my favorite part was this very clear description of the current zeitgeist:

In the West, and in America especially, we have grown up into a system that prizes desire above all. We all, nerd and non-nerd alike, live in our separate landscapes of desire. And we all have stories to tell, stories of scars and damage. It’s a hallmark of the contemporary West that we all feel like victims, we all feel broken. And we arebroken, but we also want what we want, and who the hell are you to tell me I’m wrong?

-Author Brandon Sanderson is in the middle of a very ambitious writing project - one that spans most of his published work - and I enjoyed reading his thoughts about what he's doing here: "Shadows of Self and the Mistborn Mega-Series".

-Finally, this is a great article that knocks down some old fables about a misunderstood period of history: "How the Middle Ages Really Were".

Book Notes: "The Forty-Niners", by William Weber Johnson (from Time-Life's Old West series)

"The Forty-Niners", by William Weber Johnson, is part of Time-Lifer's Old West series.

I treasure this series, as I've noted before, because they're full of stories culled from letters and journal entries and other ephemera of the times. It's one thing to get a dry recitation of facts and dates, and another to hear about the flavor of the times from the people who actually lived in them.

I especially enjoyed this volume because it was full of stories of my home state, California. I love knowing more about the place where I live.

I've been to places that are mentioned in this book. I've seen what they look like almost two hundred years past the time this book chronicles.

I've been to Downieville, a beautiful little mining town up in the Sierra Nevada, and reading about how it started as a rude collection of tents and shanties, populated by men who desperately hoped to make their fortunes . . . it fires my imagination. I can picture it, I can see it.

I've been to San Francisco, and reading about how once upon a time its harbor was full of abandoned ships, their masts piercing the skies, no one to sail them home, because all the sailors had jumped ship and run to the gold fields up in the mountains . . . it put that hilly, foggy, beautiful city in a completely new light for me.


I don't know how a historian would view this series of books because I'm not a historian. But as a simple reader, I loved them. I love hearing the stories of people who lived very long ago . . . but not so far away.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell


This post contains an Amazon affiliate link; if you purchase a book from this link, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.  (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Weekly Links: Virus-full waters, Cold Summer Dinners, Publishing Rejections, and more!

Your weekly round-up of good reading from around the web:

"AP Investigation: Olympic teams to swim, boat in Rio's filth": eeeew . . .

"Top 10 Cold Summer Dinners": so perfect for this time of year!


"Rejection Relief - First Blood": Caution for language, but some great stuff for writers.


"The Holy Round of Creeds and Chants and Mysteries": exegesis of a fascinating little poem.


"July Happened": heartbreaking and real.


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Weekend Links: the Cold War, getting ready for Advent, and more!

A few interesting links for your weekend reading and listening:

"The City Podcast: Understanding the Cold War": as someone who saw the end of the Cold War, but who was too young to really understand it, I found this short podcast fascinating and educational.

"The Fine Line Between Preparing and Jumping the Gun": a huge list of book links for Christmas and Advent, from Elizabeth Foss.

"The Right Stance Can Be Reassuring":

Watch celebrities on the red carpet, or models on a runway, and you’ll undoubtedly see the classic stop-for-the-flashing-cameras stance: chest open, legs apart, head level, usually with a hand on the hip.

It turns out that this pose not only best shows off what they are wearing, but also might send reassuring signals to their brains that they are capable and competent.

Weekend Links: Ebola, Hermeneutics, and more

Some good weekend reading from around the web:

"AAFP Member Describes His Harrowing Experience Overcoming Ebola":

I remember very clearly saying to the nurse standing beside me while being treated for Ebola, "I can't breathe. I am sick. I have no reserve. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up." I was working really hard to breathe. I said, "I don't know how you are going to breathe for me when I quit breathing." (There were no ventilators available.) (Elwa Hospital) had only had one Ebola survivor up to that point and he had never been really sick. So everyone I had ever seen with symptoms like I was exhibiting had died.

"Hermeneutics with Samuel Johnson":

. . . meaning comes from the whole and informs each part. No individual bit, no matter how much you clarify it, can in isolation deliver the work's meaning.

"Finding Faith Through Liturgy":

Grandeur hooked me, but it wasn’t what made me stay. The initial mystique of traditional churches may enchant or repulse us — but we need to look deeper. The aesthetic of traditional churches appeals to me, but the substance behind it anchors me. It accommodates my doubts and eases my grief.

