Tremendous Trifles
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Chesterton’s 39 fleeting essays are the result, he says, of “sitting still and letting marvels and adventures settle on him like flies.” Really, he does go around — Germany, France, and on foot in England when he tires of waiting for a train. Full of both excellent sense and nonsense, his commentaries remain an absolute delight.
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Anyone new to Mr. Chesterson’s writings will find this book fun and entertaining. It will give you a glimpse into the genius of Chesterton’s brilliant mind. Then you must go on to the more meaty, weighty, substantive philosophic works: Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
If you’re a fan of fantastic writing, you’ll be a fan of this collection. Each tale within the collection is fleeting, maximum 4 pages, and they get right to the point. But, like any fantastic tale, they save the best for last and you will find yourself looking forwards to reading the last paragraph within each tale as it is truly the best and most invigorating. Chesterton’s control of the English language is stunning and his direct matter of proving a thing is awe-inspiring. If you’re a fan of his additional works, you may like this one even more because it doesn’t take as long to get the same fantastic Chesterton-messages out of the reading. I give this book 5 stars because it really is wonderful when you don’t have all day to read, yet still want to learn something or be motivated that the world is not all terrible throughout the day. If you’ve got 15 spare minutes, thats enough to flip through one of these tales and feel better about yourself and the world.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
2009 inscription the hundredth anniversary of this book from 1909, which is a collection of columns the leader penned for a British newspaper, the Daily Mail. As such it’s a mixed bag; some of the writing is, in my view a 3, and some a 5, thus my rating of a 4. Sometimes I don’t know what he’s talking about. Additional times I find myself quoting a paragraph in an e-mail. This book contains my first encounter with Chesterton, a brief essay called “On Lying in Bed”, which I still reflect one of his best. But when I started this book, although I avidly devour G.K.’s novels, and some of his nonfiction, like Orthodoxy, this one didn’t hold me.
I returned to it now and then, as one does, after reading rather more gripping reads. Then its magic kicked in, and in my view, some of the later essays, particularly persons that are travelogues, are the best. Additional readers will have their favorites; some of mine are:” The advantages of Having One Leg”; “The Twelve Men”; “The Wind and the Trees”; “In Topsy-Turvy Land”; “The Tower”; “The Orthodox Barber”; “Humanity: An Interlude”; “The Small Birds Who Won’t Sing”; “The Travellers in State”; “The Prehistoric Railway Station”; “A Glimpse of My Country”; and “The Ballade of a Weird Town”.
That’s my dozen keepers from these 39 essays, a rather excellent haul from a book a century ancient. The difficulty in this volume is that the references, as in most newspaper columns, are to current controversies, culture, and even jokes of the day. The reason this book celebrates a centennial when so many others of the era are forgotten, is because for Chesterton, persons passing fancies, all the rage at the moment, are signposts to conditions common to humanity. That’s why he remains so quotable. But neither did he write abstractedly about universals; he experimental and commented on particular people and places in his time. That’s why he remains readable.
Few read the sort of column collected here in our day, and fewer now write it. What one notices on reading any Chesterton, but, on dipping into any book nearly anywhere, is his delight in living, and looking, and reuminating. This is not a self-help book, but any reader who helps him or herself to it, may be helped regardless, to see more, and delight in life more. Because his message at bottom is it’s OK to delight in life, to see it as a excellent gift, to be thankful and revel in it. This is not the frantic optimism of a prescriptive self-help book. To Chesterton, it’s simple realism. As he writes in “The Ballade of a Weird Town”:
“The fake optimism, the modern happiness, tires us because it tells us we fit into this world. The right happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.” A hundred years later these words still ring right. Which is why we’re still reading him.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Persons familiar with G. K. Chesterton probably know him for his novels (The Man Who Was Thursday), his tales (The Perfect Father Brown Tales (Wordsworth Classics) (Wordsworth Collection)), and his non-fiction ORTHODOXY). Even the fans may not be aware that his chief profession in life was as a journalist. Indeed, Chesterton wrote a stunning 3,000 columns during his lifetime. Many collections were published at the time, and others have been added since then. It is said, by the right fanatics, that all 3,000+ are reasonably excellent. I wouldn’t know, since I’ve only read a hundred or so. But I can say this. Among all essay collections by any leader that I’ve ever read, “Tremendous Trifles” is the best.
“Tremendous Trifles” is, to place it simply, a series of reflections on everyday life. In “The Twelve Men”, Chesterton recounts the tale of his call to jury duty. Being chosen merely because his name starts with ‘C’, he ends up hearing the case of an accused bicycle thief. “We did indeed, well, and truly try the case of the Crown versus the defendant in the issue of stealing bicycles, and we concluded, after much debate, that the Crown was in no ways implicated.” Several cases later, Chesterton has an epiphany and realizes why we need juries rather than judges. To professional judges, judging seems ordinary. Only a jury of normal citizens can remember that putting men on examination is an extraordinary thing to do.
In “On Lying in Bed”, Chesterton reflects on the ceiling, and the joys of observing it from a bed. In “The Extraordinary Cabman”, he tackles the philosophical question of whether anything is really real, and answers with a certain yes. It’s hard to pick the best essay in a collection like this, but I can certainly pick the best title: “The Advantages of Having a Broken Leg”. But regardless, every essay is well worth reading, and the whole book is a worthy addition to any library.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5