Saturday Good Reads: Soul-Stirrers

We saw Les Miserables last night at the movie theater. As we drove home, my wife asked me if I liked it or The Hobbit better. I said they were both different movies, but Les Miserables stirred the soul. 

What a movie. That’s all I can say. What a movie. 

What it reminded me of was other things, the things I’ve read and seen that stirred my soul. 

Like Don Quixote by Cervantes. 

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. And perhaps David Copperfield. (My wife prefers A Tale of Two Cities.) 

They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis and Arthur Greeves.  

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown. 

Chariots of Fire. Slumdog Millionaire.  

The War of the End of the World and Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa. 

The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes. 

Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. 

The Poems of Rupert Brooke. 

The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor.  

There are other films and books, of course. Things come first to mind for me. There is something about all of them – a certain nobility of spirit, an aspiration for something higher, a reach inside ourselves for something that touches and wraps our hearts. 

I considered something else, too. This soul-stirring business – it’s likely why I write. 

What stirs your soul?