books meme

[fpb]

"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

Comments

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

[jennilee.livejournal.com]

I'm taking exception with the Roman church as being the source of Christianity. Not sure how the membership breakdowns come into play.

My point is that the Bible - well, the New Testament, is the source of Christianity.

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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And who handed it down? For that matter, who taught you that it had any authority at all? And even more important, who called it into being? It is a clear fact, easily read in the New Testament itself, that the writings were written to satisfy the demand or educate the membership of an already existing Church. In other words, the Church is prior to the writings and the writings cannot be considered without their social matrix. It is the teaching of the Church that makes them special; it is the fact that they are a part of that teaching. That being the case, the issue is simply this - whether there is an unbroken and unperverted historical continuity between the Church of the origins and ours, or not.

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

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

It is a clear fact, easily read in the New Testament itself, that the writings were written to satisfy the demand or educate the membership of an already existing Church.

And one could argue that the Armenian Apostolic Church has a far better claim to being that Church (or at least its remnant) than the post-Constantine Roman Catholics.

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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Because it split off from the other post-Constantinian Churches after the Council of Chalcedon, 451? That same argument would make the Syrian Jacobites and the Copts having an equally good claim. In fact, these three churches regard each other as "sister churches" and recognize each other's orders and synods. Or because it beat by a year the legalization of the Christian Church by Constantine? In that case, it committed the very same "sin" that sectarians ascribe to the Catholic Church, only a year earlier. Sorry, that remark is by no means as clever as you seem to think it is.

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

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

It's not about being clever. My understanding of Church history is that the Armenians have best claim to being the oldest, continuous, uninterrupted Church in existance.

That the fellowship I was raised only has a direct history that dates back to 1801 does not really bother me, because I still see myself as part of the Church universal. I truly believe that God can work through even the most fragmented of human institutions - as the writer of Hebrews put it, "the word of God is living and active" and the Psalmist said, "the steadfast love the Lord never ceases."

However, I find that I agree with Rodney Stark in labeling the result of the Emperor's meddling in the affairs of the Church in Rome as the "Curse of Constantine".

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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, as a matter of mere history, it does not. There were Christians in Rome at least since the time of the Emperor Claudius (41AD), and the institutional continuity from the residence of Peter and Paul in the city to this day is certain. An early Christian Church was not just a group of friends meeting informally to discuss the Bible; it was an organization with a large number of salaried officers and a great deal of money. Ever since apostolic times, the order of deacons had been establihed for the specific purpose of managing church goods - Luke connects them with the first collective act of charity of the Church, a widespread collection to help the Jerusalem brothers in a famine. But this became immediately an institutionalized reality, with the Churches owning and managing large funds for the purpose of hunger relief, poverty relief, hospitals and the like. That was a real novelty in the ancient world, and made the churches powerful long before they became the majority. When the deacon Lawrence of Rome was arrested and ordered to hand over the goods of the Church, he answered that the wealth of the Church were the poor; he was speaking in riddles, but what he meant was that the Church did not own goods for her own advantage, but for the poor. And he was right. I will consult Eusebius if I have to, but I remember that at some time in the late second or early third century, the Church in the city of Rome had about fifty thousand members (a small number in a city of almost two million), but over a thousand dependent widows and several thousand poor. And they did not limit themselves to Christians; during one siege of Alexandria in the third century, while the pagan authorities fled, the Christians organized the relief of the starving population and even negotiated a ceasefire to let food through. The result of this charitable but very terrestrial activity was huge assets. Anyone who visits the catacombs in Rome ought to realize that the organization that dug those labyrinths must have had access to more than ordinary resources. The same message is passed by the enormous amount of Gospel and Bible manuscripts surviving from imperial times - each expensively copied by hand. Long before Constantine, the bishop of Antioch (a great city at the time), Paul of Samosata, turned the local church into a power base that made him the most powerful man in the city, in collaboration with the notorious Queen Zenobia. At the same time, as the historian Robin Lane Fox (no friend of the Church) points out, the bishop of Neocesarea in Anatolia, Gregory the Wonderworker, was in the habit of ruling on matters of civil and criminal law as though the Empire did not even happen. That is, the fact that Constantine allowed bishops to act as judges only legalized a situation that had obtained in the Christian Church for decades if not centuries. The superstition about Constantine, which Rodney Stark did not invent, is simply the most widespread variant of an ancient anti-CAtholic game: identify "the" moment in which the saintly, and oh-so-obviously congregational/protestant, Church of the beginnings, was corrupted into the diabolical, monarchic, bishop-ridden historical Church. This tradition has corrupted Church history to a quite fantastic degree. For a long time, Presbyterian and other scholars tried hard to "prove" that the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch (100AD) were forgeries. And have you noticed that the Pauline letters most often attacked by German Protestant scholars are those in which Paul mentions and even codifies the institution of Bishops?

