A Circle of Quiet.

What gallant attempts people will make to brighten and beautify, to take a messy tangle of weeds and dirt and shape all that unruly life into something lovely. Each of the books I am recommending takes the raw materials of life and turns them into something delightful and distinctive. Each of these books reminds us that people are "guardians of a precious slice of life" (Etty Hillesum), capable of finding or creating meaning in the most commonplace of circumstances or even in the face of uncommon evil.

The determination to create something worthwhile drives the rather ordinary protagonist of English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop (Houghton Mifflin, $10,123 pp.), published for the first time in the United States last year. In this delightfully wry little book, Florence Green is recently widowed. "Small, wispy, and wiry, somewhat insignificant from the front view, and totally so from the back," Green is not the type of person to make waves, or even to be noticed at all. She decides to open the only bookstore in the small town where she has been living for some years, only to be met with both subtle and direct opposition. Green simply plugs along, fumbling and hesitant at times, resolved to keep the bookstore alive despite the efforts of certain prominent people. Fitzgerald has an amazing capacity to convey the simplest human interactions with accuracy and wit, and she hits the mark squarely when describing the half-thoughts that materialize in polite conversation. Invited to afternoon tea with the most powerful man in town, Green notices that "there was only one knife on the table and the forks had been forgotten." This small domestic detail causes her to "wonder whether, as a general rule, he had any regular meals at all." Green endears herself to the reader with her unassuming manner and reluctance to abandon the belief that she has something to offer her town.

An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum (1941-1943) (Washington square Press, $5.99, 281 pp.) offers a glimpse of a young woman contending with much more sinister forces. Hillesum's journals were written when she was twenty-seven-years old. At first, the war is barely mentioned. Her early entries reveal a young woman immersed in complicated and intimate relationships with men, engaged in intellectual and political discussions with a wide circle of friends. "I still lack a basic tune; a steady undercurrent; the inner source that feeds me keeps drying up and, worse still, I think too much," she writes. "If at the end of a long life I am able to give some form to the chaos inside me, I may well have fulfilled my own small purpose." Hillesum's journal is anything but abstract and vague. "Sometimes it takes so much effort to get through the daily round - getting up, washing, exercises, putting on stockings without holes, laying the table, in short getting through the basics - that little is left over for other things. Yet when, like any other decent citizen, I get up on time, I feel proudly that I have achieved something marvelous." She becomes more and more sure of herself and her faith in God even as her fate as a Jew under the Nazis becomes more uncertain. She was killed in Auschwitz in November 1943. "Flowers and fruit grow wherever they are planted," she tells us; "life is beautiful and meaningful."

Famed A Wrinkle in Time author Madeleine L'Engle's memoirs, The Crosswicks Journal, have their own charm. The Crosswicks Journal consists of A Circle of Quiet (HarperSan Francisco, $13, 246 pp.), The Summer of the Great-Grandmother ($12, 245 pp.), and The Irrational Season ($11, 215 pp.). The Irrational Season, my favorite, gave me the feeling that I was sitting at the kitchen table with this talented woman, sipping tea and having a late-night chat about her writing, her friendships, her memories, her views on history, art, theater, prayer, and whatever else popped into her head. The liturgical seasons provide the backdrop of her reflections, transforming this rambling conversation into a sort of testimony to faith and life's abiding goodness.

If you haven't yet had a chance to read The Cloister Walk (Riverhead, $12.50,385 pp.), Kathleen Norris's account of monastic life, do so. Norris helps us to see the value of structuring our days, relentless and demanding and amorphous though they may seem, around the liturgical rituals of prayer and reflection. In so doing, we can begin to recognize "the transformative power hiding in the simplest things." Norris's newest book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead, $24.95,384 pp.) takes those same simple things and uses them to make concrete theological terms such as Incarnation, eschatology, revelation, and evangelism. Her chapter on revelation is less than a page, and mostly describes a conversation with a little boy who lives on a ranch about a dream he had after his dog died. In a chapter on prayer as mystery, she describes how Psalm 122 came into her mind as she wearily trudged from one terminal to another at O'Hare Airport. Prayer is "ordinary experience lived with gratitude and wonder, a wonder that makes us know the smallness of oneself in an enormous and various universe," Norris writes.

Norris has also published an edition of The Psalms (Riverhead Books, $12.95, 400 pp.), for which she writes an introductory "commentary." Norris does not provide brilliant new insights about the psalms, but the handsome layout of the book makes it easy to imagine reading them all, perhaps one each day. The King James translation, used here, renders the psalms in their most poetic English form. But you certainly do not need to buy Norris's book to read the psalms this summer. My current favorite (which I quote from my New Revised Standard Version) is Psalm 131: "O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,/my eyes are not raised too high;/I do not occupy myself with things/too great and too marvelous for me./But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me./O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore." In the midst of days when I occupy myself with things that can seem quite mundane, I gain perspective and calm when I read this psalm.

Elizabeth McCloskey lives in Falls Church, Virginia.