Fiction & Literature

1. The Divine Comedy: The supreme Catholic poem; read Esolen’s notes as you go.
2. Brideshead Revisited: Grace pursues a family “by a twitch upon the thread.”
3. The Lord of the Rings: A fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously at first and then consciously.
4. Flannery O’Connor: Stories, Novels, and Letters: Grace arriving violently in the American South.
5. Kristin Lavransdatter: Medieval Norway, a woman’s sin, and the long road to sanctity.
6. The Diary of a Country Priest: A young priest’s hidden holiness: “Grace is everywhere.”
7. The Betrothed (I promessi sposi): Providence and conversion in plague-time Lombardy.
8. The Power and the Glory & The End of the Affair: The whisky priest, the last priest in his state, still bringing the sacraments.
9. The Moviegoer: A New Orleans stockbroker on “the search.”
10. Lord of the World: The Antichrist arrives as a humanitarian; written in 1907.
11. Death Comes for the Archbishop: Missionary bishops in the New Mexico desert.
12. Poems: The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

All reading lists