"Advent Books - Links & Recommendations" - This is a terrific list of resources put together by the folks over at Lent & Beyond, and well-worth checking out.

"Science Fiction at Its Best: 'Interstellar' Review" - I'm linking to this solely for this paragraph, which I love:

Good science fiction has never been about rocket ships and lasers, but about people. It’s about using alien settings to tease out the nuances of truth that we can’t look at head-on because they involve such quotidian realities that they fade into the background if we look right at them. Great science fiction though marries that universality with stories about grand ideas, meditations on who and what we are as a species and what our future holds. Good science fiction uses the trappings of the future to tell stories of the present, while great science fiction is one layer more: telling stories of the future that resonate in the present even as they map the future. The difference between the good and the great is the difference between simile and metaphor.

7 Quick Takes

1. I started Jennifer Fulwiler's (our host's) book, "Something Other Than God" one night, and finished it the next. It is so good. (Review forthcoming.)

2. Kalos Press is still looking for submissions on miscarriage and infertility. The deadline is June 1. I encourage you take a look at the call for submissions, and maybe pass it on, if you know someone who would be a good contributer!

3. My daughter has taken to reading my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook as if it were a novel. This has resulted, in the last few day, in made-from-scratch devil's food cake (with fudge frosting) and homemade blueberry muffins, appearing in my kitchen, as if by magic.

So yes, dear child, I will keep buying you cocoa and butter and sugar. You bake away, you brilliant girl, you.

4. (Seriously, it's fun to watch my eldest adopt a hobby so whole-heartedly. I delight in her delight.)

5. So, here's a question for you: what's your favorite part of U.S. History? I admit to being an Anglophile, and overdosing on British history, but it's time for me to learn a bit more about my own country's past. Where should I start? What stories and settings from the United States really capture your imagination? I'd love to know.

6.  Today I had the rare experience of my cat actually coming to me, and wanting to be scratched and petted and snuggled.

He's the sort of cranky beast that thanks you for your pains by biting you when he's had enough loving - purring all the while of course. He's a bit of a psychopath, but we keep him around because he's so terribly pretty. And he kills bugs. (I admire that in a cat.)

Anyone else have a cranky pet?

(I have to say: my dog makes up for our cat's crankiness. Our dog only wants us to LOVE HER, PLEASE LOVE HER, SHE ONLY WANTS US TO LOVE HER AND WALK HER AND FEED HER AND SCRITCH HER OH, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!!!!

But that' s dog for you, right?)

7. Is it terrible that I really, really want to watch this?




More Quick Takes can be found here, at Conversion Diary.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell


This post contains Amazon affiliate links. (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Links: Holy Week and Vikings!

"Holy Week Idea":

My dear friend Jerusha passed along this great idea to mark Holy Week. But you have to prepare early, so I’m sharing it now.

Their family used no electric lights during Holy Week last year. For morning and evening light, they used only candles. I loved this idea, but had no candles in the house last year . . .

"History Channel Gets Vikings Precisely Wrong":

Every story has to be about some dynamic young person (who wants freedom) in conflict with a hidebound old conservative, who lives by oppression.

The problem — and this is serious in a series coming from a network that calls itself the History Channel — is that this is precisely the opposite of the political dynamic that was actually playing out in the Viking Age.

And I had that link above, written by Lars Walker, already copied onto this post when I read the news that his new novel is out! So excited - his Viking novels are awesome: history, fantasy, and Christianity all rolled into one adventuresome, orthodox bundle. Here's a link to the latest, Hailstone Mountain, and here's a review. Looking forward to reading it!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Book Notes: The Elizabethan World Picture, by E. M. W. Tillyard

(You can read a selection of notable quotations from this book here.)


The Elizabethan World Picture by E.M.W. Tillyard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This little book is an invaluable aid to understanding not only Elizabethan literature, but also its close follower: the work of the metaphysical poets.

Every page of Tillyard's book is an enlightenment. He lays open the world as the Elizabethans saw it, from the most minute of the elements to the great dance of the stars in the firmament above.

