I have been asked by Aquinas and More, the nation’s largest online Catholic store, to provide a “Top 10 list of books I think Catholics should read”. I thought this list might also interest visitors to this site.
As requested, here is my “Top 10 list of books I think Catholics should read”:
1. Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine by Archbishop Michael Sheehan
2. Apologia pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante (Penguin edition with commentary by Dorothy L. Sayers)
4. Aquinas by F. C. Copleston
5. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
6. The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
7. Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
8. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford Paperbacks)
9. Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot
10. Confessions by St. Augustine
No Belloc?
Golly, the top ten for all Catholics? Surely the Bible and the Catechism should at least make the list. And a Church history should be somewhere on it? *Two* entire volumes of modern poetry? I’ve read some of Hopkins’ poetry to very intelligent, well educated Catholics who are left stone cold by it. I know poetry is considered a “higher” art form than prose by some people (I love Peter Kreeft’s intelligible distinctions on such things), but *modern* poetry is too esoteric for two such books of it to make the list, it would seem, though Dante should certainly be there–that’s three books of poetry. Of course, there’s no way consensus could ever be reached on such an assignment.