A "Self-Portrait" in Books

My birthday was this week, and to celebrate it, here are 45 books I have loved during the past 45 years.

Because I'm limiting this list to books that are available in English, I've had to leave out a lot of my Finnish favourites, and so the "self-portrait" is not quite accurate. But it's a fair glimpse into my reading history and what sort of books appeal to me.

An another caveat: I didn't include the Holy Bible in this list. It's the book I read the most, but it's really in a category of its own.

Ten favourites from my childhood 

 A.A. Milne: Winnie-the-Pooh

Elisabeth Beresford: The Wombles

Kenneth Grahame: Wind in the Willows

Eleanor Estes: The Moffats

Astrid Lindgren: Vi På Saltkråkan (Seacrow Island)

Enid Blyton: the Adventure series

Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House in the Big Woods (and the series)

L.M.Montgomery: Rilla of Ingleside

L.M. Alcott: An Old-Fashioned Girl

James Aldridge: The Marvellous Mongolian

The last one gets to represent my horse phase. Most of the horse books I devoured were by Finnish or Swedish authors, probably not available in English.

From teen years and early twenties

Mary Stolz: By the Highway Home

John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley

J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings

Douglas Adams: The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

Fynn: Mister God, This is Anna

It was difficult to think back to those years. I know I read a lot, but what did I enjoy the most? I must have forgotten many good books, but if I remember a book as a significant reading experience about thirty years later, it must have been important.

Jane Austen - and other fiction favourites from the last two decades

Jane Austen: Persuasion

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen: Mansfield Park

Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen: Emma

Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford

Barbara Pym: Excellent Women

Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time

Dorothy L. Sayers: Gaudy Night

C.S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters

Adrian Plass: The Sacred Diary of of Adrian Plass Aged 37 3/4 (and the entire series)

Adrian Plass: Stress Family Robinson (and its sequel, The Birthday Party)

Jeff Lucas: Helen Sloane's Diary (and its sequel, Up Close and Personal)

Robinson, Marilynne: Gilead


For all other authors, just one favourite book (or series) has to represent them. But Jane Austen and Adrian Plass are special.

A bunch of biographies and other Christian non-fiction

Sheldon Vanauken: A Severe Mercy

Joni Eareckson: Joni

Corrie ten Boom: The Hiding Place

Norman Grubb: Rees Howells: Intercessor

Brother Andrew: God's Smuggler

Elisabeth Elliot: Through Gates of Splendour

J. Gunnar Olson: Business Unlimited

Nick Vujicic: Life without Limits

Eric Metaxas: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyt, Prophet, Spy

Karen Swallow Prior: Fierce Convictions

C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity

John White: The Fight

Loren Cunningham: Making Jesus Lord

Jennifer Saake: Hannah's Hope

Tim Kimmel: Grace-Based Parenting

The last category was a hard one to select and limit. I've read so much. I tried to pick those books that meant a lot to me at the time I read them and that have stayed with me a long time after I read them; the ones I'd recommend and buy as presents to others etc. But I could have added many others, too. (And again it's not the full picture, because many influential books have been by authors whose works have not been translated into English.)

In memoriam MS Estonia

This blog is mostly about books, but occasionally I just want to write some personal musings. Do a spot of writing things out of my system. This is one of those.

It has been 20 years since the MS Estonia disaster.

If you don't live somewhere around the Baltic Sea, I won't be surprised if you have never heard of this shipwreck - especially if you're under thirty - or just don't remember it any more. But around here, it's still synonymous with devastation.

It was a big disaster. Over 850 people lost their lives as MS Estonia sank. Most of them were Swedish and Estonian. Many of those who managed to get away from the sinking ship died in the stormy, freezing cold sea.

There weren't so many Finns on the ship, which was en route from Tallinn to Stockholm. I had no personal connection to the tragedy. But I remember how it shocked me, as it shocked all the Finns I knew. I think we all felt to some degree 'it could just as well have been me.' Travelling on the Baltic sea in a big cruise ferry, whether for work or leisure, was such a normal thing to do - as it still is.

Estonia is a small country. In the years after the disaster, whenever I was in Estonia and the MS Estonia tragedy was spoken of, it seemed to me that everyone had some kind of personal connection. If it wasn't an immediate family member or relative, there was a connection through a neighbour, a colleague, a schoolmate, a friend of a friend - someone they knew, in some way or another, had been on the ship, died or survived.

In the spring of 1998, when the film Titanic was released in this part of the world, I was in Estonia. We went to see it. The cinema in Tartu was old - my most vivid memory of the place is the wooden folding seat. Yes, wooden. It got a bit uncomfortable during the 3+ hours of the film. (I remember thinking 'just sink already' as DiCaprio and Winslet seemed to be endlessly running along the ship's corridors.)

But what was making me even more uncomfortable than my seat was the consciousness that sitting all around me were Estonians who were likely to have some kind of personal connections to a more recent shipwreck tragedy. It was less than four years since MS Estonia.

In the dark cinema, I wondered: how many others here are remembering MS Estonia, too? I'm sorry to say I did not feel much for the leading couple of the film. I felt more for the ordinary people trapped in their cheap cabins far down in the ship, like the Irish mother and her little children. The people who had no chance of saving themselves. Like so many on MS Estonia. Asleep in the middle of the night, when suddenly everything turns around and you don't have time to get out anymore. I felt almost sick in the cinema, trying not to imagine what happens to the people inside a passenger ship that sinks. What would I feel if it was myself and my family trapped in there?

I haven't wanted to watch Titanic since.

We still travel on these cruise ferries, more reminiscent of floating cities than means of transport. Usually, we do not worry that a disaster might strike again - no, not us. This huge, beautiful modern thing could not possibly sink, right? Security and safety measures have improved a lot since (and because of) the MS Estonia disaster. People are doing their best to keep these kinds of accidents from ever happening again.

And yet there are shipwrecks like the Costa Concordia cruise ship in Italy or the ferry MV Sewol in South Korea. People still die at sea - people who were only going for a leisure trip, or people who were only doing their jobs.

I may forget the film Titanic, but I hope to never forget RMS Titanic, or MS Estonia - the 'Titanic' of the Baltic Sea - for that matter. 

I hope to never forget that we cannot take any day of our lives for granted. Whether we go out to sea or stay at home. 

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, 

and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.”

Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. 

You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.

Instead, you ought to say, 

“If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”

James 4:13-15