Ten Books Lexington Green Wants To Read Again

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Lexington Green has too little time to read, let alone re-read, but he lists ten books he wants to read again — and I share my thoughts:

    1. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine – Green’s list starts with an old work new to me.
    2. Eric Rucker Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros – I enjoyed Eddison’s work immensely, but I can’t recommend it, because it is far from accessible. Written in the 1920s, it is a work of fantasy from before the genre existed as such, and it mixes archaic English, a Norse mythological style, bits of Greek and Roman myth, a setting called Mercury, with no meaningful relationship to the planet, and peoples called Demons, Witches, Goblins, etc., that are not in any sense demons, witches, goblins, etc., but ordinary men. It’s hard to explain.
    3. Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Green mentions how strongly Starship Troopers affected him as a boy, and how well it held up years later. I felt the same way. So, when I heard that Heinlein had written a more-or-less libertarian science-fiction novel, I assumed it would be right up my alley — but, regrettably, Moon is not on my re-read list.
    4. Homer, The Iliad – Everyone has to re-read The Iliad, right?
    5. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four – I need to read Animal Farm more than I need to re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four.
    6. Quentin Reynolds, They Fought For The Sky: The Dramatic Story of the First War in the Air – Sounds intriguing.
    7. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge And Decisions – I usually enjoy Sowell’s writing, and a number of EconTalk podcasts have reminded me to read his Hayekian classic.
    8. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace – Does anyone have time to read Tolstoy’s classic more than once?
    9. Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honour Trilogy – The name Evelyn Waugh always struck me as exceedingly English — like Wooster and Jeeves — and I never paid it much attention until I read about the then-upcoming James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, which borrowed its title from an Ian Fleming story that only used James Bond as part of its framing story, so Fleming could write an Evelyn Waugh-style story and get it published.
    10. H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds – Wells’ early science-fiction stories have held up amazingly well — and much better than Verne’s “harder” science-fiction. It’s hard to stay amazed by a submarine and by waterproof doors lined with India rubber.

Zenpundit calls the list of books you read over and over again your quantum library. He borrowed the idea:

The Quantum-Library is the layer that co-exists as a member of both the Library and the Anti-Library. It is something you may have read, but when read again with a different perspective it exists in another form.

I suspect that many, many folks have Tolkien in their quantum library — and Green does, apparently outside his current top ten:

The Lord of the Rings is a poetic / mythic / epic depiction of the defense of the West (especially England and its medieval inheritance) against tyranny and evil. Where most writers view the West through an Enlightenment frame, and see it as Antiquity then an interregnum followed by Modernity, Tolkien more accurately sees it as Antiquity + Christianity + Teutonic folkways and love of freedom. Modernity he has little use for. It is also a depiction of the working of Providence in History through the instrumentality of individual responses to grace, the primacy of the virtues, especially humility, and the unity of prayer and action (e.g. Sam’s prayer for water and sunlight that turns the course of the war in ways he cannot know) and hence anti-Hegelian, anti-Marxist, anti-determinist, anti-economistic.

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