(Your email system may cut off part of this newsletter. To read the full story, please take a look in your browser.) Last week a friend asked me, “If you could only read 25 books for the rest of your life, which ones would you select?” Needing only the slightest provocation – a feather’s push off the cliff – to consider such weighty matters, I spent that evening making, revising, agonizing, re-revising, re-agonizing, and finally putting my list in unerasable, unsmearable ink. (Surely to be revised next week.)
Not too long ago, I ran across on a thumb drive a copy of Richard Alan Gordon's, "A Selection of Readings in English and World Literature as Supplemental to the Background of the Culturally Underprivileged Law Student." It is eight double-sided pages, and I clearly have work to do. Let me know if you'd like a copy. As for my contribution, I have always been a fan of "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis, which I read in Fr. King's class "Truth, Illusion, Salvation."
St Augustine's "Confessions" -- God as "interior intimo meo," more intimately present to me than I am to myself; John Henry Newman's "Apologia pro Vita Sua" -- the relentless quest of the human conscience for truth; Shakespeare's "King Lear" -- a catharsis to end all catharses.
I usually try and give "Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh an annual re-read. This novel - "pure Evelyn Waugh" - is a romantic evocation of vanished splendors, which brings into dismal relief the aridity of the present. Give it a try!
Not too long ago, I ran across on a thumb drive a copy of Richard Alan Gordon's, "A Selection of Readings in English and World Literature as Supplemental to the Background of the Culturally Underprivileged Law Student." It is eight double-sided pages, and I clearly have work to do. Let me know if you'd like a copy. As for my contribution, I have always been a fan of "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis, which I read in Fr. King's class "Truth, Illusion, Salvation."
St Augustine's "Confessions" -- God as "interior intimo meo," more intimately present to me than I am to myself; John Henry Newman's "Apologia pro Vita Sua" -- the relentless quest of the human conscience for truth; Shakespeare's "King Lear" -- a catharsis to end all catharses.
Magic Mountain and Dr. Faustus by Thomas
Mann
Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist by James Joyce
Remembrance of Things Psst (actually 7 books) by Marcel Proust
Absalom, Absalom and Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
I usually try and give "Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh an annual re-read. This novel - "pure Evelyn Waugh" - is a romantic evocation of vanished splendors, which brings into dismal relief the aridity of the present. Give it a try!