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Today’s episode is The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson. A bunch of troubled kids, a messy church pageant, and a beautiful reminder of what Christmas can mean to each of us personally.

Merry Christmas!

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The winner will be announced just before Christmas!

Today’s story is Phantastes by George MacDonald—a wonderful tale of a young man’s journey through Fairyland. This one touches the heart with its mix of sorrow and joy, and it’s full of moments you can feel in your bones.

https://www.pintswithjack.com/reading-day/year-3/

In this special episode, we celebrate C. S. Lewis Reading Day 2025 by looking at Lewis' family and close relationships. He had a profound bond with his brother Warnie, showed love and loyalty to his friends throughout his life, and a wonderful love story later in his life, when he married Joy Davidman,

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

In this episode, we explore Michael Crichton’s Timeline—a fast, clever blend of historical detail, quantum theory, and medieval adventure. We walk through it as modern day turns into 14-century France. It's a great story for anyone who loves history mixed with action-adventure. Join us for a glimpse of one of Crichton’s most imaginative works.

We meet young Horatio Hornblower as he begins his career in the Royal Navy as a midshipman. The entire Hornblower series offers a masterful depiction of life at sea during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and this is just the start of Hornblower's naval career.

These stories are rich with examples of leadership, learning, and growth under pressure—and as a bonus, Stephen closes out the episode boldly with the old sailor's song Heart of Oak.

Roverandom is an endearing adventure story — created by JRR Tolkien to comfort his young son who lost his toy dog on a seaside holiday. Out of that small heartbreak came a fun and exciting tale of a little puppy who gets mixed up in the affairs of wizards and ends up adventuring on the moon and down to the bottom of the sea. It's a sweet adventure everyone can love.

Trace the winding road of The Pilgrim’s Regress—C.S. Lewis’s first major work after his conversion to Christianity. Written in 1933, it’s a challenging book, rich with philosophy, symbols, and reflections on the modern search for meaning and satisfaction in your soul. And a reflection of Lewis' own internal journey.

Strangely, the best part may be the Afterword - where we learn a bit of how Lewis' tone and style warmed and changed over time. And his careful dedication to charitable reading.

A challenging book with wonderful nuggets of thought and wisdom to find all the way through! Let's walk through it together.

Wrapping up our Halloween series with a Monster MASHup (Yes, a nod to the song.) This episode dives into the backstories of some of the most famous monsters - like Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, the Headless Horseman and back even further to monsters like Medusa and the Norse wolf Fenrir along with Shelob and Ungoliant. They're not just creatures of the night, but characters born from imagination and myth and revealing something true about humanity's flaws.