The View From The Foothills

Over at Brandywine Books, we’ve been asked to blog the ten books that have shaped our lives. I got curious thinking about what my ten books would be, and here’s what I came up with, in no particular order.

1. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis
3. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis
4. The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis
5. The Bible
6. The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis
7. The Most of P.G. Wodehouse, by P.G. Wodehouse
8. H.M.S. Surprise, by Patrick O’Brian
9. Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
10. The Dunwich Horror, by H.P. Lovecraft

The first six are the books that formed my worldview. It might seem that C.S. Lewis is over-represented, but that’s true in my head as well. I thought about tossing in something more of Tolkien’s (”Leaf by Niggle” is another favorite) but decided that nothing else of his was as influential in my life.

The latter four are by the authors whose writing I’d most like to emulate; I picked a representative volume from each. I feel odd including them, because they haven’t particularly shaped my thinking, but my only other options were to stop at six books or to pad the list out with four more books by Lewis.