I’m Booked Solid

Writers are readers long before they take up the pen. It’s a good bet that somewhere along the way a book hit their world like a meteor and sent them into a new orbit. That has happened to me more than once. I was thinking about those books and decided to share them and the lessons they taught me with you.

I am going to leave the Bible off this list because its continuing influence on my life completely overshadows anything else. So, if it is your #1 book, I understand.

The book that made the biggest impact on my life is Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I first read this Christian apology many years after becoming a Christian and it still rocked my world. I have reread it many times since then. It is simply the best laid out, most logical case for Christianity that I have ever read.

Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury, and the series of books that followed it, didn’t so much change me as cement my convictions. Drury was a White House correspondent during the Cold War. His books are a critique of the press, and its partnership with “progressive” politics that the author saw as a road map for getting from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Orwell’s 1984. I’ve read a lot of horror stories, but Drury’s Come Nineveh, Come Tyre in this series scared me more than any other book.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee taught me that there are people in the world destined to do everybody’s dirty work for them. It also taught me that those people are essential. Contrary to popular hype, picking crops is not the dirty job Americans don’t want to do. Taking an unpopular stand in a battle you can’t win is the bane of modern America.

Animal Farm by George Orwell. This book crystallized for me that the great desire of people in power is twofold. Once in power, the first great desire is to stay in power. The second is the desire to amass ever more power. These two desires are best accomplished by employing useful idiots unwilling to think for themselves. Of course, the axiom that power corrupts goes hand-in-hand with the acquisition and retention of power.

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. I had to include this one although I didn’t read it until I was in my mid-sixties. It taught me that it’s all right to be a little crazy if you can still be true to yourself. Duty, honor, and a code of right conduct are not dead, you just have to be a little odd to believe in them.

Jack LaFountain