Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Influential Books and Music

I know I haven't posted in forever, and it would be amazing if anyone checked back here for some real material, but I really am working on not one but two posts right now. One of them might as well be an essay that I'm posting, since it will be that long, but hopefully someone will still read it, and the other one is my argument against the existence of natural rights. So check back if you're interested. But if you're not...read ahead.

I got tagged on Facebook by the one and only Christy Somerville to list fifteen books that have stuck with me after I've read them. I don't feel like tagging folks, so I thought I'd do it here. These are in the order they occurred to me.

1. Christ Our Mediator--C.J. Mahaney
2. God is the Gospel--John Piper
3. Orthodoxy--G.K. Chesterton
4. Peace Like a River--Leif Enger
5. The Count of Monte Cristo--Alexandre Dumas
6. The Chronicles of Narnia--C.S. Lewis
7. The Scarlet Letter--Nathanial Hawthorne
8. The Iliad--Homer
9. Macbeth--William Shakespeare
10. Gilead--Marilynne Robinson
11. Speaker for the Dead--Orson Scott Card
12. Holes--Louis Sachar
13. The Hound of the Baskervilles--Arthur Conan Doyle
14. A Tale of Two Cities--Charles Dickens
15. Paradise Lost--John Milton

And since I'm doing this, I might as well throw up a post I started forever ago and never finished. I wanted to compile my fifteen favorite albums of all time, but hit a roadblock when I had a bunch of albums I wanted to include because I was nostalgic about them from my childhood, not because I thought they were particularly great in reality. So I cheated, and I made two lists: my nostalgia list and my real list. The first list is in order of when they influenced me, starting from early childhood and ending in high school. The second list is in alphabetical order by artist.

Nostalgia:

1. The Man from Snowy River
2. The Parent Trap
3. The Prince of Egypt
4. Rich Mullins - Songs
5. Steven Curtis Chapman - Speechless
6. Chris Rice - Past the Edges
7. Michael W. Smith - Live the Life
8. Avalon - Oxygen
9. Steven Curtis Chapman - Declaration
10. FFH - Have I Ever Told You
11. Mark Schultz - Song Cinema
12. Big Daddy Weave - One and Only
13. Relient K - The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek
14. Casting Crowns - Casting Crowns
15. Godspell

Favorite Albums:
1. Anberlin - Cities
2. Caedmon's Call - 40 Acres
3. Chris Rice - Amusing
4. David Crowder*Band - A Collision (or 3+4=7)
5. House of Heroes - The End is Not the End
6. Jars of Clay - Good Monsters
7. Les Miserables
8. Mae - The Everglow
9. The Ragamuffins and Friends - The Jesus Record
10. Relient K - mmHmm
11. Rich Mullins - A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band
12. Simon and Garfunkel - Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme
13. Switchfoot - The Beautiful Letdown
14. Third Day - Wire
15. U2 - Joshua Tree

4 comments:

William said...

Woah, woah, woah. Speaker for the Dead made the list, but not Ender's Game?! How?

Unknown said...

I love all the Ender books, but it was Speaker for the Dead (and Xenocide) that really stuck with me...the ethical dilemmas and battle between the worldviews to make sense of the world, the completely different alien creatures (not just humans in different bodies)...it showed me the way science fiction should be written and made me think. Ender's Game was great, but, for me, not as good as its sequels.

Anonymous said...

Hey, no dc talk, matthew west, newsboya, or even tobymac!

Unknown said...

even tobyMac? He'd be at the bottom of that list, whoever you are (don't post anonymously, please).

And dc Talk and the newsboys were not really part of my childhood music...I didn't really get into them until I was much older (as in, within the past three or four years), and I none of them became my favorites at that late point. Matthew West is fine....