Skip to main content

Platypialian Influences: The Platypus Reads Part LXIII

This string of posts began with a list of my three favorite books.  I'm not always up for lists of favorites, though I've created a few for this blog, but I was inspired after seeing this post to try and think through what books influenced my life the most.  It's also a fitting question since I just asked my students to write a one to two page paper on the topic of "whether a book can change someone's life."  Without further ado, then, here is my best guess at the books that changed my life.  Note: they are in no particular order.

1. The Gospels; especially Luke and John.  It was a close reading of the gospels during my first two years of high school that solidified my commitment to the Christian faith.

2. Job.  Having suffered from childhood cancer, the problem of pain has been at the core of my life.  Job helped create a context for beginning to wrestle with that question.

3. The Oresteia.  Aeschylus' handeling of the problem of pain, especially in the character of Cassandra, continued the meditations set in motion by Job.

4. The Lord of the Rings.  I read this before I read Job, and I think it has shaped my thinking more than any other work next to the Bible.  Again, you'll note that it deals with the probelm of suffering and death.

5. The Idylls of the King.  If the Bible is number one and The Lord of the Rings is number two, then The Idylls of the King is number three.  This book had a heavy impact on how I view social and political problems.  It also made me love Goodness.

6. The Iliad and the Odyssey.  Here, I found the only true alternative to the Christian world-view, but I found Jesus here too, staring right back at me.  The more I look, the more I become convinced that Christ is in all possible worlds.  He is the question and the answer.  Look wherever you will, and you will find Him.

7. The Geneology of Morals. Once I read Nietzsche, the twentieth century made sense.

8. Orthodoxy.  The perscription is not more cowbell, it's more Chesterton.  Like Philip Yancey, every time my Christianity needs refreshing, I turn to G.K.C.

9. Jane Eyre.  For years, this was my mother's favorite book.  It's another meditation on the problem of evil.  I don't know that I'm sold on Bronte's via media, but her strong emphasis on Providence and severe mercy has shaped my understanding of suffering.

10. The Abolition of Man.  I'm an educator, and I think I first really began to understand what eudcation is and what it's for when I read Lewis' essay.

11. The Scions of Shanara.  Somehow, ever since I read this quadrilogy in jr. high, this work has shape my image of the Church.  Weird, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

12. The Lays of Beleriand.  This book cemented my interest in epic literature.  I wish Tolkien had finished the poems found in this collection.  It contains some of his best stuff.

13. Kingdom Triangle.  J.P. Moreland's masterwork opened up the wider possibilities of life in the Kingdom.  Much of the last few years has been spent wrestling with the ideas in this book.

14. The Hobbit.  I picked up a copy of this book on a whim when I was in fifth grade.  I created a love of reading in me practically ex nihilo.

15. Phantasties.  Don't know what it did, but it did something profound.  Tolkien baptized my imagination, but MacDonald may have chrismated it.

16. Democracy in America.  I got the twentieth-century when I read Nietzsche, I got America when I read De Tocqueville. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

California's Gods: Strange Platypus(es)

We've noticed lately a strange Californian dialectical twist: there, freeways take the definite article.  In other parts of the country one speaks of I 91 or 45 North.  In California, there's The 5, The 405, The 10.  Each of these freeways has its own quirks, a personality of sorts.  They aren't just stretches of pavement but presences, creatures that necessitate the definite article by their very individuality and uniqueness.  They are the angry gods to be worked, placated, feared, for without them life in California as we know it would cease.  Perhaps that's fitting for a land whose cities are named for saints and angels.  Mary may preside over the new pueblo of our lady of the angels, but the freeways slither like gigantic serpents through the waste places, malevolent spirits not yet trampled under foot.
9 comments
Read more

Seeing Beowulf Through Tolkien: The Platypus Reads Part CXCIX

After spending a few weeks wrestling with Tolkien's interpretation of Beowulf , I found myself sitting down and reading Seamus Heaney's translation of the text during a spare moment.  I came to the place where Beowulf presents Hrothgar with the hilt of the ancient sword that slew Grendel's mother.  Hrothgar looks down at the hilt with its ancient runes and carvings depicting the war between the giants and God and meditates on the fortunes of men.  In a flash of insight, I thought: this is the whole poem! Let me explain.  Tolkien believed that the genuine contribution of the Northern peoples to European culture was the theory of courage.  The Northern heroes, at their best, were men who fought for order against chaos -a battle they knew they were doomed to lose.  If they were true heroes, their souls would join the gods and aid them in the final battle against darkness and its monsters and again go down fighting, spitting in the face of the meaninglessness...
3 comments
Read more