The Confessions
The first great autobiography in Western literature, and the first to use the form as an examination of consciousness rather than a record of deeds. Augustine's account of his restless seeking, his sins, his conversion, and his discovery of God contains psychological self-analysis that would not be surpassed until Freud.
The last four of the thirteen books drop the life story (Book X examines present temptations, the final three read Genesis closely and meditate on time), and it's the stretch readers most often stall in or skip outright. One reviewer calls the whole thing “a grind with no grit” once the famous passages are set aside. Augustine spends chapters tormenting himself over the stolen pears while the woman he lived with for over a decade, mother of his son, gets dismissed in a sentence; his account of ending that relationship for a better engagement is, by several readers' count, the least self-critical moment in an otherwise relentlessly self-critical book. One reader mocks the whole address as “a person grovelling before some sky-daddy,” unpersuaded by the constant address to God rather than to the reader. A critic bluntly warns off weak editions: “it is a dead translation. Sheed's is living.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
