| Mike ( @ 2009-01-01 13:41:00 |
| Entry tags: | books, quotes (chesterton) |
Well, I may or may not make more New Years resolutions later (besides the obvious ones), but one resolution I'm going to try to keep is to read more books. I've always been a slower reader, so I don't read as many books as a lot of other people, but this year in particular I really didn't read that many (due to a noisy enviroment). While the enviroment is still noisy, I'll try to read more this year anyway. :-)
At the top of my list of non-Chesterton books (besides the Bible obviously) is Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis, as well as From the Angel's Blackboard: The Best of Fulton J. Sheen.
However, I also wish to read Chesterton books as well, of course. Believe it or not, I've only read 13 books of his (if I remember the number correctly). Considering he wrote around 100 books, I have a lot to read. :-)
The first book I plan on reading is his autobiography, which was completed just weeks before he died in 1936. It should be a fun read. Just to give you a taste, here's the opening two paragraphs of his Autobiography (read at least the opening line):
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Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.
Nevertheless, the great Waterworks Tower was destined to play its part in my life, as I shall narrate on a subsequent page; but that story is connected with my own experiences, whereas my birth (as I have said) is an incident which I accept, like some poor ignorant peasant, only because it has been handed down to me by oral tradition. And before we come to any of my own experiences, it will be well to devote this brief chapter to a few of the other facts of my family and environment which I hold equally precariously on mere hearsay evidence. Of course what many call hearsay evidence, or what I call human evidence, might be questioned in theory, as in the Baconian controversy or a good deal of the Higher Criticism. The story of my birth might be untrue. I might be the long-lost heir of The Holy Roman Empire, or an infant left by ruffians from Limehouse on a door-step in Kensington, to develop in later life a hideous criminal heredity. Some of the sceptical methods applied to the world's origin might be applied to my origin, and a grave and earnest enquirer come to the conclusion that I was never born at all. But I prefer to believe that common sense is something that my readers and I have in common; and that they will have patience with a dull summary of the facts.