Spring 2018:

Where do I even start? How do I even quantify how beautiful this was, and how touching it was to listen to forty different pieces of preeminent poetry and prose from the literary canon. I can see myself putting this on, and letting it sing and read throughout my whole house, as I'm putting up the tree and all the decorations this coming after-Thanksgiving weekend. ( )

A nice little anthology (there is an audiobook available read by Juliet Stevenson and Simon Callow). Most authors are British with the exception of "the usual suspects" -- Moore, Alcott, Longfellow, Irving -- and Henry James, who probably counts as British anyway. Much of the book consists of excerpts from longer works. Still, I would have given this book five stars but for the fact that the many lovely illustrations are completely uncredited, being in the public domain, except for the illustration from E. H. Shepard's drawing from The Wind in the Willows. I recognized Arthur Rackham and John Leech but it would have been nice to know the sources of the other illustrations; and a bit of information on the less well-known contributors would have been a good thing too. ( )