Books I Have Loved

Carl Wells

Description

Some oldthinkers still read books . . .
Carl Wells has been one of them.
Some of those books have made a huge impression on him.
Books I Have Loved gives us Wells' response to 46 books (by 41 authors) encountered through a longish life mostly spent (misspent?) reading books.
His only regret is that he didn't spend more time reading.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Philosophy
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 08 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665576406
• Langue: English

Extrait

Books I Have Loved










by Carl Wells









AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: [phone]






© 2023 Carl Wells. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/07/2023

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7641-3 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-7640-6 (e)






Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.



Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

















This book is dedicated to the
gifted writer Theodore Dalrymple, who
clearly has read and loved a lot of books.
















When you come bring the cloak which
I left at Troas with Carpus, and the books,
especially the parchments.
2 Timothy 4:13



Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Catcher in the Rye —by J. D. Salinger
Chapter 2. A Man of Letters —by Thomas Sowell
Chapter 3. The Breakdown of Nations —by Leopold Kohr
Chapter 4. Bomba the Jungle Boy on the Underground River —by Roy Rockwood
Chapter 5. Crime and Punishment —by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Chapter 6. Understood Betsy —by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Chapter 7. War Without Garlands —by Robert J. Kershaw
Chapter 8. Leftism —by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Chapter 9. Cress Delahanty —by Jessamyn West
Chapter 10. Penrod —by Booth Tarkington
Chapter 11. Miss Mapp —by E. F. Benson
Chapter 12. As I Was Young and Easy —by Clancy Carlile
Chapter 13. The Law —by Frédéric Bastiat
Chapter 14. The Cancer Ward —by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Chapter 15. True Grit —by Charles Portis
Chapter 16. The Green Stick —by Malcolm Muggeridge
Chapter 17. The Rookie Fights Back —by Burgess Leonard
Chapter 18. Life Is Life —by Zack (Gwendoline Keats)
Chapter 19. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer —by Mark Twain
Chapter 20. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall —by Anne Brontë
Chapter 21. The Gulag Archipelago —by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Chapter 22. Jane Eyre —by Charlotte Brontë
Chapter 23. Persuasion —by Jane Austen
Chapter 24. Politics of Guilt and Pity —by Rousas John Rushdoony
Chapter 25. Tammy Out of Time —by Cid Ricketts Sumner
Chapter 26. Sam Small Flies Again —by Eric Knight
Chapter 27. Treasure Islan d —by Robert Louis Stevenson
Chapter 28. David Copperfield —by Charles Dickens
Chapter 29. The Old Curiosity Shop —by Charles Dickens
Chapter 30. King—of the Khyber Rifles —by Talbot Mundy
Chapter 31. Pride and Prejudice —by Jane Austen
Chapter 32. Tom Sawyer Abroad —by Mark Twain
Chapter 33. Life at the Bottom —by Theodore Dalrymple
Chapter 34. Apache Gold —by Joseph A. Altsheler
Chapter 35. A Master of Craft —by W. W. Jacobs
Chapter 36. Tarzan the Terrible —by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Chapter 37. Anne of Green Gable —by L. M. Montgomery
Chapter 38. The Code of the Woosters —by P. G. Wodehouse
Chapter 39. Watership Down —by Richard Adams
Chapter 40. The Wind in the Willows —by Kenneth Grahame
Chapter 41. That Hideous Strength —by C. S. Lewis
Chapter 42. 1984 —by George Orwell
Chapter 43. Ain’t My America —by Bill Kauffman
Chapter 44. The Last Chronicle of Barset —by Anthony Trollope
Chapter 45. The Agony of the Church —by Nikolaj Velimirovic
Chapter 46. Pollyanna —by Eleanor H. Porter
Chapter 47. Summing Up
Appendix I. A Prayer
Appendix II. Three Iron Laws
Appendix III. Goodreads on the Books I Have Loved
Other Books by the Author



