Tom at Disputations is doing a wonderful series of posts on what it means to be a Lay Dominican. Much food for thought here (for me, anyway). Here are the first, second, and third posts, so far.
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Sad
I agree with the Jester. This makes me very sad.
The BBC Books List
I was sent this on Facebook, but decided to respond to it here. Apparently, the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the following 100 books. Following the instructions, I’ve put an “X” after those I’ve read, and a double “X” after those I’ve read more than once. In some cases I’ve put a triple “X”, meaning that I long ago lost count of how many times I’d read it.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – XX
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – XXX
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – XX
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – X
6 The Bible – XX (different parts to different degrees)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – XX
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – XX (but not again)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – X
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 – XXX
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – XX
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – X
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – XXX
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – XXX
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – XXX
34 Emma – Jane Austen – X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – XX
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – XXX
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – XXX
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – XX
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
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
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – XXX
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons – XX
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – XX
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 – X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – 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 – XX
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 – X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
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
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – XX
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – X
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – X
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – XXX
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – X
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – X
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – XX
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – XX
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – X
Total: 38, which is two less than my correspondent (sigh!)
However, this is an absurd list. It has The Da Vinci Code on it, but lacks Patrick O’Brian, P.G. Wodehouse, and Terry Pratchett.
The Great Heresies
I ordered a copy of Hillaire Belloc’s The Great Heresies after reading Heather’s post on Belloc’s birthday, as I’d been curious about Belloc for some time, and had had no idea where to start.
Let me first address the book itself, as an artifact. I’m grateful that the publishers have brought it back into print, but, honestly, I’ve never seen such a poor job of type-setting. The problem isn’t typographical errors, as such, though there are a number of them; it’s not even the weird line breaks that occasionally occur in the middle of the paragraph, or the way that the left margin migrates. The real problem is with the punctuation. There are many, many spots where, quite clearly, a dash or a colon or a comma is simply missing. It was maddening! If you can find an alternate edition, by all means do.
Now that I’ve gotten that off of my chest…
Heather’s right, the book is politically incorrect. It’s un-PC by modern standards; and unless I miss my guys it was un-PC by contemporary standards as well, and intentionally so. It’s clear they called him Old Thunderer for a reason.
The goal of the book is to discuss five “heresies”, where “heresy” is carefully defined as follows:
Heresy is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein.
The “complete and self-supporting” scheme is the Catholic Church, and the heresies are movements of thought, and of people, that set themselves up against the Catholic Church. The five “Great Heresies” Belloc discusses are:
- The Arian heresy
- Islam
- The Albigensian heresy
- Calvinism, and Protestantism in general
- Modernism
In each case he discusses the origin of the heresy, the Catholic doctrines it affirms and denies, the effect of the affirmation and denial, and the progress and end of the heresy.
It would be easy to write a blog post on each of these, but for now I’ll confine myself to some general remarks. First, in each case Belloc brings in some historical details with which I was unfamiliar. For example, he attributes the longevity of the Arian heresy to the support of the Roman Army; and the members of the Army were Arians because it set them apart from (and, from their point of view, above) the run-of-the-mill citizens. (Remember that at the time in question, the Army was recruited from the folk of the frontiers, or from outside the Empire entirely.) I’d want to check these details, and I suspect him of over-simplifying, but in general he seems to have things the right way round.
And second, a number of the currents he discusses, especially with regard to Protestantism and Islam, seem prophetic in the light of the headlines of the last decade. I’m thinking, for example, of the on-going disintegration of the main-line Protestant churches in America, and the melt-down of the Anglican communion.
There’s much here to ponder.
The View from the Foothills 