Rabbi Lionel Blue's Top Book Recommendations

Rabbi Lionel BlueThis is a book that sent me into religion; a book by Victor Gollancz called A Year of Grace. I didn’t know whether all this religious stuff wasn’t just somewhere over the rainbow sort of thing, and I got hold of this book and I was introduced to it by person after person after person who said it contains the truth. A lot of religious people find books that contain the truth for them. Edith Stein... (Source)

Rabbi Lionel BlueThe one I’m reading now is Dear Lady Disdain by Paula Marshall. It’s about a very, very wealthy bankeress who is seduced by an upper-class aristocrat, and they are rather like Beatrice and Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing, and they really fall in love as well as lust and it all ends happily ever after with the birth of a child. You can’t fall down on that, can you? (Source)

Rabbi Lionel BluePilgrim’s Progress is a book which has stuck with me throughout my life. And now that I’m over 80 I’m reading more and more the part where Christian and Christiana are preparing themselves to go across the River of Death and get to the Celestial City. (Source)

Rabbi Lionel BlueThis is called A Book of English Belief and it’s by Joanna Mary Hughes. She was my girlfriend – the nearest thing I’ve ever had to a girlfriend – and we nearly got married but didn’t. There were too many difficulties, I think. For one thing I was gay, but what the two of us knew about sex then could have been written on the back of a postage stamp. Of course it was the late 1940s, early 1950s,... (Source)

Rabbi Lionel BlueWell, first of all it makes me happy. I had to go into hospital to have one of those X-rays that people have. Everyone else got dismissed and was told they were fine, but I was told to come back at two o’clock and not be late, so I came back rather apprehensively as nobody had told me anything about what was happening or what was wrong and I tut-tutted, and finally I grabbed the nurse and said:... (Source)