Introduction

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read. 1
Book lists never satisfy me. Other people admire books I don’t particularly care about. Or don’t mention books I do care about. Or say things with which I disagree. Or something else. I’m glad to see that other people like reading enough to give us their recommendations, but their recommendations end up disappointing me.
So I’m pretty sure my list of books I have loved will disappoint you. And that in turn will disappoint me, because these books have meant a lot to me. If you roll your eyes, or sneer, or if you just shrug, you will be rolling your eyes or sneering or shrugging at me personally. So don’t tell me about your unfavorable response; I don’t need the aggravation. Make your own durn list.
Let’s look on the optimistic side, however. There is a strong possibility that at least a few of these books would find favor with you. Some of them you’ve never heard of, while some of them you’ve heard of but just never got around to reading. So consider this an encouragement to you to try something new and potentially enjoyable. At least one person—me—has found these books to be life-enhancing. You might have a similar response to at least a handful of them. My descriptions of them hopefully will let you know which books might interest you, and which of them you want to run screaming from as if from the plague.
My own love of reading began early in life. I can distinctly remember, at about age six or so, seeing my parents read a lot, and wanting to be like my parents. So I tried to be like them, and it worked out well for me. Reading came naturally to me. I’ve always read a lot, from childhood onward. I have several excellent legacies from my parents, and the love of reading is far from the smallest.
The reading has always been much more than a pleasant hobby for me. Reading is what I do, and really have to do.
The reading has not led to me becoming successful and wealthy. I am not famous for being learned or wise. I’m just a guy who read a lot, and enjoyed doing so.
Reading books did not lift me to eminence. The books, I suppose, helped me to hang on.
For most people, life is challenging and difficult. We might lead lives of quiet desperation, or of noisy self-deception, but one way or another most of us manage to make a mess of our lives. This is just as true of the outwardly successful as it is of the rest of us. I know lots of outwardly successful people—and so do you—who are examples to be shunned.
The fact that my life has been unsuccessful has been a result of my own poor character, of course. If character is fate, I chose my own fate by the way I exercised my character. In this I suppose I join many teeming millions. To explain is not to excuse.
So: I’m just a guy hanging on. Don’t blame the books! Through this unimpressive life, reading has been one of the great mitigating blessings. Reading was a gift from God, given to me for reasons—generosity of spirit surely among them, I would guess—of His own.
Reading was not my only gift from God. The greatest gift He gave me was to allow me to become a beginning Christian in my mid to late twenties. That marked the start of a long, slow slog toward semi-sanity. I think the books have helped immensely on that long journey.
Should I have invested much more of my time in things other than reading? Perhaps. But also perhaps not. I am a one-trick pony: I write books. Because I have read many books, eventually I became able to write books, although it took me a long time to get to the publishing part—publishing at my own expense, at that—and although the books have not been successful.
All I did was read books, and write books nobody read. I am completely unrepentant. I remind myself of the famous outlaw Frank James. Late in his life, decades removed from his bloody criminal past, a reporter asked
if Frank thought what he had done with his life had been “worthwhile.”
Frank paused for a moment, as if his mind was racing over the scenes of his past: foolhardy charges, smoking revolvers, bloody corpses, the faces of Quantrill, Bloody Bill, Cole, Jesse, his mother—and Joseph Lee Heywood, stumbling to his death.
Finally, Frank answered: “If you’re not a quitter, anything you’ve done has got to be worthwhile. You can make it worthwhile. I guess, if I had it all to do over, and had the choice, and had to make the choice as a young man, I’d rather have all the pain and danger and trouble than to be just a plain farmer. If I had an old man’s head, I would choose different. . . .” 2
Hilarious. Looking back, Frank James is glad he chose to be a criminal as a young man. It is only with his ‘“old man’s head”’ that he would choose different.
Well, I’m worse even than Frank James. Even with my old man’s head, I would still choose to do the reading/writing all over again. I would just do it more and better. If I had an opportunity to do it all over, I’d buy and read even more books, and I would self-publish earlier and more.
Reading offers such immense pleasures! By now I should be cynically hardened to any behavior of mankind, but I confess I continue to be astonished that countless intelligent people refuse to read good books. What person of normal intelligence would not