Books Which Affected My Life

 Important Books in My Life

 I thought I would do an ongoing project for my Blog on the books that have really affected my life.

Perhaps the most important was The Degrees of Knowledge by Jacques Maritain.  It was this book which led me to the true belief in God.  After 16 years of Catholic education, I never really believed in God even though I searched for that belief for years.  Jacques Maritain and his wife were both existential atheist philosophers.  One day they entered a cathedral in France, and both came out believing in God.  Logical proofs in God do not give us "belief" or faith in God.  His writings helped me bridge the gap between logic and a true mysticism in theology that leads to God.  Some of his other thoughts are well worth taking into account also.  He was a true believer in mending the Catholic attitudes toward Jews and debunking anti-Semitism.  I've come to believe that Christ was the true and perfect existentialist, while most would say that such a thought is an oxymoron.  I don't think so.
  As a kid, I was totally mesmerized by the Tom Swift series of kid's books.  I must have read almost all of them.  He was always inventing something and then using it to solve some crime or injustice in the world.  Most of my friends were reading the Hardy Boys or the Drew Sisters, but I was into Tom Swift and his inventions.  The books were fantasy, but I think they spurred my imagination for the rest of my life.  Nothing is impossible when one is Tom Swift, using one's imagination, to create solutions, and to help one's fellow man through creativity.
 Another atheist, Mortimer Adler, taught me about  syntopical reading and all the other skills needed to read a book.  However, as Adler got older, I believed he was beginning to believe in God also.  He wrote a number of other books which I also found enlightening.  How to Speak and How to Listen was also enlightening, as were his ideas about the Great Books series.  I tried his syntopical reading on George Orwell, reading all of his stories and numerous biographies on Orwell's life.  It was extremely rewarding as I learned a lot about Orwell and how his life entered into almost everything that he wrote.
Well, this is a book that I continue to read.  As a kid, I was fascinated by the Bible and was constantly reading excerpts from it, particularly Genesis and Exodus.  This is one book that seems to constantly change as we get older; we see different meanings and find different lessons from it.  It is no wonder that it remains a best seller.
Another standby.  The good old Dictionary.  I'm not the best speller in the world; although I did quite well in grammar school at our "spelling bees".  Still, as I get older, I think my spelling is deteriorating, only going to prove that practice makes perfect.  I still look up words like "demagoguery" which I find very difficult.  One word I have a problem with is "misspellings", of all words.  Again, as a kid, I often looked through the dictionary, not only to find meanings of words, but also to improve my own vocabulary.  I have always found it fascinating that people who immigrate to the U.S., speak another language, are often better at spelling than most Americans.  I also think the Thesaurus is also a very important book to read and go back to.