Book Meme and C.S. Lewis

[imbecamiel]

(Grabbed from Veronika's blog, God-Writing)

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list.

-The instructions-
Look at the list and:
Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read
Underline the books you LOVE.
(I'm following V's addition of striking through the ones I've heard enough of to know I don't intend to ever read. I'd probably add more to the never-read list, once I learn more about them, but those are the ones I know.)

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (Saw the movie a few years ago, and loathed it. While I don't make a practice of judging books by the movie...)
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Read a children's version,a few years ago, loved it.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler's Wive - Audrey Niffinegger
20. Middlemarch - George Elliot
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (Heh, um, same as Wuthering Heights, though I didn't loathe the movie as much. Just... really long to spend with characters I was so annoyed with. Seriously, I really don't usually judge books by the movie. I've seen enough to know how much movies can wreck them.)
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 Carrol (Read short versions, seen movies, read excerpts, but never read the whole thing)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (As opposed to having read the Chronicles of Narnia? Huh. )
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
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
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
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' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (hmm... Now I can't remember if I've actually read the book, or only seen movies and read the children's version... I think I read it...)
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
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - A.S. 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 - E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Aurthur 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 (Again, hmm, not entirely sure whether I've read the original, or only seen movies and read the children's version... Think I read it.)
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (er, wouldn't this be included in the "Complete Works of William Shakespeare"?)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So... Bit more than 6. :) I do wonder a bit what exactly their criteria for this "Top 100" are, though. Some are obvious, for their being classics, or extremely popular, or whatever, but a number are ones I've never heard of before, or seem... odd choices, while I can think of others that would seem much more likely to be in a list like this. Hmm, anyway...

Been reading more C.S. Lewis. Mmm, I believe I've mentioned before that I absolutely love his writing? *g* A snippet from what I read today, from his address "Christian Apologetics" (in "God in the Dock"):

"I believe that a Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any directly apologetic work. The difficulty we are up against is this. We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture of laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success in simply impossible. We must attack the enemy's line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects - with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the marked was always by a Christian. The first step to the re-conversion of this country is a series, produced by Christians, which can beat the Penguin and the Thinkers Library on their own ground. Its Christianity would have to be latent, not explicit: and of course its science perfectly honest. Science twisted in the interest of apologetics would be sin and folly."

I look at that, and I can see it. Not just in the sciences, but in other areas as well (and not just in writing, or the arts in general either, though since that tends to be my great interest I see applications there most readily). What if the best writers were Christians? Not explicitly in their work, but there, in their worldview, in their implications, in their attitudes, to whatever degree of subtlety, but there nonetheless. (I've got a whole lot I want to say about more explicitly Christian fiction writing, and my experiences with it, but... *restrains self* Don't have time today. That is a whoooole long discussion in itself.)

I think of it for myself... I truly want to honor God in all that I do. And I believe that something doesn't have to be explicitly Christian to be God-honoring. But at times, I've wondered. How can I write a book of advice on writing, and have it be honoring to God? To attempt to insert explicit Christian messages would be irrelevant, and almost certainly detract from its quality. What about writing fanfiction? Trying to use the characters as explicit mouthpieces for Christianity would just... not work, in almost all cases. Or what about... drawing dragons? Some activities just don't seem to lend themselves to explicit Christian messages - but that doesn't mean they can't be God-honoring. They can be, in the spirit with which we do them, in subtle world-views that come across, in the actions and lifestyle that surround them, in the mere testimony of a Christian being good at what they're doing and producing truly quality work, and sometimes, even when they're not blatant in their message, they can lead to more direct opportunities to speak.

Sometimes, reading C.S. Lewis just has a way of making so many various things, often things which I have known before,but which so easily get muddled in day-to-day living, seem so clear, if only for a while.

Hmm, a bit convoluted and not very well thought-out. But... I've gotta get back to work. I've got so much to do, at the moment, and a lot of it's quite manageable, but some of it's got me a bit overwhelmed. And I'm kinda freaking out over my writing at the moment. *headdesks* And all I really want to do is draw, and investigate the newly-discovered joys of Photoshop. Meh.

*goes off to Be Responsible and Do Work*