The Defendant

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OK, I read so much this month, that I could barely keep track of it...I read an astonishing..er...1 book this month. lol. OK, ok. But it was a huge book. It was...er...75 pages. :-)

It was The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton (found online here). It was a collection of newspaper articles he wrote, first published in 1901 (when he was 27 years old), in which he "defended" things such as skeletons, planets, ugly things, farce, and so forth. But it was filled with such great wisdom. Each article was only about 3 pages in length. It was a minor work of his, but it did have some influence. From one biography of Alfred Hitchcock:

The influence of Chesterton must be assessed as well. Much admired and celebrated by the Catholic clergy, and read by Catholic schoolboys, Chesterton's popular essays "A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls" and "A Defence of Detective stories" (published in his 1901 collection The Defendant) entertained the adolescent Hitchcock, and provided him with ideas for the formation of his own style and vision when he was an apprentice filmmaker. It was Chesterton who defended popular literature, Chesterton who pointed out the archetypal, fairy-tale structure of police stories, and Chesterton who defended exploration of criminal behavior.

"One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mast of which we contentedly describe as vulgar." Hitchcock read in "A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls."

[Source- The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, Donald Spoto, p. 40)]

Below the cut, I included some quotes from the book (at least one from each article), some short, some long. One of the quotes from the "Introduction" is quite long, though, so...(you may wish to skip over the longer quotes, though I thought them quite good)

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Books read in January

[kiwiria.livejournal.com]

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X-posted to my own journal.