My goal in sharing the following lists is to simply open the reading life a little wider to you, set you on your feet, and launch you on your own journey of exploration. “Way leads on to way,” wrote the poet Robert Frost, and I hope that you’ll discover that book leads on to book and that the titles in these lists will lead you beyond, into the book lists of other writers and the best beloveds of other friends.
Organization
Each chapter is themed around a gift or grace that comes to a book girl through the reading life. The lists that follow are crafted to follow that theme, introducing you to the books that embody and continue the qualities discussed in the chapter. This book is structured specifically to address the different seasons of reading and experiences in the life of a book girl, organized in such a way that you can dip into this chapter or that list and find the resources you need in that particular phase. The lists are shaped to address different needs, varied amounts of time or attention, and different seasons of learning and growth. If you’re a mother of toddlers, I’m guessing your reading needs might run toward a restorative novel, while if you’re a student in a season of discovery, you’ll find the tougher theological titles or cultural commentary to be the meat you need. The lists and chapters are individual, meant to meet you in these varied seasons.
These selections reflect my own reading experience, my deep sense of books as companions that come alongside me to help me to be faithful wherever they find me. During my twenties, during many long, lonely hours, I discovered classic writers on prayer and spiritual formation and spent hours in their brisk and convicting company. At the moment, as I sit here pregnant and overwhelmed by daily life, I doubt I could read one of them without feeling frustrated. Instead, it’s a novel I crave, one that helps me to reconnect to ordinary life as a gift and a wonder.
In theming the chapters and lists that follow, I’ve tried to create the resources and stories I would want to discover in my own various stages of life. My hope for you as a reader is that you will encounter this book as an adaptable companion and resource through many seasons.
Content
Literary Quality
The easiest way to understand what makes a book excellent is simply to read good books. Read a short story by Wendell Berry, dip into George Eliot’s Silas Marner, throw in a snippet of Narnia and a William Wordsworth poem, and you will be well on your way to discerning, even intuitively, what makes writing good. Along with C. S. Lewis, I am not particularly interested in the “chronological snobbery” that prizes writing according to what is popular in a particular age. And like Lewis, I think children’s books, mysteries, classics, and contemporary fiction can be excellent, but all of them should share a few basic qualities, ideas for you to consider in forming your own idea of what makes for literary quality:
High quality of language. A good book wields language with skill and insight, using words that broaden your experience of the world; that help you to see in a fresh way; that bring a person, a landscape, or a history to life. Good writers also have a certain degree of particularity in the words they choose. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”[2]
Showing, not telling. It’s probably the first thing you’ll be told to do in a beginning creative writing class, but it’s vital, the thing great writers do without even thinking about it. An author who shows sets you as a reader in the scene, immersing you in the scents and sights, feelings and emotions of the setting. To tell is simply to relate facts; to show is to place a reader in a world.
Concision. With all this praise for good words and evocative descriptions, you might think good novels have to be hundreds of pages. In fact, some of the best novels are brief. To Kill a Mockingbird is a fairly short story that manages to communicate the profound racial tension and moral dilemmas dividing a small Southern town, but all of it is told through the eyes and vocabulary of a child (though Scout is probably a wordier little girl than most!). Good writing is taut. It doesn’t waste words; it puts them to swift, disciplined work.
Humanity (the particular and the universal). By which I mean the capacity of a book to realistically describe the human experience on the level of the individual—whether Potok’s depiction of a Hasidic Jewish boy or Eliot’s depiction of a lonely English woman in the Victorian era who is caught in a difficult marriage—and through that depiction to say something universally true about what it means to be human, to suffer, to hope, to love, to work. A good book should ring true to human experience, regardless of character or setting.
