It is crazy to think that today is already Ash Wednesday. It seems like Christmas just ended and now it’s the middle of February and the beginning of Lent.
One of my favorite songs ever is “Ashes” which is typically only sung on Ash Wednesday. So, on this Ash Wednesday, I offer you a brief meditation on the four verses. Sadly, one of the best videos I found does not have all of the verses. 🙁 Therefore, the following verses are from memory.
The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth With this volume, the holy trinity of fairy tales – the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen – becomes a quartet. In the 1850s, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth traversed the forests, lowlands, and mountains of northern Bavaria to record fairy tales, gaining the admiration of even the Brothers Grimm. Most of Schönwerth’s work was lost – until a few years ago, when thirty boxes of manuscripts were uncovered in a German municipal archive. Now, for the first time, Schönwerth’s lost fairy tales are available in English. Violent, dark, and full of action, and upending the relationship between damsels in distress and their dragon-slaying heroes, these more than seventy stories bring us closer than ever to the unadorned oral tradition in which fairy tales are rooted, revolutionizing our understanding of a hallowed genre.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Find the book: Goodreads
Water Song by Suzanne Weyn Young, beautiful, and wealthy, Emma Pennington is accustomed to a very comfortable life. Although war rages abroad, she hardly feels its effect. She and her mother travel from their home in Britain to the family estate in Belgium, never imagining that the war could reach them there. But it does.
Soon Emma finds herself stranded in a war-torn country, utterly alone. Enemy troops fight to take over her estate, leaving her with no way to reach her family, and no way out.
With all of her attention focused on survival and escape, Emma hardly expects to find love. But the war will teach her that life is unpredictable, people aren’t always what they seem, and magic is lurking everywhere.
Find the book: Goodreads
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly link-up hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.
This week’s list is the Top Ten Book Related Problems I Have.
This is currently my biggest problem. I do not have enough space for all of my books. My sister says I have too many books. I do not agree. When we moved a year and a half ago, I sold quite a few of my books. And I still don’t have enough shelf space. 🙁
The feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes was on February 11th. It happened to fall on a Wednesday this year which means it was a night we had religious ed. It also happens to be the last Wednesday before Lent this year. All of that led me to declare last Wednesday night a “Mary Party” for the fourth grade classroom.