15 posts tagged “literature”
A work in progress...
About the Faith
The Baltimore Catechism
Theology for Beginners, by Frank Sheed
The Tridentine Creed
Scripture
Genesis
Exodus
Joshua
Judges
1 & 2 Samuel (1 & 2 Kings in some older Bibles)
Tobit
Job
Wisdom
The Gospel According to St. Mark
The Gospel According to St. John
The Acts of the Apostles
Hebrews
1 & 2 Peter
Church Fathers
Letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch
First and Second Apology, by St. Justin Martyr
The Incarnation of the Word, by St. Athanasius
Sermons of St. John Chrysostom (selected)
The Confessions, by St. Augustine
Letters of St. Leo the Great (selected)
Spiritual/Moral Reading
Introduction to Devout Life, by St. Francis de Sales
The World's First Love, by Bishop Fulton Sheen
In Defense of Purity, by Dietrich von Hildebrand
The Practice of the Presence of God, by Brother Lawrence
The Story of a Soul, by St. Therese of Lisieux
Transformation in Christ, by Dietrich von Hildebrand
The Secret of the Rosary, by St. Louis de Montfort
Literature
Beowulf
The Golden Legend (selections)
The Song of Roland
The Divine Comedy, by Dante
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Understanding the Times
On the Threshold of Hope, by Pope John Paul II
The Syllabus of Errors, by Pope Pius IX
Iota Unum, by Romano Amerio
The Devastated Vineyard, by Dietrich von Hildebrand
Found here, but who knows from whence it came?
==
Below is a list of the 106 books most likely to languish, unread, on the bookshelves of people who only want to seem cultured and well-read. If you want to play along:
green for the titles you've read on your own,
teal for the ones you had to read for school,
purple for the ones you started but didn't finish,
red for the ones you hated,
blue for those you'd recommend
orange for those you'd like to/plan to read
Let the List begin
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Ulysses
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
Moby Dick
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Illiad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales - Excerpts
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
[From "The Warrior's Soul," by Joseph Conrad]
There were three of us round my fire. The third one was that adjutant.
He was perhaps a well-meaning chap but not so nice as he might have been
had he been less rough in manner and less crude in his perceptions. He
would reason about people's conduct as though a man were as simple a
figure as, say, two sticks laid across each other; whereas a man is much
more like the sea whose movements are too complicated to explain, and
whose depths may bring up God only knows what at any moment.
[From Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad, Pt. 4, Ch. 1]
This much said, there is no need to tell anything more of that first interview and of the several others. To the morality of a Western reader an account of these meetings would wear perhaps the sinister character of old legendary tales where the Enemy of Mankind is represented holding subtly mendacious dialogues with some tempted soul. It is not my part to protest. Let me but remark that the Evil One, with his single passion of satanic pride for the only motive, is yet, on a larger, modern view, allowed to be not quite so black as he used to be painted. With what greater latitude, then, should we appraise the exact shade of mere mortal man, with his many passions and his miserable ingenuity in error, always dazzled by the base glitter of mixed motives, everlastingly betrayed by a short-sighted wisdom.
[From "Windsor Forest," by Alexander Pope]
The groves of Eden, vanish'd now so long,
Live in description, and look green in song:
These, were my breast inspir'd with equal flame,
Like them in beauty, should be like in fame.
Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain,
Here earth and water, seem to strive again;
Not Chaos like together crush'd and bruis'd,
But as the world, harmoniously confus'd:
Where order in variety we see,
And where, tho' all things differ, all agree.
Here waving groves a checquer'd scene display,
And part admit, and part exclude the day;
As some coy nymph her lover's warm address
Nor quite indulges, nor can quite repress.
There, interspers'd in lawns and opening glades,
Thin trees arise that shun each other's shades.
Here in full light the russet plains extend;
There wrapt in clouds the blueish hills ascend.
Ev'n the wild heath displays her purple dyes,
And 'midst the desart fruitful fields arise,
That crown'd with tufted trees and springing corn,
Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn.
