'But you and all the kind of Christ
Are ignorant and brave,
And you have wars you hardly win
And souls you hardly save.'
The ballad of the white horse

Thursday, June 30, 2011

G.K. Chesterton; a biography

Today I am halfway in my 'year of reading Chesterton' and I just finished Michael Ffinch' biography. I cannot tell much about this biography, for several reasons. First, I took five months to read the book, so the first part is quite distant at the moment. The second reason is that I did not know anything about Chesterton's life before reading the biography: all my information comes from one source.
Looking through the table of contents, I see that with my chronological reading, I am not even on one third of the chapters in this book (which, I take it, roughly correspond with Chesterton's output). But at least I am beginning to get a feeling for the immense variety of Chesterton's thinking and writing.
One thing I liked about this biography was the short descriptions of Chesterton's various books: I do not only have a first idea about his life, but also about the books I want to read. And on that list of books to read I will put another biography, just to make sure I have various viewpoints.

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