Grace Livingston Hill

Lately I’ve been doing some behind-the-scenes work on my blog. Tweaking formatting here and there… (had you noticed?) …and trying to organize some of my older posts. I added some photos from my personal library to a post I wrote in 2015 about reading levels.

In the process of pulling books to photograph I realized my library is slowly evolving into a collection of books I remember reading when I was growing up. Of course I still discover new “keepers” from time to time, but mostly I tend to hang onto old favorites.

I thought it might be fun to mix in some reviews of some of those throw-back titles occasionally. For organizational purposes I decided it would be good to first talk about the authors, and then link in my reviews (past and future). 

A kind of virtual library, if you will, but much more complete than my actual library.

One author that holds nostalgic memories for me is Grace Livingston Hill. She lived from 1865-1947 so, no, I was not reading her novels when they were first released. They were actually already very vintage by the time I was reading them in the 1980s. 

Grace Livingston Hill wrote over 100 novels and our public library had many of them when I was a teenager. I read as many as I could get my hands on between 1980 and 1983, which turned out to be most of them.

Since then I’ve re-read a few of them from time to time as the mood strikes me for something sweet and old-fashioned. They are very predictable and oh-so-precious. Some modern readers don’t care for the sappiness of them. However, I love GLH’s exquisite descriptions and enjoy chuckling over the occasional melodramatic scenes.

I own 30 or so titles, some in vintage hard-back and some in not-quite-as-vintage paperback. Plus a few that are in the public domain on Kindle.

My Reviews and/or Commentary

• Crimson Mountain – From 2007. In which I decide I’m not mechanically inclined.
• The Enchanted Barn – From 2016. In which my friend and her family move into a barn.
• More to come…

Titles Available on Kindle

Disclosure: Many of the following book covers are Amazon affiliate links. 

Currently Free

The titles in this section were free when I posted them but prices are always subject to change, so be sure to double-check before ordering. 

In my experience, these free editions are usually not as well-edited as the Love Endures editions listed below. However, they are still perfectly readable. Plus, the titles don’t overlap much.

Love Endures Editions

I suspect that the titles in the Love Endures editions with the beautiful updated covers are Grace Livingston Hill’s most popular books. As I glanced through the list I noticed that they include many of my favorites. Most of them  are currently $2.99 each.

Free GLH Audiobooks

The following books are apparently in the public domain because they are available as free audiobooks from LibriVox.

Do you know about LibriVox? It’s where you can download totally free audiobooks. All books from LibriVox are in the public domain (meaning very vintage) and are read by volunteers. Some of the readers are better than others. But hey! You can’t beat the price, right?

Do you like to read vintage novels? Have you ever read any by Grace Livingston Hill? I’d love to hear about it!