And he makes that world infinitely attractive. There is an appealing order in the world the way the Elizabethans saw it, in the way that the kingdom of plants was a real - and not an imaginary - parallel to the kingdom of the animals, which paralleled in turn the kingdom of men. To understand a truth about one part of the world was to understand something true about the rest of the world because there were real correspondences throughout all of creation, and all created things were part of one long "chain of being", rising from the elements to the plants to the animals to man to the angels to God himself, from whom it all came. One part of creation mirrored the others. If you knew something about lions, you knew something about kings.

And along with those macrocosms, you gained knowledge of the microcosm of man himself. To know about kings was to know something about the role that reason ought to play in your own self - reason being the proper monarch of the well-ordered self. Everything was connected.

The connections were not mistakes, and not happenstances. They of necessity existed in a world that was ordered by an intelligent creator. As it says in Proverbs, "It is the glory of God to hide a thing; it is the glory of kings to seek it out." The Elizabethans sought out that order to the full.

Fascinating book; I highly recommend it.

View all my reviews

Christian Regency Romance Blog

I'm happy to announce the launch of Regency Reflections, a blog about Christian romance novels set in the Regency (think the time of Jane Austen, Napoleon, and Constable). This is a group blog, and I'm honored to be blogging alongside many talented authors, including Ruth Axtell Morren, Laurie Alice Eakes, and Naomi Rawlings.

What can you expect from the blog? Well, if you'll hop over and read Kristi Ann Hunter's exellent kick-off post, you'll see that it's going to be a mix of history, book reviews, author interviews, and devotional thoughts.

I'll be blogging there about twice a month, starting this Friday, when I'm going to share a bit about love, romance, and John Donne. (Because what's a good marriage without a bit of poetry?)  I hope you'll check it out!  And if it's intriguing to you, go ahead and add it to your feedreader, so you can enjoy some fun chatter about books, beaux, and blessings as we explore this fascinating era and all the fun stories that spring from it.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Links! many, many mostly-unrelated things

I recommend this post by Fred Sanders on Cyrus the Great, which, in addition to explaining why that ancient king is important and providing one more good apology for classical education, includes many interesting quotations from Dorothy Sayers. ("Sayers" = must-read, yes?)
If you, like me, have a secondhand bread machine sans manual, you might find this post from the Hillbilly Housewife as helpful as I did. She goes through - in great and welcome detail - exactly how to use and figure out the quirks of your new-to-you appliance.
If you know who Fitzwilliam Darcy and Mark Darcy are, and if you have seen the Harry Potter films, you just might find this imagined conversation as funny as I did (it had me laughing out loud). (Also, I want to see the movie they're promoting. The trailer looks great.)
Speaking of Harry Potter, I'm pretty sure I need a "Make Love, Not Horcruxes" t-shirt.
I wrote earlier about using coconut oil as a moisturizer. If you want to read more about something similar, check out Kelly's post about using jojoba oil. She adds a "steaming" step to her routine, which sounds interesting.
Here's a neat blog post passed onto me by my sister-in-law called "Liturgy of the Home", comparing the rhythm of the author's home to the liturgy of the church, and looking at a few of the connections between them.
I really like this hairstyle tutorial (I'm wearing my hair this way right now, in fact!). It's quick and easy, but it looks very elegant.
This post, by a mother who has recently lost her son, is amazing and terrible and sad and all about the love of God. I don't have better words to describe it, but go read it. And pray for her and her husband, please.
Emily has a post about making your own bouillon which is intriguing.

I hope this week's links didn't give you too much whiplash! Not many of them are very related, but hopefully they provide you some good reading.
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Links! Dueling, homemaking, homeschooling, but most especially, Terrible Poetry

If you go to no other link on this list, you have to go here, and check out Chip MacGregor's Bad Poetry Contest.  Here's his description of the annual event:

For those not in the know, we deal with books and publishing 51 weeks out of the year, answering questions and offering insights to writers and those interested in the world of publishing. But one week out of the year (my birthday week), we set aside the topic of publishing in order to share something much deeper... much more meaningful... and very stupid. In the old British tradition of offering something falsely deep yet with a veneer of thoughtfulness, we hold a Bad Poetry Contest. Each year the readers send in truly horrible poetry, then a team of experts (me...and sometimes Mike, if he's sober and I can convince him to help) offers a thorough evaluation of each piece ("That sucks... but this sucks worse."). Eventually we come up with a winner, who is presented with a truly fabulous Grand Prize. One year it was a 45 record of Neil Diamond singing "I Am, I Said" (which contains these deep thoughts: "I am, i said, to no one there, and no one heard at all not even the chair." Wow. Sing to me, Neil.) Another year it was a very special book that had been sent to me in hopes of finding representation: Does God Speak Through Cats? You see the theme here? We go for a mood of deepfulness and reflectivosity. And YOU need to participate. 

