Recommendations
The following are introductions or sign-posts (very descriptive sign-posts) to some of my favorite stuff—books, mostly, and movies, and maybe other things—in the hopes that it might inspire you to check them out. I'll try to minimize spoilers, while giving enough information to answer the question, "Why is this [book/movie/other thing] worth my time?"
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G. K. Chesterton was a man who discovered the secret to a happy life—I doubt one can read much of his work without coming to that conclusion. The most natural reaction to his body of work, I think, is amazement: to wonder what secret this man discovered that allowed him to take so much delight in a sheet of brown paper, for example, or where he found the energy to defend his faith in a land growing faithless with so much gusto and wit.In Manalive, a short novel full of events as improbable as the name of the story's protagonist,...
Casablanca was shot in black-and-white, as were most movies made in the 1940s. That, and the fact that the film is considered a classic, has probably contributed to many people avoiding it who might otherwise give it a chance (expanding Mark Twain's definition of a classic to "a movie that everybody wants to have watched and nobody wants to watch.")But if other classics can be accused of being difficult to relate to for a modern audience, Casablanca effortlessly dodges the charge.
Braveheart is to my generation what Shakespeare may have been to an earlier and more literary generation. When it came out in 1995, my friends and I could quote entire scenes, especially the stirring speeches Mel Gibson gives as freedom fighter William Wallace. Although it's been accused (among other things) of historical inaccuracies and of fetishizing violence, the movie is a brilliant piece of storytelling and a model of good filmmaking. To dispense with those two criticisms (which I consider the most serious that have been levelled at the movie), the issue of historical inaccuracy is of course valid, but...
Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol
Except for the Bible, there isn't a book I've read as many times as Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Again except for those found in the Bible, there isn't a story I'm more familiar with than that of the mean-spirited, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who repents one year during the holidays and ever after knows "how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge." And I've not only read A Christmas Carol, I've watched countless movie and theatre adaptations of the book.
