Book meme

My painted, tainted, sainted aunt tagged me with this meme. Sorry it took so long, but I... well.. I sorta have... a life.

1. One book that changed your life?
I'm tempted to say "Mere Christianity," because I read that as a teenager and it was the first time I had actually had any of my questions regarding Christianity answered. I suspect I probably would have become a practicing Christian as an adult anyway, though, just out of kind of a spiritual inertia. I had been raised with certain Christian assumptions, after all, and I never really dropped them even when I was seriously questioning them. I suppose I had been looking for an excuse to believe what I had been taught.

But the book that jolted me out of my rather shallow Protestantism and into serious study of historic Christianity was The Way by Clark Carlton, a Protestant-turned-Greek Orthodox Christian apologist. It was a bit of a shock to realize that the Baptist Protestantism I was raised believing was kind of a stripped-down version of a faith that had not only begun in the first century but had continued uninterrupted. As Carlton put it, the Church is still at Corinth.

2. One book you have read more than once?
That would be most of the ones I've read, actually. I'm a terrible one for rereading. The one currently by my bed is John the Balladeer, a collection of Manly Wade Wellman's wonderful forays into Appalachian mythology.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
A guide to boatbuilding with minimal materials would be appealing. But I don't think that's what the memestress had in mind. I suppose I should say a Bible, but if so, it should be one of those interlinear ones with originals and various translations.

4. One book that made you laugh?
Almost anything by George MacDonald Fraser. I'm seriously addicted to his Flashman series, but by far his funniest was The Pyrates. Anybody who enjoys the old swashbuckling movies will want to glut themselves on that one.

5. One book that made you cry?
My Daddy was a Pistol and I'm a Son of a Gun, by Lewis Grizzard. No further comment.

6. One book you wish had been written?
At one time there was a two-volume biography of Robert Heinlein planned, but I haven't heard anything about it for several years now. I wish that had been written. (Not that I've given up hope.)

7. One book you wish had never been written?
My auntie, who tagged me for this, mentioned The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as one possibility. I have to disagree with that. (As my PC readers gasp and create a suction to rival a jet engine, let me make it worse by admitting that I actually have a copy.) The Protocols only collected in one place what was "common knowledge" at the time. (That it was a forgery didn't make a lot of difference; it would simply have been called "truthy.") The long-term result of the propaganda was a Holocaust that galvanized the Jewish people like nothing else could have. Had there been no Holocaust, it's entirely possible that world Jewry might have been whittled down by attrition, from pogrom after pogrom, or assimilated into the cultures around them. Zionism was kind of a faddish thing among a few "intellectuals," not a policy anybody paid a lot of attention to.

But after the horrors of the Nazi extermination, the Jews that were left became determined that nobody – but nobody – was going to make victims of them again. Much of the rest of the world rallied to the Jews' side and made it possible to establish a nation, a single corner of the world where (as one writer put it) the word "Jew" would never be a slur. Today, no country on earth is so ready to fight for its survival as Israel, and the Chosen People are unlikely ever to be wiped out.

So what book do I wish had never been written? How about the Koran? With no waves of Islam, the Middle East would still be Christian, and I suspect that the Protestant Reformation could have been averted as well. One of the reasons that the Church was in such desperate need of housecleaning was that so much of the leadership's attention was being absorbed by successive Muslim assaults on Europe. The Spanish Inquisition grew out of the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain, which probably wouldn't have happened had the peninsula not been under Muslim domination for several centuries. (I don't know if the East-West schism would still have occurred, but it might have been easier to reconcile without the barbarian literally at the gates.) Imagine a world with no 95 Theses, no Institutes of the Christian Religion, no Black Legend. And no foaming fanatics eager to strap on a bomb belt and die with an honor guard.

8. One book you are currently reading?
Currently I'm reading – and enjoying thoroughly – Forgotten Kingdom, a history of Utah during the years between the first settlement in the Salt Lake Valley and the extension of US control over Utah in the 1850s. The Mormon "Kingdom of Deseret" was a virtually autonomous theocracy during that time, and the society they created is a fascinating historical study.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?
Well, I've been wrestling with Aquinas' Summa Theologica for years, and every so often I tackle it again. Someday I'll get through it. I've also got a copy of Mein Kampf in the original that I've been meaning to read. (Pause while readers resume breathing normally.) The little bit I've read creeps me out about as much as The Turner Diaries did. But my German is really rusty, and I don't want to read a translation because God knows what a translator has done with it. If I'm going to read something so socially poisonous, I at least want to know what it really says. So it's slow going.

I'd also like to read some St. John of the Cross, which shouldn't be too difficult because my Lovely and Brilliant Wife has it all over the house. (Hint: notice her blog title.) But somehow every time I try, my head spins. I'm ot what anyone would call a mystic, and John confuses me. Oh yes, and I'd like to read St. Augustine's City of God. He's my patron, and I feel bad not having read more of him.

Okay, I'm inflicting this on Pastor Paul, Pastor Doug, Pastor Jeff, Pastor Mike (whenever he gets back from lolling around in Hawaii), and Father Sam. Let's see what the clergy read.

And of course, the love of my life.