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IMO, a very good point, indeed, and where I started, in 1965. Esp. good if you also like very high quality detective short stories. I then went on to ORTHODOXY, and it's been a great trip, for 40+ years.

Of the Fr. Browns, start with THE INNOCENCE OF FR. BROWN, if you can find it. "The Blue Cross", "The Secret Garden", "The Queer Feet", "The Flying Stars", "The Honour of Israel Gow", "The Sign of the Broken Sword" {"Where does a wise man hide a leaf?"}, all among my favorites. And it's available on line.

Good place to start. If you want more ideas, I'm around.

GKC

I was thinking about reading them perhaps during the Easter. In Norway it's a tradition to read crime novels during easter. If I want all of them in one book, preferably hardcover, which edition should I choose?

I'm not sure there is a one volume edition, hard cover, in print. Ignatius Press has a 2 vol. set that is good, but pricey. Otherwise, I don't know of a current hard cover in print, containing all the books. My own copy of the collected Fr. Brown dates from 1953 (IIRC), has all the published books, and one of the 4 uncollected stories. But it is long out of print.

GKC

What are the names of the uncollected stories? Why are they uncollected?

I can't answer that, completely. My Chesterton stuff is at the other house now, and while it's out of the boxes, it's not arranged in any order, and I don't remember where the info on the "uncollected" stories is (it will be scattered) can be found. I can't promise I can locate it, any time soon.

But I can answer part of the question. The first "uncollected" was an unprinted Fr. B. story titled "The Vampire of the Viallage". It is suggested, in some of the critical studies of Chesterton, that this, the last known story written for magazine publication, was not up to the usual standards, and that Chesterton was "written out". Maybe, but it seemed about average to me, and very similar to "The Hammer of God". Toward the end of his career, Chesterton relied on the Fr. Brown stories as a source of funds to keep his magazine and his Distributionist work going, and some folks think the quality of the latter stories suffered. At any rate, it's not really accurate to call "Vampire" an uncollected story, since it was included, in the early 50s complete Fr. Brown collection I have. But that was its first publication.

The other 3 (or maybe other 2) were written for special or private purposes (like the Holmes/Watson "Field Bazaar" story), and perhaps printed in a limited form, somewhere. They hadn't been republished for many years, until recently. I think at least one was reprinted in the CHESTERTON REVIEW. I'll look when I get the time.

The stories in THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN are Fr. B. at his best.

GKC

I found my Father Brown in a used book shop in Vasteras, they seemed to have several anthologies both in English and Swedish. You would be hard pressed to find Chesterton's more spiritual books used in Scandinavia; however people love crime novels and the Father Brown series is considered top notch even in secular circles. So, just try out one in your local used bookstore, with a dusty pulp fiction cover from the 50's

Just read Barth's "The Call to Discipleship" and found it very strong stuff. His arguments (from Bonhoeffer) that "following" Jesus is much more than embracing a Christian movement, and is all about a complete 'turning' and transformation of a life are very compelling.

One of the greatest books I have ever read. When I am elected Pope it will be required reading by all the faithful.

Peace,
DCD

A Canticle For Lebowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr. - a book about how the Catholic Church saved civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire...er, I mean, a work of science-fiction about how the Catholic Church saves civilization after the fall of the modern world through total nuclear conflagration.

I just found my copy of "The Backbiting Tongue." I encourage everyone to read this little pamphlet!

I knew you could be trusted.

Tell me if you like Benjamin.

GKC

I'm almost halfway through. Let's meet up on the porch in a few days when I'm done (squeezing in the reading at bedtime), and chat about it.

The Externals of the Catholic Church, John F. Sullivan. (Yes, this is SAP's favorite book.) I'm OCRing and proofing it, having successfully gotten a clone of the PGDP system running on a Fedora 7 installation running under VMWare Fusion (and reveling in my total geekiness for so doing).

Crossing the the Tiber, Justin Martyr's Apologies and Teddy Roosevelt's Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.

Holy cow. And I thought I was a geek.

I'm reading lots o' stuff, mostly for class:

- The Old Testament: Historical Traditions (Paul Tarazi, an EO priest who approaches scripture as literature. Not sure I buy it all, but it does help to make sense of a lot of inconsistencies)

- Moses and the Deuteronomists (as well as the other two parts, when I can. These are by Robert Polzin, and I'm sceptical of his rather post-structuralist literary approach. Smacks of Derrida to me.)

- The Everlasting Man (I like GKC, but my goodness this is a tiresome book. And as you can tell, I'm used to abstruse prose.)

I have other books stacked on my nightstand, but these are the ones I'm actually working on.

It would be even geekier if I could get it to work automagically with Google's Tesseract OCR software, but I'm not up to that yet.

I'll be there.

Bought Jack McDevitt's latest today.


GKC

EVERLASTING MAN tiresome?

Oh, dear.

How about ORTHODOXY? Maybe his Anglican prose will be more fetching.


GKC

I thought it was great fun (especially GKC's skewering of H. G. Wells), although I'm not sure I would think the same on a second reading.

Oh, dear.

Have you read Belloc's responses to Wells' OUTLINE?

GKC