Let India boast her plants, nor envy we
The weeping amber or the balmy tree,
While by our oaks the precious loads are born,
And realms commanded which those trees adorn.
Not proud Olympus yields a nobler sight,
Tho' Gods assembled grace his tow'ring height,
Than what more humble mountains offer here,
Where, in their blessings, all those Gods appear.
See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crown'd,
Here blushing Flora paints th' enamel'd ground,
Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand,
And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand;
Rich Industry sits smiling on the plains,
And peace and plenty tell, a Stuart reigns.
[From The Examiner, Numb. 32, by Jonathan Swift (Major Works, pp. 264-5)]
Liberty, the daughter of Oppression, after having brought forth several fair children, as Riches, Arts, Learning, Trade, and many others, was at last delivered of her youngest daughter, called FACTION; whom Juno, doing the office of the midwife, distorted in its birth, out of envy to the mother, from whence it derived its peevishness and sickly constitution. However, as it is often the nature of parents to grow most fond of their youngest and disagreeablest children, so it happened with Liberty, who doted on this daughter to such a degree that by her good will she would never suffer the girl to be out of her sight. As Miss Faction grew up, she became so termagant and froward that there was no enduring her any longer in Heaven. Jupiter gave her warning to be gone, and her mother rather than forsake her, took the whole family down to earth. She landed at first in Greece, was expelled by degrees through all the Cities by her daughter's ill conduct; fled afterwards to Italy, and being banished thence, took shelter among the Goths with whom she passed into most parts of Europe; but driven out every where, she began to lose esteem, and her daughter's faults were imputed to herself. So that at this time, she has hardly a place in the world to retire to.
One would wonder what strange qualities this daughter must possess, sufficient to blast the influence of so divine a mother and the rest of her children. She always affected to keep mean and scandalous company; valuing nobody but just as they agreed with her in every capricious opinion she thought fit to take up; and rigorously exacting compliance though she changed her sentiments ever so often. Her great employment was to breed discord among friends and relations, and make up monstrous alliances between those whose dispositions least resembled each other. Whoever offered to contradict her, though int he most insignificant trifle, she would be sure to distinguish by some ignominious appellation and allow them to have neither honour, wit, beauty, learning, honesty or common sense. She intruded into all companies at the most unseasonable times, mixed at balls, assemblies, and other parties of pleasure; haunted every coffee-house and bookseller's shop, and by her perpetual talking filled all places with disturbance and confusion. She buzzed about the merchant in the Exchange, the divine in his pulpit, and the shopkeeper behind his counter. Above all, she frequented public assemblies where she sat in the shape of an obscene, ominous bird, ready to prompt her friends as they spoke.
[From Letters to a Doubter, by Paul Claudel (letter to Jacques Riviere in February 1910), pp. 183-4]
There is no worse profession in the world than that of a writer who has to live by his pen. And here are you constrained henceforth to produce with one eye upon a patron, the public—to give him, not what you love, but what he likes, and God knows how elevated and refined his taste has always been! Say what you like—rather than lead the life of a Monsieur X, I would cobble shoes. I always think of tragic figures like Villiers de l'Isle Adam, or Verlaine, with the relics of their talent clinging to them, like the fur on a moth-eaten coat. It is not an honorable thing to live on one's soul and to peddle it to strangers. The contempt of the world has always had for actors and artists is a quite legitimate one.
And you are a married man![...]
You have one great fault. It is the way you exaggerate your weakness, your incapacity for any dull, prolonged task. You always want to prove that life is in the wrong. Life is life. But you stand at a point where an access of despondency or a hasty decision may have results for you that I shudder to contemplate. I repeat to you with all the energy of which I am capable, and with the full memory of certain terrible examples in my mind's eye: there is no worse trade than literature!
