Very well then: what Chesterton book, essay, or short story ought I to read first?
And then which?
Better yet: What are the five (or ten) best writings of Chesterton, the ones most likely to lead one to seek out still more?
Check out some of the excerpts and let us know what you choose.
Any of the Father Brown detective stories is an excellent place to start. There are several.volumes.
First, a warning.
Chesterton is NOT to be undertaken lightly.
He is an acquired taste: his writing has much more substance, more meat, to it, than most others, and particularly more so than the "intellectuals" of our day. But he does it (as did Dick Feynman) by writing as CLEARLY as possible, seeking to elucidate, not to impress: and to do so by example, not erudition.
Think of him as a Roman Catholic Rush Limbaugh, only writing in a time when 8th graders in Kansas had to pass tests that today's college graduates would fail.
He wrote in a number of genres and for different audiences, so it is difficult to assign a best.
So I'll go by category. Hypertext links to the works if I could find a free copy online readily:
Christian Apologetics
1) Orthodoxy
2) The Everlasting Man
Novels / Victorian Fantasy
3) The Napoleon of Notting Hill
4) The Ball and The Cross (one word: perdinavititis!)
5) The Man Who Was Thursday
6) The Flying Inn (TOPICAL 100 YEARS LATER. TO SAY MORE WOULD BE TO SPOIL IT.)
Short Stories
7) The Father Brown Mysteries or the Mr. Pond stories -- (Try When Doctors Agree or The Three Horsemen of Apocalypse or The Eye of Apollo
Memorable quote from Three Horseemen:
"Grock said no prayer and uttered no pity; but in some dark way his mind was moved, as even the dark and mighty swamp will sometimes move like a living thing; and as such men will, when feeling for the first time faintly on their defence before they know not what, he tried to formulate his only faith and confront it with the stark universe and the staring moon.
'After and before the deed the German Will is the same. It cannot be broken by changes and by time, like that of those others who repent. It stands outside time like a thing of stone, looking forward and backward with the same face.' "
Memorable quote:
Basil smiled at me. "You didn't know," he said, "that I had a practical brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at everything. I remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist, an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, a—what are you now, Rupert?"
Collected Essays
Memorable quote:
"A man offered me a newspaper or something that I had dropped. I can distinctly remember consigning the paper to a state of irremediable spiritual ruin. I am very sorry for this now, and I apologise both to the man and to the paper."
10) The Illustrated London News
For these (and others!) click here.
Cheers!
One of my favorites is “The Flying Inn”, which I need to reread if I can find a copy. I also liked “Four Faultless Felons”. And you can’t go wrong with the Father Brown stories.
Salvation, many thanks for your original post. I hope more people will enjoy Chesterton’s writing as a result.
I'd suggest Orthodoxy as the first to get to, and the one most likely to take you all through the rest.
Orthodoxy is a good introduction (I think) to the way GKC thinks,an amazing (one is tempted to say "universal") assemblage of various common-sense experiences and desires of all right-thinking humans, founding its observations not so much (at first) on theology or philosophy as on fairy tales, finding in them universal (and very practical and admirable) desires for the Good, the Just and the Heroic, which almost all of us feel as children, before the various ideologies we are made subject to throughout the process cruelly called our "education" weasels and shames them out of us, and we are set adrift in a dark world where we are cut off from not only the wisdom of our faith, but that of our ancestors and even our own experiences, and schooled to believe things that do good neither to us nor to our masters (though they will tell us, often enough, that it is all for our own good). Orthodoxy is the declaration of independence for the mind that would be free to perceive reality.
That book gives you a general overview of the terrain of Planet Chesterton. If you want to get into sorts of adventures available there, I'd suggest either Manalive or (my personal recommendation) The Man Who Was Thursday. The former might (inaccurately, but what are you gonna do?) be described as a kind of social farce or (better, if used in the Aristotelian or Dantean sense) a comedy, but Thursday is a free-wheeling, extravagant and bizarre chase that is partly an espionage and detective thriller, and partly an absurdist-seeming farce (though it has nothing at all to do with absurdism--in fact, quite the opposite: it has everything to do with Sense!) And don't wait for the movie version because (please God) there will never be one. At the heart of the book is an Outlook and Attitude (I'm not completely sure that it can be called a "philosophy," though what there is of one may be found, if anywhere, in Orthodoxy) that would give most film-makers hives--and there is no director smart enough to make the movie, or even to understand the book without changing his life and career entirely--though, oddly, Orson Welles adapted it for his radio series The Mercury Theatre On The Air, the episode being available commercially and also (I believe) through legal and free download from various sites on the web (I bought mine on audiocassette before I realized this)--and I have to say it's not bad, though largely because, like the book, it's mostly a verbal experience. I have no idea how it would work as a film, unless it were a critically-opaque mixture of genres, up to and including animation, to make it work.
Once you've got through these two works, you are free to the Chestertonian universe--though probably never completely stable on your feet: Chestertonia is earthquake country, and even the most seasoned traveler there is likely to be knocked off his feet from time to time, or have the country suddenly whip around under his feet and to find himself facing in an unexpected direction. It will be outlandish and challenging.
And best of all, it will be Home--the place where you were always meant to live--not the drab, shallow, meaningless and truly absurd and wholly artificial low-level theme park that our so-called thinkers and social-engineering types have spent their lives (and yours) convincing you that you ought to be content with. It is the world humans were meant for.
Get there as fast as your legs will carry you.
The Everlasting Man is a great book, but it’s slow going because it makes you think. I found myself reading some passages several times to soak up what he was saying. Chesterton could be quite humorous and at the same time manage to convey some very profound thoughts.