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That Fifteen Books Meme
Jun. 12th, 2009 11:12 amFifteen books which will stay with you:
1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien.
2. The Silver Chair, CS Lewis. Oddly enough, despite the fact that as someone interested in mystics, you'd think I'd go for Voyage of the Dawn Treader, this is the Narnia I really identify with. Or maybe it's not odd: it's the one that seems to relate most closely to what life is like most of the time.
3. Gaudy Night, Dorothy L Sayers. In so many ways....
4. Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich. Julian is such a fantastic theologian.
5. The Way of Paradox, Cyprian Smith. Secondary literature on Eckhart (I haven't picked any Eckhart because picking 'a book' for him is problematic). But this is a wonderful book on Eckhart as a guide to life, by a wise man, and I wish I'd read it years ago.
6. Possession, AS Byatt. Recently I've been reflecting a lot on the idea of the things that matter being the ones that 'survived our education'...
7. Witch Wood, John Buchan.
8. Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson. Both this and Witch Wood are seminal books about the Scottish identity (though WW is unjustly neglected these days); they're both also evocative and very exciting.
9. The Daisy Chain, CM Yonge
10. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott.
11. The Allegory of Love, CS Lewis. Actually I think this book is one of the reasons I became a mediaevalist, and I still think it's a very good study, even though there are lots of places where Lewis' thinking on allegory has been overtaken (in part, of course, because of the questions he opened up).
12. The Christian Priest Today, Michael Ramsey. "Today" is in this case the late sixties (I think), but it's still a beautiful and inspiring book.
13. "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". Seminal article on Beowulf criticism by Tolkien. I tend to think New Testament scholarship needs something similar. You can't recover the lost sources or even reconstruct the archetype, so stop trying to reconstruct the stock, and eat the soup!
14. The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy L Sayers. This was the point at which I realised that Trinitarian theology is both interesting and important.
15. Christianity Rediscovered, Vincent J Donovan.
I'd also kind of like to do the "Ask My OCs" meme, ( but )
( Oh, and the Which Fantasy Writer are You? Quiz )
1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien.
2. The Silver Chair, CS Lewis. Oddly enough, despite the fact that as someone interested in mystics, you'd think I'd go for Voyage of the Dawn Treader, this is the Narnia I really identify with. Or maybe it's not odd: it's the one that seems to relate most closely to what life is like most of the time.
3. Gaudy Night, Dorothy L Sayers. In so many ways....
4. Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich. Julian is such a fantastic theologian.
5. The Way of Paradox, Cyprian Smith. Secondary literature on Eckhart (I haven't picked any Eckhart because picking 'a book' for him is problematic). But this is a wonderful book on Eckhart as a guide to life, by a wise man, and I wish I'd read it years ago.
6. Possession, AS Byatt. Recently I've been reflecting a lot on the idea of the things that matter being the ones that 'survived our education'...
7. Witch Wood, John Buchan.
8. Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson. Both this and Witch Wood are seminal books about the Scottish identity (though WW is unjustly neglected these days); they're both also evocative and very exciting.
9. The Daisy Chain, CM Yonge
10. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott.
11. The Allegory of Love, CS Lewis. Actually I think this book is one of the reasons I became a mediaevalist, and I still think it's a very good study, even though there are lots of places where Lewis' thinking on allegory has been overtaken (in part, of course, because of the questions he opened up).
12. The Christian Priest Today, Michael Ramsey. "Today" is in this case the late sixties (I think), but it's still a beautiful and inspiring book.
13. "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". Seminal article on Beowulf criticism by Tolkien. I tend to think New Testament scholarship needs something similar. You can't recover the lost sources or even reconstruct the archetype, so stop trying to reconstruct the stock, and eat the soup!
14. The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy L Sayers. This was the point at which I realised that Trinitarian theology is both interesting and important.
15. Christianity Rediscovered, Vincent J Donovan.
I'd also kind of like to do the "Ask My OCs" meme, ( but )
( Oh, and the Which Fantasy Writer are You? Quiz )