Moving on to real reflection: free advice may be worth what you pay for it, but this seems to be an exception to the rule.

And here is more in that sensible, gracious vein.

Finally, Lars Walker has a post on dueling as an economic phenomenon:

". . . imagine you're a gentleman who sometimes needs a short-term loan, and your only source of credit is to borrow from another gentleman. 

Now, imagine that someone publicly calls you a liar.

He is attacking your trustworthiness, the only collateral you possess. If word gets around that you're not a man of your word, who will lend you ten pounds, when you need to buy seed in the spring?

We still use the saying, “His word is his bond.” In this situation, that's more than a metaphor. It's quite literally true."

Happy Mother's Day to all you moms out there!

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Book 6 of 15: "'What Shall I Say?': A Guide to Letter Writing for Ladies"

This is a little museum reproduction of a book originally published in 1898. After listing the proper forms of address (starting with the queen, then proceeding through the greater and lesser ranks of nobility, clergy and professional men) and a few pithy pieces of advice on the mechanics of letter writing itself ("No one admires a 'style' which is difficult to read, and if you hanker to be 'admired,' as all vain persons do, you would, for your own sake, do well to choose some other field in which to 'show off' than in affecting an eccentric handwriting"), the rest of the book consists in examples of various types of letters.

I think the author of this book must have a had a stifled longing to be a novelist, because these letters are entertaining stories in and of themselves. With titles like "From a governess to her mother saying she is unhappy in her situation" to "From young lady to her lover, who urges immediate marriage", these letters are bunches of little windows into late Victorian social life. In many cases, the letters are answered by a second example, and sometimes two! For example, the letter "Asking lady to sing at a concert" is followed by "Reply-favourable" and "Reply-unfavourable."

You'd think the Victorians would surpass us in courtesy at every occasion, so it was interesting to read some sentiments in these letters that wouldn't be polite to write in a modern email. For instance, in a birthday letter, a young lady says to her mother: "How can I express my joy at having you still with us to congratulate on another birthday?" Can you imagine that on a Hallmark card? "Happy birthday, Mom, I'm so glad you're not dead yet."Reading this book made me realize that mortality is avoided in modern conversation in a way it wasn't when this book was written.

I think my favorite, though, was the section of love letters. There are several in a row dealing with responses to marriage proposals - some accepting and some declining. A couple of the declining ones are very kind - expressing the lady's hopes that the gentleman will find someone who can love him as much as he deserves, etc. - but one of them reads as follows:

Dear Sir,

I thought from my manner of receiving your smallest attentions, that it would have been evident to you that those same attentions were disagreeable to me. You will do me the justice to acknowledge that I never on any single occasion gave you the least encouragement.

Hoping you will come to your senses, and forget me as soon as possible.

I am, yours truly,

MABEL YATES.

In twenty-first century terms: burn.

Very fun book. Definitely worth dipping into, and, honestly, a useful little tome if you're at a loss for words, even in 2010. The language might be old, but the sentiments are recognizable even 100 years later.

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Links: Whiskey, Weight, Word and more

This is a recipe for something called a "hot skin". I don't know why it's called that, but it's made from lapsang souchong tea and whiskey, with a few other ingredients, and it is smoky goodness.
Why do you gain weight when you start a new workout? This is the most clearly I've ever seen it explained, and I think knowing this can save you a lot of discouragement when you start that new weights or yoga routine!
This made me laugh so hard. To my writer friends especially: check it out. It's an autocorrect hack for Word. "No! No! No!"  Ha!
Staying on the topic of books, I've learned a lot about publishing in the past year, but I did not know about signatures. Apparently, the possible page counts for your masterpiece were determined hundreds of years ago by none other than Johannes Gutenberg.
I've been thinking a lot about how I use my computer, and I appreciated reading Challies' thoughts about how he moderates his use of technology. (Here is the computer verse: "All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial. All things are beneficial, but I will not be mastered by anything." Emphasis mine.)
Here's an easy and super-cute Valentine's Day craft for the kids.