The Chesterton Shelf

1. Orthodoxy: Start here: his own road to faith.
2. The Everlasting Man: The answer to H. G. Wells, and the book that helped convert C. S. Lewis.
3. The Father Brown Stories: The priest-detective; start with The Innocence of Father Brown.
4. The Man Who Was Thursday: A nightmare-comedy that turns into a vision.
5. Heretics (1905) — G. K. Chesterton: Twenty essays on the great men of his day, and why they were wrong.
6. St. Thomas Aquinas (“The Dumb Ox”) & St. Francis of Assisi: Gilson said the Aquinas was the best book ever written on Thomas.
7. The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) — G. K. Chesterton: A London borough goes to war for its lamp-posts.
8. What’s Wrong with the World (1910) — G. K. Chesterton: Family, property, and the case for distributism.
9. The Ball and the Cross (1909) — G. K. Chesterton: An atheist and a Catholic try to fight a duel and keep getting interrupted.
10. Manalive (1912) — G. K. Chesterton: A comic novel about a man who rediscovers life by recapturing his own wife and house.

All reading lists