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

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

The superstition about Constantine, which Rodney Stark did not invent, is simply the most widespread variant of an ancient anti-CAtholic game: identify "the" moment in which the saintly, and oh-so-obviously congregational/protestant, Church of the beginnings, was corrupted into the diabolical, monarchic, bishop-ridden historical Church.

Which is actually *not* what Dr. Stark says. His "problem" (if you can call it that; he tends to write somewhat dispassionately) is not institutionalization itself. Rather, his position is that the "Curse of Constantine" turned the Church into one more place where opportunistic Roman aristocracts could attempt to advance the social-political standing of their sons. That by making the Church "official" (and preferential) the Emperor opened the doors for the entry of a lot of people who frankly couldn't have cared less about the raison d'etre of the institution and therefore weakened it.

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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Even granting that that is the exclusive case, and it seems to me that your interpretation does not contradict mine, have you read what I wrote? The Church was a possible power base since long before Constantine, because of its enormous assets if nothing else, and Paul of Samosata used it to become the biggest man in the biggest city in Roman Asia before Constantine was born or dreamed of.

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

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Sorry, Sweetie, but I'm losing track of which interpretation you're refering to. That what Stark meant by his choice of the words "the Curse of Constantine" was anti-Catholic? That would contradict my understanding because I don't read Stark as anti-Catholic at all. I think it's quite possible to say Constantine did a less-than-helpful (or even downright stupid) thing and still be pro-Catholic general or at least solidly neutral.

I did read what you wrote, but I think you're letting yourself go off on tangents. Talking about the Bishop of Antioch does not strength your case that the See of Rome was *the* early church.

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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is because I never said it was. The early Church was, as it has always been, all the bishops who are in communion with the See of Rome. There is institutional continuity in a great number of places - there was a bishop in Lyons, France, by the second century, and there have been bishops there ever since; there have been places where the Church has been destroyed, eg in North Africa; places where it was wiped out but came back, as in various parts of Germany; parts where it grew and remained. The borders of the thing are variable, but the definition is certain. One of the many reasons why Paul of Samosata is important is that when the Churches excommunicated him and set up another bishop in his place, both sides appealed to the then reigning Emperor, who ruled that the Antiochene Church and its vast assets belonged by right to the bishop whom the dioceses of Italy (ie the Bishop of Rome) recognized. And before you say that this was a pagan king ruling, you have to remember that Roman law had a principle that corporations, companies and local administration had to receive sentences according to their own law - that is, the Emperor was bound to rule according to the laws and procedures of the Church. And at any rate the primacy of Rome can be found implicitly or explicitly in the writing of Irenaeus (170AD) and in the inscription of Avircius (early third century), well before Paul of Samosata.

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

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

You said, and I quote,
"The superstition about Constantine, which Rodney Stark did not invent, is simply the most widespread variant of an ancient anti-CAtholic game."

You brought up anti-Catholicism, not me. You also made certain assumptions about what Dr. Stark meant that are explicitly not true.

Also I cannot accept that early church was only and always that which was communion with Rome, because it took a number of years for the church to reach Rome. Or was the church recorded in the Book of Acts, the one that held a council under James, instituted deacons under Stephen, etc., not *actually* The Church until Peter or Paul reached Rome? Or are you taking the stand that since the city of Jerusalem was under Roman military administration that made it de facto the See of Rome?

My original comment was in response to jennilee's objection to naming, "the Roman church as being the source of Christianity" and your response "who called it [the New Testament] into being?" I have no quibble that there was an early, institutional Church or that there were bishops or a hierarchy. I don't doubt for minute that the New Testament was written for the edification of that Church. However, I do quibble primarily with the stance that Rome was first, and secondarily that communion with Roman Catholicism is the deciding principle that makes the Church "real" or not. I don't think that the eastern churches pre-dating Rome or their years of separation from Rome made them any less "the Church."

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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The Church had reached Rome even before Peter (the Church's designated head) and Paul (its chief missionary) took residence there. IN the year 41, eight years after the Resurrection and before Paul ever began his mission, there were enough Christians in Rome to start major riots with the local Jews, which forced the then emperor Claudius to expel both. This is stated by the historian Suetonius (who, not understanding the Jewish term Christus, the Anointed One - since anointing was not a sign of coronation among the Greeks and Romans - misread His name as Chrestus, a common slave's name) and confirmed by Acts, in which Luke testifies that, when in Corinth, Paul was the guest of two rich Roman Christian Jews who had the Roman names Aquila and Priscilla. They had been expelled from Rome by Claudius. So, before written record begins, there was a solid Roman Christian community among the local Jews, speaking Latin. This is shown not only by the names of Aquila and Priscilla, but by the fact that they settled in Corinth - the only city in Greece which spoke Latin rather than Greek. Early testimony is unanimous that Peter settled in Rome, became the leader of the local Church, was murdered by Nero in 64, and his tomb has been found exactly below the great altar at St.Peter's. What more evidence do you want? And who else except Peter did Jesus put at the head of his Ekklesia?

