19 August 2024

The Sunday Times is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of their first weekly  ‘Best Sellers’ list. In this week’s ‘Culture’ magazine, the top one hundred are listed with miniature summaries of their contents. There were no books on mathematics nor theology.

There were a number on scientific subjects including Dava Sobel’s ‘Longitude’ which I enjoyed. But her book about the relationship between Galileo and his daughter was more immediately engaging. The latter didn’t appear in the top hundred.

‘The Ascent of Man’ by  Jacob Bronowski and ‘Alistair Cooke’s America’ were popular books from the seventies. I succumbed to purchasing both. The one came in at number 26, the other at 36. I learned a lot from Alistair Cooke’s ‘Letter from America’. His conclusions were superb. He, more than any other, taught me how to end a sermon.

I gave  my mother number 12, ‘The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady’ which she loved. And my brother gave me number 68, Alan Bennett’s ‘Writing Home’. His acute observation of human life and relationships recounted with his infectious sense of humour is always entertaining in book or on stage.

My younger daughter had ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’, the first of Rowling’s Harry Potter collection. Reading it inspired me to write a school address on ‘Mirrors’. It came in at 21 just ahead of Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ at 23. I read it to answer some of the questions which members at New Kilpatrick had about its strange contents.

Brian Keenan’s ‘An Evil Cradling’ defeated me. It was too painful. And I never bought Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’. It was top of the list. He was an exceptional physicist who became a celebrity not just because of his brains but also because he overcame enormous disability defying his two year life sentence at 21 and living for another fifty-five years.

In introducing the list, Joahanna Thomas-Corr observes that  ‘Our celebrity authors are just as likely to emerge from social media as TV these days’. And, more interestingly, ‘We now seem more interested in improving ourselves than in understanding the world.’ Looking in and looking out are both areas of exploration worthy of a sermon or two!


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