Four million. It blows my mind. I just looked up how many new books are published each year in the United States.

Four million. That number can feel a little overwhelming, but it can also feel a little exciting.

For it means that the possibilities for living books, that collective pool available

to us, is potentially expanding every few months. Now, of course, not every one of those

four million titles will be a living book. In fact, most of them won't. And of the small percentage that are living, only a few will be well written and contain good

and noble ideas.

We have to do our research to determine which ones are worthy to share with our children.

So I try to keep a stack of new books going and read through

them in turn, replenishing the stack as I hear of new possibilities. And when I find one that deserves

that coveted award a good living book, I share it with you. Today I want to make sure you know where

you can find those titles and give you some ideas for how you can use them with your family.

Welcome to the Simply Charlotte Mason podcast. I'm Sonia Schaefer. I love to discover new book gems,

whether they are new from a publisher or just new to me. And I like to then share with you

the titles of the ones that pass muster. Now, we have already chosen our favorite

living books to include in our curriculum. If you look at the book list for one of our

history courses, you are going to look at a list of some of our favorite books. But as

I mentioned, more books are coming out every year.

And sometimes we have more favorite books than we can prudently schedule into a year of study.

So we keep a running list of what we call bonus titles.

Bonus titles are books that are not written into our history lesson plans, but that have

passed our high standards.

Check the description for a link to that list.

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