An autobiography

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1. yesenadamSep 2021
   I read a page years ago mentioning in detail the enormous number of well-known 20th C figures inspired or called-to-action by Chesterton. Can't find it now, but this mentions a few -

   https://thefinalprojectchesterton.wordpress.com/the-influenc...

   Hitchcock, C.S. Lewis, Tolkein, Orwell, EF Schumacher etc. Maybe most remarkably, Chesterton's 1909 essay on Indian self-determination/nationalism gave Gandhi the idea of fighting for it himself.

   I've never thought his fiction compared at all with his non-fiction. A bit like Werner Herzog in that way–they're so good, fascinating, skillful at interpreting the real world in their works, it's a shame when their skills are restricted to a made-up story. Yet people often act as if Stevenson only wrote fiction, or Nietzsche's best is Zarathustra, or Chesterton's best The Man Who Was Thursday!

   (I've only read a small part of his huge output.. but) My favourite of his books maybe is Heretics, on some contemporary trends and errors of thought—Shaw, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, nihilism etc. It's just brilliant, and very funny, like most of his stuff, though more so. Endlessly re-readable. Also What's Wrong with the World. His Autobiography. Full of wonderful bits.

   Most of his books are collections of his newspaper articles, some good, some amazingly good. All worth reading. All Things Considered, Alarms and Discursions, Come to Think of It, All is Grist etc.

   There are a series of biographies, all of remarkable penetration. Stevenson, Shaw, Blake, St Francis, St Thomas etc. As if biography was his unique gift. He somehow gets inside his subjects to an astounding degree. Varied Types has about 15 short pieces on contemporary/recent figures, e.g. the first is on Charlotte Brontë.

   I love the first half of Orthodoxy—before it (unsurprisingly) gets too Christiany. I find his usual brilliant arguments often turn into very lazy, stupid ones where his religion is the topic. But every writer has their blind spots.

   An example of GKC being very funny while very serious: Even The Everlasting Man, about Jesus, has its moments of brilliance (from my atheist perspective). From its first chapter The Man in the Cave, about our prejudices vs what we actually know about early humans:

   'So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, "Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him," the novelist's readers would be very disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large portraits of cows on the drawing-room wall.'

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2. FinnucaneMar 2016
   An Autobiography, Mohandas Gandhi Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
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