I've never read any Chesterton, but I've always wondered about him. Where should I start?

Where should I start?

JZ's busy at work on a Tuesday morning, but I'm sure she'd recommend The Man Who Was Tuesday as that's her favorite.

(It's also very accessible and funny.)

Is this the Chesterton who wrote The Rich are Different?

You are right the Chesterton was not part of the Inklings. Don't know why I thought he was. Apparantly Sayers was not really a member being a woman, but did socialize with them and was sometimes considered an informal member. [link]

But if Chesterton was pro-working class it was in a very odd way. [link]

I will add that the Rebecca West link is the essay in which she made the statement often quoted: "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what Feminism is: I only know that people call me a Feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute." [link]

I think the man was actually Thursday.

Oooh, it looks like loads of Chesterton is available for Kindle, for free.

I think the man was actually Thursday.

Oh, you are entirely correct.

Now my wife will chastise me.

Typo, I'm well aware that he talked a shitload of nonsense, much of it indefensible, and my best guess from the context of the rest of his writings is that he went off half-cocked in the essay West is responding to, working himself up into a lather over incomplete information that he didn't bother to investigate and that left him with a general impression that, rather than resolving the strike or directly helping the striking families, rich people were stepping in to forcibly separate children from unwilling families.

There's no excuse for the sloppiness, and no excuse for the anti-Semitism, but the impulse behind it is that he thought someone had judged struggling working-class families unfit to raise their own children, and that the best solution to class struggle was to remove the kids. Which, to be fair, a lot of high-minded people all over the world haven't for a second hesitated to do to working class, poor and indigenous families all over the Western world since time out of mind.

Deplorably sloppy, sexist, anti-Semitic, and the actual essay I'm sure is totally indefensible, but I've read probably 500-some-odd pages of his essays and I feel on pretty solid ground guessing that this particular one started with a half-read, half-understood story that punched his "Fuck you, you smug fucks, the people you're kicking ARE PEOPLE" triggers.

And, yep, Man Who Was Thursday. Emphatically not for everyone, possibly not even for many people at all (though Gaiman, PTerry and Mark Leyner love it so I'm at least not in bad company), but it pretty near saved my life many years ago when I was drowning in despair and immobility and poisonous brain chemicals. It was a gleeful, anarchic, joyous lifeline, and reading it over and over kept me tethered to a world outside my own head. As wretched as many of his beliefs are and as complicated and qualified and hedged in as my ability to recommend him is, I owe him one fuck of a debt for that one story.

Maybe I'll try it. But he triggers a lot for me. Because "We conservatives are really working class heroes fighting against condescending lefty elitists" is a pretty big meme among the worst of the right these days. Pings me as badly as his passionate anti-semitism does. And he was not causal about the anti-semitism. His work reads as someone who went out of his way to hate Jews. So if I try "Man who was Thursday" how much anti-semitism and how much condescending right wing garbage will I run into? If the answer is a lot, no point in my reading it - I won't be able to see the good stuff through a haze of rage. If "Thursday" is light on the anti-semitism and the union bashing, I might be able to give it a fair shake. I'm not asking for zero, just not much.

It is a parallel case for me to the reason many people legitimately can't enjoy Hemingway. Hemingway's misogynistic macho bullshit is too much and understandably they don't try to wade through it to see what Hemingway did well. But Hemingway told a good story, and he wrote male characters well, and his prose was, in its way, laconic poetry. And any one else who tried to the same thing mostly ended up just parodying Hemingway - which includes some of Hemingway's own later work. But when he was on his game, Hemingway was brilliant - if you can see past his attitude towards women, and I don't blame anyone who can't. (Actually I can think of one other person who could do this - Stephen Crane, who I strongly suspect Hemingway was influenced by.)