The Book that Changed Your Life

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kera
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Umberto Ecos The name of The Rose

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi for its religious dimensions and intense candid imagery.

various textbooks dealing with psychology urban studies sociogy etc.

Tangentially, i plan on going on a reading fast. After my exam on friday i plan on reading at least one book a week for the next 23 weeks. THe books has to be between 100-300 pgs. Lets face it if i try to read anymore i might be sacrfificing content for brevity unless the book is truely interesting. Wish me luck:thumbsup:
 
The problem with me too is that im interested in too many topics. I mean could spend a whole day at borders or the libary purusing the different titles. SOmetimes i find my self on Amazon.com for hours because one book will hyperlink me to another and another and next thing i know my amazon recommendation list consist of books as diverse as Jewish theology to globalization or Journalism.
 
St Thomas a Kempis The Imitation of Christ - I read it about 2 months after becoming a Christian, over a single day in lots of very difficult sittings, I kept throwing it down and picking it up again, finishing a paragraph, praying, picking it up again. It nearly made me lose my faith because it spoke of such radical sacrifice for the love that God has shown us. In the end though, I feel it strengthened my faith.

Now, 7 years later, I can see that it also set me on the path toward the Catholic Church, a path which often set me at odds with the Evangelical Protestants I hung around with at University, who often saw me as a little odd in some of my views, but which I now realise was leading me to the right place.

Of course, as any Evangelical would point out, it’s now post number #23 and nobody’s said The Bible yet. I assume that’s because it goes without saying, not because us papists never read the thing! 😃
 
Hm. The short list? 😉 I read a lot.

Father Elijah, Michael O’Brien. I didn’t know anything about the inside of Catholicism until I read it. It made clear to me the beauty, depth, and history of the Church, and the loveliness of devotion to Mary. Michael O’Brien’s novels were instrumental in bringing me into the Church.

Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton. I read it almost seven years ago, and it has formed the fundamental structure of my thinking ever since. I always come back, over and over, to Chesterton.

The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton. His spiritual autobiography.

Revelation of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich. The first serious spiritual writing that I read, which made real to me for the first time the importance and physicality of God’s love and suffering for us.

Two-Part Invention- the Story of a Marriage, Madeleine L’Engle. The story of her courtship and marriage, and her husband’s death from cancer. I read it when I was a young teenager, and immediately resolved that they would be my blueprint for marriage.

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson. Probably my favourite novel of all time, a profound meditation on the beauty of the world, held in tension with the world’s insufficiency to us, on suffering, and the utter reality of God’s love.

I think those are the big ones. I’m probably forgetting a lot of others, but those are central.
 
This will seem odd, but Solzhenitzyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”, all three volumes. It’s about Stalin’s prisons and forced-labor camps, but it’s really about human nature, both the good and the evil; and examines it as well as any book or combination of books I have ever read. There is more true psychology in them than in every psychology work ever written. Russian writers can be wordy, and “Gulag” can be a tough slog at times. The suffering of some of the people in it is so awful one is sometimes tempted to put the book down. But when one reads about some informant’s motivations or the machinations of people in the camps for so much as a handful of potato peelings, one can look inward and see the outline of the very same threads, perhaps not so dramatic, in one’s own soul.

At the same time, there is nobility to some of the characters that restores one’s faith in humanity; a young man in a camp, for instance, who pleasantly shows his fiancee around before her visitation time is up, knowing full well that he is scheduled to be shot immediately after she leaves. Marriages contracted between people who have never seen each other; but know each other only through conversations through a prison fence that neither can see through, and to which they remain faithful in prison for 10, 20, 25 years and get together only after both are released. Appearance, ruined health, lost teeth; none of those things matter to them, because their long-ago “marriages” were of the soul.

He tells of imprisoned, aged nuns who somehow help weak and starving women meet their production quotas cutting and hauling logs by hand in deep snow and in subzero conditions, and who nevertheless somehow stay healthy and strong and cheerful.

Virtue, and the Acceptance of Providence are big themes. In a passage in which Solzhenitzyn describes life in the Kolyma (the absolute worst camps, really beyond belief) he says that one “cannot be truly virtuous until it is a matter of indifference to him whether he is or is not in the Kolyma.” He then “thanks” his prison for the moral lessons he learned there. In a swipe, then, at moral vanity, including his own, he follows that passage with “…and from the grave a voice says ‘it is all very well for you to say that, who survived and are still walking upon the earth’.”
Fabulous! Page after page after page of that kind of thing.

I will confess, though, that I was led to the “Gulag” books by his Nobel prizewinning “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, in which a prisoner wakes up sick in a subzero barracks; gets a few ounces of bread, walks miles to his workplace where he lays bricks in a howling wind and returns. At the end, he is thankful for the day, which he counts as a good day. You would just have to read it to understand. I think about it all the time.

That’s my contribution. Thanks for your patience.
 
Catcher in the Rye, The Divine Comedy by Dante, and St. Faustina’s Diary…

the first was a big factor in me losing my faith, the next put me in awe of what is truly art, and the last one brought me back to practicing my faith…
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top