Okay, so this is personal and highly subjective and I’m putting out my list only so that you will respond and remind me of all the great literature I haven’t put on the list.

5.  Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory – Greene gets to the heart of what is strength, weakness, sin and grace through this story of the “whiskey priest.”

4. Shusaku Endo, Silence – often called “the Japanese Graham Greene,” Endo’s novel of faith and persecution in early modern Japan made me question all my certainties.

3. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited – I’m not especially impressed by Waugh’s devotion to the British class system, but I found myself totally immersed in the grand sweep of this Catholic “Gone With The Wind.”

2. Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins – Percy writes searingly beautiful prose and, even if you don’t agree with him, you have to acknowledge the force of his argument.

1. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain – Happily, I called this post “Top 5 Catholic Books” because this isn’t a novel, but a memoir.  One that changed my life by drawing me towards a Religious vocation.

Hmm. Only one woman on the list.  How could I have left out Flannery O’Connor or Rumer Godden? And what about G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ron Hansen and about a thousand others.  I’m in trouble here. …