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books meme

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.NB: since I do not know how to strikethrough a piece of text, I will just write NO WAY alongside.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman NO WAY
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres NO WAY
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown NO WAY
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood NO WAY
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (My feelings about this one are complicated. It is a masterpiece, but so horrifying I will not read it again)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley maybe
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce tried once or twice
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert Tried once
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I did not really intend to open up a whole new line of discussion underneath the one about books, but the statement by elegant_bonfire made an assumption I reject and felt I could not let stand unchallenged. I would definitely agree that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches of Christianity can lay claim to being the oldest hierarchical church structures, but there are millions of us who do not see such hierarchicalism as either necessary or desirable. The church (the body of believers) already existed before the churches of the Roman Empire began to structure themselves after the political framework of the empire. As for the Church giving the world the Bible, I would point out that the writings of the apostles were already in wide circulation before the church fathers and councils made their canonical lists based on what was widely accepted anyway. I take the authority for my religious belief and practice from the writings, not from those who came before me in accepting those writings and certainly not from any ecclesiastical superstructure.

The church (the body of believers) already existed before the churches of the Roman Empire began to structure themselves after the political framework of the empire.

I suggest a careful reading of the letters of St.Ignatius (AD100, within living memory of the disciples if not of Jesus) and of the works of St.Irenaeus (AD170). Both men had been trained by people who had known St.John the Evangelist.

As for the Church giving the world the Bible, I would point out that the writings of the apostles were already in wide circulation before the church fathers and councils made their canonical lists based on what was widely accepted anyway

Are you serious? "What was in wide circulation" among whom? And I hope that you are not going to line up behind the Elaine Pagelses and the rest of the idiots who imagine that the Gnostic Gospels and the rest of the rejected writings were a real "alternative tradition" rather than a shameless attempt to hijack the already existing traditions of the Church? Have you even paid any attention to my hint as to what caused the writings to be written? What about the fact that not only the Epistles, but even REvelation, with its seven letters, were clearly written with specific audiences in mind? What about the clear statement in John that there is a community that confirms the validity of the author's writings? What about the clear statement that Luke's writings were commissioned by a high Roman official? Do you think the Writings came down from Heaven, as the Muslims believe the Koran did? The writings were drawn forwards by an already existing Church. That is so painfully obvious that I am ashamed to have to insist on it.

As for the letters being written within the context of an existing church, I come back to my distinction between the body of believers and the organizational hierarchy that went to higher and higher levels of human authority.

And absolutely NO, I don't subscribe to the Gnostic Gospels as being valid alternatives. They were rejected by all but the Gnostics themselves. The canon framers were formalizing criteria already in general use: namely an apostolic connection and wide acceptance among the churches (not a monolithic Church).

So there was no hierarchy in the early Church? I find that strange, considering Paul's threats of what he is going to do if he is forced to come back and sort the Corinthians out himself. All the Epistles are written from the point of view of absolute authority, and I do not mean Paul's alone. (Although one should remember his unsubtle hint to Philemon in the matter of Onesimus, that he only asked what he could command.) And if there was no hierarchy, what were the seventy disciples and twelve apostles doing, and why did Jesus select them? I would point out that the fact that Jesus selected leaders among his followers was one thing that was clear even to Jewish opponents who misrepresented him in every other way.

Ah, but you see, I still follow the authority of the apostles through the New Testament scriptures, which are readily available for me to read. I do not subscribe to the idea of apostolic succession as anything sustainable by the teachings of the apostles themselves. The Seventy are another issue entirely. Their mission was to travel around Palestine ahead of Jesus and say that the Kingdom was coming. There is no record that they had any authoritative standing outside of this role. And there was no hierarchical superstructure either above (other than Jesus) or below the apostles. In the Jerusalem council James the elder had a major role alongside that of Peter, in fact as apparent presider of the council, with Peter testifying as a witness of God's work among the Gentiles. Peter certainly did not take a pope-like role in that council.

Peter was the one who gave the ruling. James only supported him; and if we are to judge by what else we know of him, it must have been very much against his better judgment, since he was not only a devout Jew, but the only Apostle who did not flee Jerusalem and was actually murdered there, as Josephus reports. The importance of Peter is brought out by the fact that Luke goes out of his way to tell the story of his conversion of Cornelius and the prophetic dream. Why are those things there at all? Because they are the antecedent of Peter's decisive intervention in this meeting, the decision which seems to have decided the whole matter in everyone's view. Paul, too, speaks of "resisting Peter to his face, because he was in the wrong" in the exact same tones that we would say, "He might have been President, but in that matter he was wrong, and I told him so to his face". The consent or dissent of Peter to Paul's proposals for his gentile converts was clearly central; of no other Apostle, not even those "pillars" James and John, is anything similar said. Besides, it was neither of James nor of John that Jesus said: "You are the Rock, and upon this Rock I shall build my Ekklesia, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. I shall give you the keys to the kingdom; when you open, nobody shall shut, and when you shut, nobody shall open." Or, speaking of Peter as if everything depended on him alone: "Peter, Satan has sought you [that is, you alone, you Peter] out to sift you out like wheat... but when you are converted, give strength to your brothers". Find me another Apostle of which anything like this is said, find me a place of which this is said of them even collectively, and I will consent you may have a point.

Acts 15:14 (James speaking as president of the council): "Simon has described to us . . . ."
Verse 19: "It is my judgment, therefore . . . . "

Concerning the keys to the kingdom (which Peter, standing up with the Twelve, used on the day of Pentecost) Jesus also said to the Apostles in general that they had the same ability to bind and loose what had already been bound and loosed (Greek estai dedemena/lelumena in heaven. (Matt 18:18)

I am afraid I am going to have to give this discussion a rest for the time being, due to my schedule for the next few days.

And we would not get anywhere anyway. If either of us seriously believed himself in the wrong in this debate, he would have to make some serious changes.

From Chapter 3 of his book, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? accessible online at http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/ffbruce/ntdocrli/ntdocont.htm

One thing must be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognising their innate worth and generally apostolic authority, direct or indirect. The first ecclesiastical councils to classify the canonical books were both held in North Africa-at Hippo Regius in 393 and at Carthage in 397-but what these councils did was not to impose something new upon the Christian communities but to codify what was already the general practice of those communities. (Bolding mine--lametiger)

What does that have to do with anything? I am talking about the first century, not the third. There was a Church before Paul wrote his first letter. It was this Church that recognized the authority of the gospel and epistle writers, as indeed it had recognized Paul as some sort of extra Apostle. Indeed, in many cases, it was this Church that demanded that apostles and disciples should write down the Good News and their teaching.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

books meme

Re: No desire to be offensive, but . . .

Re: No desire to be offensive, but . . .

Re: No desire to be offensive, but . . .

Re: No desire to be offensive, but . . .

Re: No desire to be offensive, but . . .

Re: No desire to be offensive, but . . .

Jerusalem Council

Re: Jerusalem Council

F F Bruce on the canon

Re: F F Bruce on the canon