[From The Nigger of the "Narcissus," by Joseph Conrad, Ch. 2]
The passage had begun, and the ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her, ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always imposing. Now and then another wandering white speck, burdened with life, appeared far off—disappeared; intent on its own destiny. The sun looked upon her all day, and every morning rose with a burning, round star of undying curiosity. She had her own future; she was alive with the lives of those beings who trod her decks; like that earth which had given her up to the sea, she had an intolerable load of regrets and hopes. On her lives timid truth and audacious lies; and, like the earth, she was unconscious, fair to see—and condemned by men to an ignoble fate. The august loneliness of her path lent dignity to the sordid inspiration of her pilgrimage. She drove foaming to the southward, as if guided by the courage of a high endeavour. The smiling greatness of the sea dwarfed the extent of time. The days raced after one another, brilliant and quick like the flashes of a lighthouse, and the nights, eventful and short, resembled fleeting dreams.
[From The Discarded Image, by C. S. Lewis, pp. 97-100]
The dimensions of the medieval universe are not, even not, so generally realised as its structure[...] the Earth was, by cosmic standards, a point—it had no appreciable magnitude. The stars, as the Somnium Scipionis had taught, were larger than it. Isidore in the sixth century knows that the Sun is larger, and the Moon smaller than the Earth (Etymologies, III, xlvii-xlviii), Maimonides in the twelfth maintains that every star is ninety times as big, Roger Bacon in the thirteenth simply that the least star is 'bigger' than she. As so estimates of distance, we are fortunate in having the testimony of a thoroughly popular work, the South English Legendary: better evidence than any learned production could be for the [Medieval] Model as it existed in the imagination of ordinary people. We are there told that if a man could travel upwards at the rate of 'forty mile and yet som del mo' a day, he still would not have reached the Stellatum ('the highest heven that ye alday seeth') in 8000 years.
These facts are in themselves curiosities of mediocre interest. They become valuable only in so far as they enable us to enter more fully into the consciousness of our ancestors by realising how such a universe must have affected those who believed in it. The recipe for such realisation is not the study of books. You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten millions miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined: and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this. The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything—and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. The furthest sphere, Dante's maggior corpo is, quite simply and finally, the largest object in existence. The word 'small' as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance.[...] Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest—trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with and object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.
This explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien—all agoraphobia—is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky. Dante, whose theme might have been expected to invite it, never strikes that note. The meanest modern writer of science-fiction can, in that department, do more for you than he. Pascal's terror at le silence eternal de ces espaces infinis never entered his mind. He is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea.
[From Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, ch. XX]
"Friend Sancho, know that I by Heaven's will have been born in this our iron age to revive in it the age of gold, or the golden as it is called; I am he for whom perils, mighty achievements, and valiant deeds are reserved; I am, I say again, he who is to revive the Knights of the Round Table, the Twelve of France and the Nine Worthies; and he who is to consign to oblivion the Platirs, the Tablantes, the Olivantes and Tirantes, the Phoebuses and Belianises, with the whole herd of famous knights-errant of days gone by, performing in these in which I live such exploits, marvels, and feats of arms as shall obscure their brightest deeds. Thou dost mark well, faithful and trusty squire, the gloom of this night, its strange silence, the dull confused murmur of those trees, the awful sound of that water in quest of which we came, that seems as though it were precipitating and dashing itself down from the lofty mountains of the Moon, and that incessant hammering that wounds and pains our ears; which things all together and each of itself are enough to instil fear, dread, and dismay into the breast of Mars himself, much more into one not used to hazards and adventures of the kind. Well, then, all this that I put before thee is but an incentive and stimulant to my spirit, making my heart burst in my bosom through eagerness to engage in this adventure, arduous as it promises to be; therefore tighten Rocinante's girths a little, and God be with thee; wait for me here three days and no more, and if in that time I come not back, thou canst return to our village, and thence, to do me a favour and a service, thou wilt go to El Toboso, where thou shalt say to my incomparable lady Dulcinea that her captive knight hath died in attempting things that might make him worthy of being called hers."
