Thursday, February 03, 2005

Reading Highlights of 2004

Re-reading John Buchan thrillers…First time around with the Horatio Hornblower series of C. S. Forester…Continuing my new appreciation of Rafael Sabatini…John Toland’s But Not in Shame (only one of his many terrific histories)…several Chesterton works…an incredible little book by Tolkien called Tree and Leaf…H. Rider Haggard’s Mr. Meeson’s Will…Re-reading the insightful, kind-hearted Christian psychologist Paul Tournier (he is more relevant to our times than when I first read him as a newly-converted Christian back in 1971)…Antonia Fraser’s massive biography of Oliver Cromwell…William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy…Zane Grey’s non-western Desert of Wheat…assorted mysteries including Erle Stanley Gardner, John Dickson Carr, and Dorothy Sayers…the “cornerstone” apologetic trilogy of Francis Schaeffer…Paul Kengor’s “spiritual biography” of Ronald Reagan…Re-reading the first two volumes of The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn… Scott’s Woodstock…Dickens’ Hard Times…the beginning of what I believe will be a long appreciation of Nevil Shute…Dumas’ Twenty Years After…T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral…and, a sweet little holiday surprise, Fannie Flagg’s A Redbird Christmas.