It’s All Gonna Be Magnificent

Thoughts on “Surprised by Oxford” by Carolyn Weber

“Few people have the imagination for reality.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I do believe I have found my new favorite book. I bought it about five years ago, and it quietly sat on my bookshelf (as so many of my patient, unread volumes do) until this spring, when I finally dove into its pages. I’m not sure what I was expecting…So many of my friends had been singing its praises for years, and I was prepared to like it. But I wasn’t prepared for it to nourish something deep inside of me, for it to absolutely and utterly delight me. Carolyn Weber is the writer I wish I was and from henceforth will endeavor to become. In her memoir, Surprised by Oxford, she shares her academic years at Oxford University in England as she pursues a master’s degree in Romantic English Literature. She arrives with a mind intensely alive, eager, and confident but is surprised with the presence and alluring of God and Christianity…and TDH (Tall, Dark, and Handsome).

One of the reasons I found this book to be so enchanting is that Carolyn seamlessly weaves in thoughts, ideas, and notes from literature, music, Scripture, and art into her story. They highlight her experience, stand as garden walls of context, and feel like clues being slipped to the reader as Weber draws us in to the analyzations, wonderings, and wrestlings of her mind and time in the “City of Dreaming Spires.”