Millions,
So, I just finished Good Omens, thanks mostly to copious recommendations from this thread. First off, nice job everyone—fantastic recommendation. It could’ve lasted another 250 pages & not lost any steam. I was a little iffy on the ending at first, but, the more I dwelled on it, the more I enjoyed it. Not the theme, necessarily, just the way it was executed. God, I’m babbling.
Onto the question at hand:
The authors & Crowley dedicate the book to a G.K. Chesterton. Wikipedia is filled with information, but I wanted to see if any Dopers out there will go to bat for this guy. Pratchet & Gaiman certainly do.
If you will laud him, give me some recommendations. What should I start with? Poems? Stories?
British Catholic author and theologian. If you’re looking for good fiction by him, try the Father Brown mysteries (bunch of short stories about a priest who solves crimes), and “The Man who was Thursday”, which is a comedic thriller which is also a satire of modern (1908, at least) England.
His essays and non-fiction books are good reading and entertaining, but whether you like them or not depends in part on your own biases. Chesterton was a very devout Catholic, and his essays are really critical of what he saw as a growing British secularism and atheism, as well as what he saw as a kind of hyperrationalism that denied spirituality and, even more, denied people their humanity.
Well, he was not really a comedy writer, if that’s what you’re thinking of. A wry wit, but he wasn’t aiming to be funny per se.
The various Father Brown mysteries (sorry, they all blurred together) and The Man who was Thursday were his best fiction. If you want to read his philosophical/theological writings, Orthodoxy is the place to start; one of my favorite books ever.
You might be interested in my email sig:
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
–Chesterton
I was curious about Chesterton for exactly the same reason, but never got around to reading anything of his until recently. I finished reading The Man Who Was Thursday not long ago, and it’s a great book. Every time you think you know where it’s headed, it takes a turn into something else. Even after reading the introduction, which spoils a lot of the surprise in the book, I was surprised not just by what happened in the plot, but by what Chesterton had done with the novel as a whole.
That’s the only book of his I’ve read so far, but I recommend it highly. (Although I’d recommend to read as little about it as possible before-hand).
Another thing: Chesterton is best known today as being exceptionally quotable and a master of paradox, and its those quotable quotes that they may have been thinking of, more than his longer narratives per se. Examples:
My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober.
Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
I’m a big Chesterton fan. His writing was a formative influence on C. S. Lewis, which can be good recommendation or not depending on whether you like Lewis.
You know, I just wrote and erased about four lines trying to describe him. Early 20th century journalist, essayist, novelist, and poet. Very overweight, and extremely forgetful. Friend of Hillaire Belloc, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw. Convert to Anglicanism and eventually Roman Catholicism.
I think the thing I like best about his writing is his profound good humour. He had a postive genius for looking at the world and seeing the great beauty and great comedy inherent in everything.
Most of his work is online. Here’s a site that would be good to stroll through. http://www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/books/ My favourite book by him is Orthodoxy, and as a lead-up, I suggest reading his essays On Lying In Bed and A Piece of Chalk. I haven’t read the Father Brown books, but maybe someone else can give a recommendation.
Chesterton’s an interesting kind of guy, and even when you don’t agree with his political or religious stances, he’s still a cogent and an entertaining writer.
Besides the “Father Brown” stories and The Man Who Was Thursday, he wrote quite a number of other detective stories (you can get most of them in the collections The Poet and the Lunatics, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Club of Queer Trades, Tales of the Long Bow, and The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond … as far as I’m concerned, I’ve listed those in descending order of merit), and several offbeat novels, including Manalive (possibly the quintessential Chesterton novel), The Ball and the Cross, and The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I’ve read all of that lot, and I don’t regret any of it.
One of my favourite Chesterton quotes is Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it was too long and the age of great epics is past.
This is great. I think the last 15 books I’ve read have come, in one way or another, from the SDMB and none have dissapointed. It’s a rut, but a good rut. To the library with me!
Chesterton is a polemicist, no question, but a very entertaining one. In addition to stuff already mentioned, you might try The Dream of Gerontius (which is a kind of shortish weird poem/chant thing that Elgar turned into an Oratorio of the same name) and The Everlasting Man (which CSLewis cites as an influence).
I’ll second just about everything everyone else has said. The Father Brown stories inevitably (and deservedly) come up on any list of great mystery short stories. The Man Who Was Thursday is a terrific novel, and I can’t say much more without spoiling it. He’s written a number of absolutely wonderful essays, including those mentioned by Lissla Lissar. For some great religious/philosophical thinking that influenced C. S. Lewis, read Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton was witty, fond of paradoxes, and very very quotable.
The back cover of my edition of Manalive describes it as “full of high-spirited nonsense expressing important ideas” and says that it “celebrates one of G. K. Chesterton’s earliest themes: the joy of being alive”—which could well apply to much that he wrote.
Since everyone is recommending the Father Brown stories (Brown is usually cited as the Second of the Great Detectives, after Sherlock Holmes) and no one is being specific, let me point out some of the best:
“The Blue Cross”
“The Secret Garden”
“The Queer Feet”
“The Invisible Man”
“The Sign of the Broken Sword”
All from The Innocence of Father Brown, the first and best of the series. “Queer Feet” is especially tasty.
"‘Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest?’
"‘Well, well,’ cried Flambeau irritably, ‘what does he do?’
“‘He grows a forest to hide it in,’ said the priest in an obscure voice. ‘A fearful sin.’”
– “The Sign of the Broken Sword” (makes beautiful sense when you read the story, trust me)
I keep meaning to delve into Chesterton; all of Gaiman’s referential reading lists in SANDMAN have been most enjoyable. I bought EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS because of him, and expanded my reference book library. I may make a greater effort this Christmas by ordering some of Chesterton’s books. So thanks, Dopers.
Gaiman’s such a fan he’s dropped Chesterton’s name in the SANDMAN’S Library of Dreams, the repository of books by authors that were never written, or unfinished, or only completed in their minds. In fact he frequently includes snippets from the imminently quotable THE MAN WHO WOULD BE FRIDAY in the Key to Hell storyline.
I’m waiting to buy Gaiman’s ANANSI BOYS in paperback, too. I went into B & N to get the hardback, got sticker shock and ran off.
Chesterton’s essays are good examples of why it’s sometimes important to read an author even though large chunks of what he writes are wrong. Not only are they fun to read, but they’re full of clever analogies and striking bits of argumentation. That doesn’t mean I think that they are consistently correct in their conclusions. They’re very mixed. Often they start with dubious premises but then draw interesting conclusions from those premises. Other times they start with interesting premises and then go off the rails at some point. They’re a good exercise in reading an author for what he does best and not getting too hung up on what he gets wrong.
There are a surprising number of people with solid literary credentials (who often don’t agree much with Chesterton’s religious beliefs) who think that The Man Who Was Thursday is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
I suspect that Chesterton’s poems are the least interesting of his works.
Beware of the late Father Brown stories. As Ukulele Ike said, the first book is best. By the time of the sixth book, the stories were tendentious and preachy in the wrong ways. Not very good mysteries either.
Okay, at the risk of being off-topic, I have a question for Gaiman fans:
I have Anansi Boys (got it for $9.95 from Zooba.com, so it wasn’t too expensive), but I want to know: Assuming I’m going to read both books eventually, should I go ahead and read Anansi Boys now or should I get & read American Gods first?