Two recent posts about books for the Close Reads FB group:
1)
In lieu of a bio, here's a list of ten books that have stayed with me, that have shaped my life. I'm 38-years-old now. I read all of these for the first time between the ages of 10 and 18.
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
Brief Lives - Neil Gaiman, Various
The Chocolate War - Robert Cormier
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Macbeth - William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost - John Milton
The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame - Robert Silverberg, ed.
The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
The Stranger - Albert Camus
I'm not at all saying that these texts should be prescribed to anyone else. My own life might have been better had ten other texts wormed their way into my heart. But I was who I was and these are the books that were available to me, that insisted themselves upon me. They are still the books that reveal who I am now, a late 20th Century hot mess! This list is not identical to an all-time Top Ten list, though there is some overlap.
2)
The last list was the ten books that shaped me, that I cannot shake, the ones that got inside deep before I knew any better. They are the Top Ten by default.
This list is the list of my CHOSEN TOP TEN BOOKS OF ALL TIME, the books that I have fallen for and added to the previous ten. This is my first time making this list. I intend to cheat.
1. Par Lagerkvist
Lagerkvist could have been on my other list. I read The Dwarf when I was 15 or so. But it wasn't The Dwarf that made a huge impression on me. It was a series of books that I read when I was 19 or 20:
Barabbas
The Sybil
The Death of Ahasuerus
Pilgrim at Sea
The Holy Land
Herod and Mariamne
(These were translated in the 60s and available in paperbacks. The last four have been out-of-print ever since.)
(IF I had to pick only one, it would be Barabbas)
Lagerkvist described himself as a "religious atheist." His aesthetic and his philosophy resonated deeply with my own internal struggles. I rebelliously ran from God, cursed God, denied God, until I realized that my posture was ALWAYS *in relation* to God. I could not escape.
I return to these books every few years.
2. Sigrid Undset
I've seen a few people mention Kristin Lavransdatter. I still haven't read it.
What I did read at about the same time I was reading Lagerkvist was Undset's The Master of Hestviken. To be honest, I only read the first two books of the four. And of those, it's only the first one that stuck with me. The Axe. It's a favorite. I re-read it until it fell apart. I need to buy a new copy and I need to read all four books.
The Axe took Lagerkvist's Swedish despair and shot it in the head with Norwegian faith. Both are painful. No easy comforts.
3. The essays of G.K. Chesterton
I enjoy Chesterton's novels and his stories. I love the essays. I don't love any collection more than any other. With all of the work in the public domain, I've been thinking about publishing my own personal "best of" collection.
A list of ten favorite Chesterton essays, not in any particular order:
From Alarms and Discursions:
"Cheese"
"The Nightmare"
From All Things Considered
"On Running After One's Hat"
"Wine When It Is Red"
"Fairy Tales"
From Tremendous Trifles
"The Dragon's Grandmother"
"The Red Angel"
From The Well and the Shallows
"Babies and Distributism"
From What's Wrong With the World
"The Free Family"
"The Wildness of Domesticity"
4. James B. Jordan
5. Peter J. Leithart
Everything they've written. :-)
Fav books are probably Through New Eyes and Against Christianity.
I was raised Methodist with a strange liturgical-Pentecostal flair. I am as grateful for this as I am still confused by it. In college (a small Wesleyan school), I started reading Judges based on an Our Daily Bread bible reading plan. The story of Ehud saying "I have a message from God for you" as he stabbed Eglon in the belly started me on a fun journey toward Reformedville. There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the moment I pinpoint as a transitional one. Reading Jonathan Edwards in a lit class was a step. There were lots of other steps. I had a degree in lit and education (I apologize that there are no education titles on either of these lists. They haven't been all that important to me!). I was disgusted by the public schools but did not know of any alternatives. I discovered Sayers' "Lost Tools of Learning" hosted on Wes Callihan's site (in 2001? 2002?). I slowly learned that all of the education people I was enjoying reading were Reformed. I discovered Biblical Horizons and never looked back. I'm committed to the BH Mission Statement as much as I am to the Heidelberg Catechism or Westminster Confession.
http://www.biblicalhorizons.com/about/biblicalhorizons/
6. James Blaylock
7. Tim Powers
Favs are probably--
Blaylock: The Paper Grail, The Last Coin, The Knights of the Cornerstone (my #1 comfort book)
Powers: Last Call (also Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather), The Drawing of the Dark
I've been a science fiction and fantasy fan for as long as I can remember. These two guys are among the best working today (for forty+ years now), with Christian themes shot through their work.
I have to confess that I don't really like Blaylock's steampunk stuff, but I do love all of his California books.
Possibly of interest to those here, George Grant wrote an essay on Powers, but I can't remember where it was published. It's probably floating around in the Wayback Machine somewhere.
8. Soren Kierkegaard, A Sickness Unto Death
This is a very recent read, about two years ago. I don't think I can write about it without getting too personal.
9. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Fruit of Lips, The Christian Future
ERH stretches my brain, hurts my brain. I've made some stumbling steps towards connecting theology and science fiction. ERH is a bridge on that journey.
10. The Complete Works of R.A. Lafferty
“It seemed, until I thought of it a bit, that I had written quite a few novels, and many shorter works, and also verses and scraps. Now I understood by some sort of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was ‘A Ghost Story’. The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people, that they are ghostly and that they are sometimes split-off. But no one can ever know for sure which part of the split is himself.” -R.A. Lafferty
R.A. Lafferty is my chosen lifetime companion, a master whom I have yoked myself to.
The journey from Lagerkvist to Lafferty has been a long process of submitting to joy.
I've known of him and read some of his work since the mid-90s. It wasn't until a few years ago that I really discovered him and relaized that his work had been what I was looking for all along.
I will gladly spend the rest of my life reading and learning from him.
(I won't write any more about Lafferty since I'm going to start sounding like a Lafferty commercial. Here's an Alan Jacobs blog post in which he interacts with a Lafferty story that all classical educators and slow readers should love: http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/…/learning-from-cam… )
That's it. Ten. ish.
I could add dozens more. But I'm satisfied. These ten coupled with the past ten do give a broad outline of my soul. Talking about books is dangerous business.
-----
Forcing myself to condense that second list, here it is:
Lagerkvist - Barabbas
Undset - The Axe
Chesterton - Personal "Best of" Essays
Jordan - Through New Eyes
Leithart - Against Christianity
Blaylock - The Knights of the Cornerstone
Powers - Last Call
Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death
Rosenstock-Huessy - The Fruit of Lips
Lafferty - A Ghost Story