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

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Eight years is still not zero years. The Church was in Jerusalem first.

Earlier you accused anyone who does not consider the Roman church to be the "source" of Christianity with playing "some damned funny games with history", but it seems to me that you're having to pull out some fancy footwork of your own it order to assert it.

As for Peter - Matthew 16:18 uses "petros" to refer to Peter, but "petra" to refer to the foundation - that Christ is the Son of God - of the Church. And an appeal to Greek grammer does not adequately deal with the difference.

You advised both lametiger and I earlier to read Ireneus. Well, Ireneus, writing in late 2nd century doesn't dispute that. Ignatius, writing even earlier says, "Jesus Christ will deliver you, who has founded you upon the rock, as being chosen stones, well fitted for the divine edifice of the Father" - which, if I read that right, I take as Ignatius saying all Christians who accept Christ are "the rock". Even Tertullian, mocks the idea that the bishops of Rome should hold any special primacy over the other apostolic churches and thier bishops.

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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Eight years IS zero years in the context of something that was to last, at a minimum, two thousand years. And if you tell me that Jesus could not foretell that His Church would not last that long, you have just denied His divinity. It is not a matter of the place: it is a matter of communion with Peter. It is now nearly 2000 years since Jesus first called a community to Himself and spoke of an Ekklesia. If you, like Schweitzer or the like, argue that He had no foresight of the length of His militant Church's stay upon Earth, but rather expected the Apocalypse to take place any time in the next few days or years, you are arguing that He was not God, but a deluded prophet of an all too familiar kind. Indeed, the time of That Day is known "not to the Son, but to the Father alone"; on the other hand, "I and the Father are one". And if the God in Jesus did not, as the creative Word who still creates each new instant of time across the universe, lay out to human beings His plan for them, as the fullness of the Trinity He cannot have been deceived in Himself. So God knew from the moment He founded the Church that the Church would last, in human terms, long. And it is none other than St.Peter who warns us that, just as one moment can be worth more to God than a thousand years, so a millennium is not more significant than a moment.

Your Protestant arguments against Petrine supremacy are all meant to challenge this obvious fact; without realizing that you challenge God's own divine foreknowledge and creative power. You are sawing off the very branch you stand on. Try and understand this: it is not a matter of a place. The successor of Peter has sometimes lived in Avignon, sometimes in Viterbo, sometimes in Venice. He was still Bishop of Rome and successor of of Peter. And that you should rely on Tertullian of all people to deny this is breathtaking: don't you know that Tertullian died a Montanist - a heresy that Rome and Antioch had condemned? Don't you know that that is why he is never referred to as a saint?

Your treatment of "Greek grammar" is even worse, considering that you know Italian, in which the same difference Pietro-pietra exists and is well understood by everyone. I am certain that this is not your theory, and I am just as certain that the person you learned it from has no personal knowledge of any inflected language; for any personal knowledge of Italian, Latin, or Greek, or for that matter Spanish, would have prevented him from talking so much nonsense - so much that is completely alien to the native rhetoric and even to the wit of our languages. I do not have to refute it; all I have to say is that I find it bewildering that you ever took it seriously.

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

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Please don't forget that the origin of this discussion was the comment "if you're gonna be Christian, you might as well go right to the source and be Catholic" and that is what I'm disagreeing with: that somehow Roman Catholicism is the source of Christianity. It's not. God is. I have no doubt that Catholism is part of God's plan. But to assert that Rome created the Church? The arrogance is breathtaking.

Eight out of of two thousand is small, agreed, but it is not, and will never be, zero. Zero is zero.

I am not denying any of God's foreknowlege or challenging His creative power and frankly I can't remember who Schweitzer is. All of this discussion is a tangent off the point at hand.

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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If you insist on putting words in my mouth, this discussion is not going to end well. There is nothing that rouses my temper quicker. Point out to me where I said that "Rome created the Church". I said, repeated, and repeated again, that Peter is the Rock on which the Church is built, and I said so because I have Our Lord's word for it. If Peter had stayed in Jerusalem or in Antioch, then it would be those in communion with the Christian authorities of those cities, the successors of Peter, who would be the enduring Church. Peter went to Rome. And the successor of Peter went sometimes to Viterbo, sometimes to Avignon, sometimes to Venice. Will you please answer the things I actually write?

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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Unless you think otherwise, I suggest we leave off right here. Quite apart from my anger management issues, I do not think there is any purpose carrying on with this debate unless one of us is seriously willing to change his or her allegiance, and clearly neither of us is.