Tag: Gustave Flaubert

Top 10 Books

I don’t know who asked me to jump on this top 10 books list, but I’ve finally gotten round to it.  Here goes:

  • Emma, by Jane Austin.  It’s a long story, but this is how I decided I was looking for love in all the wrong places.  I had a long discussion with the girl who became my wife, shortly after reading this book
  • The Way the World Works, by June Wannasiki.  I don’t know that this is the best economics book.  Wannasiki is kind of like Algernon – he doesn’t necessarily write accurately, but he writes with wonderful expression.   Anyway, this book opened my eyes to the sort of political shenanigans that are being done in the name of bad economics.
  • Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, by Mark DeverI had been looking for what exactly was going wrong in the sort of churches I was going to.  Even in the prosperous, well-populated churches, there was something rotten about their state.  9Marks pointed me in the right direction. Incidentally, I gave my copy to somebody, so if you’d like to help me replenish my library…
  • Humility: True Greatness, by CJ Mahaney.  It was a toss-up between this and The Cross-Centered Life.  Either way, what I really appreciate about Mahaney’s little books is their practicality: “XYZ is true.  Here are some habits you can build into your life so it will have an practical effect.”  Want to be humble?  Start by thanking God that you get tired at night.
  • The Bruised Reed, by Richard Sibbes.  Just… Wow.  I used to want to be Dennis Jernigan when I grew up.  Now I want to be Richard Sibbes.  So incredibly helpful to see how exactly the Spirit of God works in actual broken hearts.  As a happy side effect: the sweetest, most reassuring teaching of God’s selection in salvation you have ever heard.
  • Surprised by Joy, by CS Lewis.  This is a cheat.  It stands in for “The Complete Works of,” which I understand is against the rules.  I might have been CS Lewis, if my middle class lawyer dad had just sent me to a private tutor for my entire high school, where I studied classics in Latin and Greek for 12 hours a day.  Surprised by Joy is less biography and more a spiritual memoir in the style of Augustin’s Confession.  The picture he give of his conversion still sticks with me:  a lobster in a corset on a bus, I think.  Strangely, he falls on the side of free will in salvation, while describing a perfectly Calvinist conversion.
  • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.  I wrote a paper on Gustave Flaubert my junior year in college. It kind of revolutionized my view on the world.  I got an A-.  My hard drive crashed, and now I have only the vaguest recollection of what my conclusions were.  Flaubert was set to be a fantasy author.  He had this blockbuster story he wrote about Saint Anthony in the tombs.  It was a colossal flop.  His friends urged him to quit writing about “Chimeras,” that is fantastical ideas, and to focus on realism.  So he wrote a story about a girl who wanted to have a truly great romance and ruined her life chasing it while ignoring the perfectly good romance right in her lap.  I was totally unable to relate to this concept.
  • Institutes of Christianity, by John Calvin.  This is kind of a cheat, since I never actually finished the book.  But he really knew how to pack ‘em in there. The one that comes up the most is his explanation of faith – not just confidence, but confidence in a person’s word in the face of very good reasons to doubt. We’ll skip past how much Calvin talks about the Spirit, and how I totally avoided him the first time I heard of him, because I knew he had nothing to say to me due to his ignorance of the Holy Spirit.
  • Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer.  More specifically, The Franklin’s Tale, which taught me about the complex overlay of loyalties that we would now call “Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.”  As a bonus, reading journal articles on The Franklin’s Tale taught me that Feminism is bunk, specifically because it can’t see those loyalties as anything other than systematic oppression
  • On the Cessation of the Charismata, by John Ruthven.  Specifically, the footnotes to the first chapter, which gave me references to a whirlwind tour of early church thought on spiritual gifts, and the supernatural.  I used it as the bibliographical launching point for a church history paper, and it inspired me for the thesis for my PhD, which I will probably never get to write.
(Yes, Tolkien is lovely, but he didn’t change my life.  I’m very fond of Luther, but I haven’t actually read any books by him. Paradise lost did nothing for me, other than give me some perspective when reading Middlemarch. Inferno was extremely interesting, but Purgatorio was distressingly Catholic.  Robinson Crusoe was a waste of time.)
There’s a strange lack of fiction titles in this list.  I went through a major theological shift about 15 years ago, so my top 10 list changed accordingly.  The books above are the ones that got me going in my current direction.  It just so happened that when I was grasping, very few of the branches that held were fiction.

3 Stories

I’ve always been the sort of person who is profoundly affected by fiction. When I hear people talk about the importance of reading, only to discover that every book they ever read falls in the category of non-fiction, I get a little testy. Okay, I get mad. Non-fiction isn’t reading; it’s being lectured at.

Recently, it’s come to mind that there are three stories that have profoundly affected the direction of my life, and under the guise of being brief, I’ll tell you their titles and authors without explaining wherefore:

  1. Emma by Jane Austen
  2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  3. The Vorkossigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold

    4. The last one’s a cheat, I know, since it’s a series of some 20 books, instead of a single volume like the others, but you have to read most of them to get the full effect.