after months of excitement, extended lulls and momentary all-night euphoric multichapter blitzkreigs, I have finished David Dark's Everyday Apocalypse. many of you have witnessed my excitement over this book--some perhaps enough repetitions to make you sick. but I have to say it again:
this is one of the most important books of [now]. what the communist manifesto was to the poor politically and economically disenchanted masses of the world, this book is to those disenchanted with every soul-destroying force bastard-spawned by our long, simultaneously glorious and ignominious Anglo-Saxon-American civilization. (I'm starting to sound like Ian Kanski...)
in honor of this moment, I give you my list:
The Nine Most Important Books of my Short Life:
1. C.S. Lewis' 'Til We Have Faces
2. Thomas Merton's No Man Is An Island
3. David Dark's Everyday Apocalypse
4. Matthew Stover's Traitor
5. Eleanor Vandevort's A Leopard Tamed
6. Donald Miller's Prayer and the Art of Volkswagon Maintenance (now republished as Through Painted Deserts)
7. Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog
8. J.R.R. Tolkein's Silmarillion
9. Plough Press's Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter
I suppose I could have rounded it out to ten, or kept going on to twenty, but these are the nine that came to mind within five minutes of realizing that Apocalypse was going to be one of the most important books I'd ever read, no browsing or searching necessary. There are a lot of books I've been excited about--but these nine are a part of me. The ideas that live in them live in me to the extent that I don't have to think very hard to remember reading them or figure out where I found them.
Four of these books are works of fiction; of the other five, one is a collection of excerpts that read like conversations, three move with compelling narrative style, and one is a series of extended meditations. Fiction and narrative put abstract things into context, like fish into water, where they can breath and swim and cavort and be observed in life. Truth dehydrated, preserved and presented divorced from story is no truth at all, like a fish out of water is not very long a fish.
Finally, of the four works of fiction, two are fantasy and two science fiction. I feel a bit sheepish for it, but a bit relieved too: like coming out of the closet or being caught picking my nose. I like science fiction, and fantasy more, and people who are snobby about their genres are missing out on a whole lot of good writing. so there. and yes, Traitor is a Star Wars book. It's called incarnation, guys!
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4 comments:
Love the Silmarillion, too.
Thinking of Anglo-Saxon-American civilization, though--I would n't wish myself to be in any other.
I suspect that each civilization has its own endemic temptations and soul-destroying tendencies. This is the one that I am tested with.
How this affects others in the world is an interesting question, but I am not responsible for their choices.
No Tozer books? I'm disappointed.
haha, good ol' Dan! I'm not too surprised about the sci-fi actually. Thanks for sharing the books, I may want to check some fo these life-altering books, some sound great! God bless ya bro, I'll be praying for you! In the love of Christ, Baby Joc
I'm on the beginning side of the middle of Everyday Apocalypse and I've found it difficult to keep from underlining every other paragraph or tagging every other page. In my 23 yrs of life (how old are the Simpsons?) I've managed, SOMEHOW, to not have watched a single episode of the Simpson's. Perhaps this is because I don't watch much TV period, and don't ever remember to figure out what time it comes on, and until recently I'd been most definitely too lazy to look for it, but taking note of Dark's observations and analyses, I want to watch as many episodes as I can find (in Japan they may be a bit difficult to find - in English, that is). But aside from the Simpson's, he touches on so much that I was confronted and stretched and challenged by in Latin America, and has been very successful at restirring the pot that had since settled to a certain extent. Anyway, all that to say that I agree with you. It really is one of the best books I've read.
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