Saturday Good Reads

I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House when I was in high school. It was originally published in 1959 (when I was somewhat younger than high school) and made into a movie in 1963 called “The Haunting,” starring Julie Harris.  Harris has a line in the movie that has stuck in my head more than 40 years – and it’s something like “I sleep on my left side to weaken my heart so I’ll die faster.” That gives some insight into the movie and the book. (A 1999 remake of the movie starred Liam Neeson and Catharine Zeta-Jones.) The 1963 film has achieved something of a cult status.

What Jackson is perhaps best known for is a short story published in The New Yorker in 1949, – “The Lottery,” one of the most widely anthologized stories in American literature and still something of a favored assignment in high school English classes. This past week, Emily Collins at Curator Magazine took a look at Shirley Jackson’s writing, and discovered the “ordinariness of evil.”

Faith

Absence Makes the Heart Grow: A Marriage Letter - Seth Haines.

Relevance Cannot Be Earned, It Can Only Be Given – Matt Appling.

Getting Past “I Want to Know You” – Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact.

Remember You Are Dust - Morgan Meis at Image Journal.

History / Literature

Shirley Jackson and the Ordinariness of Evil – Emily Collins at Curator Magazine.

The Three Hermits – short story by Leo Tolstoy via The Rabbit Room.

Hannah More: Powerhouse in a Petticoat – Karen Swallow Prior at Christianity Today.

Flannery O’Connor’s Unsafe Audience – Mike Duran at deCompose.

Poetry

Sunday Double Haiku – Simply Darlene

Monday Muse on ‘A Poet’s Sourcebook’ – Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

The Poet as Unacknowledged Legislator – Charity Craig at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Remembering Phil Levine – Paul Mariani at Image Journal.

Remain – Amy Orazio at Curator Magazine.

Photography

Some Leaves – Timothy Good at Photography by Tiwago.

Snow in Jerusalem – Victor Bezrukov at Photographer’s Log.

Painting

December Forests 4: Environments – Randall David Tipton at Painter’s Process.

People

My Husband’s Cousin – Simply Darlene.

Photograph: A scene from The Haunting of Hill House (1963).