Last Christmastide, instead of a yearly letter of the kind most people send to friends and family, Claire and I decided instead to send out a letter featuring lists of our most recommended books from the previous five years of reading. We tried this unusual approach because our monthly Vital Signs LifeSharer letters keep our friends and family pretty well informed of the various happenings in our lives.
Well, the booklists were fun for us to create – and I’m pleased to say, they were well received. So, we’ve decided to broaden their readership. The next few “chapters” here in The Book Den will be excerpts from that December booklist. I hope The Book Den visitors find them of interest. First up, in no particular order, are four of my fiction recommendations:
1) The Doctor and the Devils by Dylan Thomas. A remarkable and almost unknown screenplay by the great poet, this is a provocatively pro-life masterpiece. (A few other plays I’d recommend from my last few years of reading would be: G.K. Chesterton’s Magic; Malcolm Muggeridge’s brilliant attack on euthanasia, Sentenced to Life; Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Love Girl and the Innocent, and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. I won’t trouble you to suggest Eugene O’Neill. I read him quite a bit but he is definitely an “acquired taste.”)
2) While on the subject of drama, let me suggest any and all of the plays of J.M. Barrie. His classic Peter Pan is great but The Admirable Crichton, Quality Street, What Every Woman Should Know, etc. are also engaging reads.
3) The Children of Men by P.D. James. James is one of the world’s most popular mystery writers but this work is amazingly different than anything she’s ever written. Another must read for pro-life advocates.
4) Pied Piper by Neville Shute. An old man becomes a daring if not especially dashing hero in WWII simply by doing what any man should do for kids in danger...
(to be continued)
