Lepanto and Ballad Of The White Horse are great.The Father Brown stories are a lot of fun.Man Who Was Thursday is extremely clever and interesting.A lot of his social commentary essays are amazing.Honestly I think he's at his worst when he's trying to be a theologian, it's not really his wheelhouse and it's the genre where his habits start to grate on you the most.
>>25423905I think his essays are much his best work. Then his Father Brown stories.Not impressed with either the novels or the verse to be honest.One of the best things he did is not so well known. A friend of his called Holbrook Jackson wrote a book of aphorisms called Platitudes in the Making: Precepts and Advices for Gentlefolk. Chesterton went through it and wrote a little commentary next to every one. The commentary is better than the book (a bit like William Blake's annotations to Lavater).It's interesting because GKC's obsession with paradox can get irritating, but here, the guy he's annotating is like that but even more so. His whole thing is to say the opposite of what everyone believes (a bit like Wilde). So GKC is cast as the straight man, the voice of reason, and he does it very well. He just points out plain common sense and destroys all the nonsense.Well worth seeking out if you haven't read it.
