Ten books meme

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A book that changed your life. May I have two? Karl R.Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies; and Georges Dumezil, Archaic Roman Religion. The former grounded my instinctive love for liberty on a solid foundation of articulate thought, and the latter introduced me to the man from whom I learned everything I know about interpretation. Two that would have, if I had read them earlier, would have been Ernst Gombrich's History of Art and Art and Illusion.
A book that you've read more than once. Many, many... Lord of the Rings. The Father Brown Stories. C.S.Lewis' books of Christian essays. Robert Fagles' translation of The Oresteia. All the Harry Potter books.
A book that you'd want on a desert island. The complete works of William Shakespeare.
A book that made you laugh. Anything by Wodehouse. Or the Don Camillo stories.
A book that made you cry. Dee Brown, Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee.
A book that you wish had never been written. The Kinsey Report - but if he had not, someone else would have. Margaret Mead, for instance, had already unleashed her concoction of lies and misrepresentations upon the world.
A book that you hope someone will write. Epic and Myth: The Indo-European cultural heritage. I hope I will write it myself.
A book that you wish you had written. G.K.Chesterton's History of England. And his astounding passage - in a booklet of war propaganda, yet! - on Frederick II of Prussia.
A book that you're currently reading. I am busy re-examining the Four Branches of the Mabinogi.
A book that you've been meaning to read. Filippo Coarelli, Il Foro Boario, an in-depth study of an important archaeological area of archaic Rome.

Comments

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That comment was slightly double-edged. If I had written GKC's History - and the book which inspired a good deal of it, Cobbett's Protestant Reformation - I would have made sure that they were more like proper history and less like extended essays. And I would have removed some of the crankery from Cobbett. But I would not have changed the basic contentions of either, because I think they not only are right, but that unless they are expressed with all the force of indignation and revolt, we will never understand what happened in the history of England, and what forces, still today, underlie its irrational politics and its still more irrational attitudes. I will send you an e-copy of it via e-mail, with some annotations of mine.

As for the passage on Frederick II, it comes from Chesterton's The crimes of England, and, again, it is rather unfair to call it a wartime pamphlet. In some ways, it is like a dry run for his History, that was to come a couple of years later, and a testimony of the impact of Belloc and Cobbett on his views. It is of course strongly anti-German, but GKC's detestation of Prussianism was perfectly genuine and he was capable of attacking it with a perfectly clear conscience.