Or, in C. S. Lewis’s loving description: “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”[3]
Worldview
The first real doctrine essay I wrote at Oxford was on the Incarnation. I was asked to outline why Christ’s human life was as important as his death. Intuitively, I understood that it was pretty radical that God took flesh at a certain point in space and time, but I struggled to get the abstract theological points straight in my head until I remembered a particular character from a Wendell Berry novel. It all came clear when I revisited Berry’s tale of Nathan Coulter, a Kentucky farmer and war veteran. His experiences left him horrified at the way people and land became nameless, depersonalized, and lost in the face of violence, good only for destruction. Berry’s novel recounts the way Nathan came home determined to live a life rooted in love, one opposite to war, in which he would care for the named and known people in his place on earth, tending his farm, committed to his marriage and community, faithful in the smallest, local particulars of everyday existence. As his wife, Hannah, puts it, “It is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”[4]
In Nathan’s story I recognized an incarnational, Christ-shaped love. He helped me to understand that the Incarnation means that God himself came into a particular corner of the war-torn universe to embody a life that is the opposite of war and death; to name, know, and love each human being into redemption. The Word who spoke everything into being became flesh in the squirming, little baby Jesus, asleep in the musty hay of a Bethlehem manger. Before Jesus died, he lived, and in doing so, he started the story of humanity afresh as his perfect, faithful, loving life became the ground of renewal for the whole world.
I wrote the rest of that paper in a blaze of inspiration, delighted by the way a story I loved made theology clearer to me. But that was only the first of many such instances. The more I studied doctrine, the more I realized that the great books I’d been reading all my life had already been teaching me to think about the ultimate questions at the heart of theological study. In The Lord of the Rings, I had already learned to consider what it means to be an agent responsible for my actions. Middlemarch taught me about what real compassion might mean. A Wrinkle in Time challenged me to consider what love really is . . . and isn’t.
The great stories I have read have impacted my spiritual and moral development more than almost anything else. Next to Scripture and the influence of my parents, great books have formed my worldview, developed my moral imagination, and shaped my idea of virtue. But I think this is true of most human lives, whether we get our stories from great books, from other people, or from TV sitcoms. Stories shape our existence because we recognize in a deep part of ourselves that life itself is a story. The tale of the world opens with a sort of divine “once upon a time,” or “in the beginning.” Much of Scripture is narrative, and the Gospels are crammed full of the parables Jesus told to announce and explain the coming of his Kingdom. The gospel itself comes to us in narrative form, and one of its great tenets is
that we have the chance to join the story of the Kingdom come in this world, to be agents in the ongoing story of redemption, what Rowan Williams calls the “freedom of a sort of authorship.”[5]
To read a story is to be shaped in the very depths of one’s soul. Because of this power, this grace given by great books, I’ve often had to ask the question “What makes a book acceptable for a Christian reader?” Because stories engage my imagination and heart on a deep level, I am aware of the fact that what I encounter on their pages will teach me how to see the world, and this is why I’ve had to learn to practice discernment. As you explore the vast realm of books available today, you might have to ask, as I have, where we draw the line on the inclusion of sex or violence or “bad language” in a story. How deeply should we delve into worldviews that run contrary to what we believe? What does it mean to read faithfully?
First, let’s briefly consider the cultivation of discernment, the means by which we nourish our inner capacity to love what is good and hate what is evil, to know when evil is presented to us in whatever form. The temptation here would be to create a list of rules by which each piece of reading could be evaluated, but I think this is both unhelpful and, in the long term, destructive. Discernment has far less to do with creating an outward legalism than it does with cultivating our innermost hearts. Real discernment, I believe, springs from a heart so nourished by the true, the good, and the beautiful that what is evil simply cannot find room to root.
In my earlier book on children’s literature, Caught Up in a Story, I explore the difficult question concerning the age at which children can safely be exposed to evil, suffering, or darkness in the world of literature. While I agree with Chesterton that “fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already,”[6] I think the question we really should be asking is not so much “When do I expose my children to darkness?” as “Have I exposed them to light?” My contention is that in order for children to cope with evil, they need a bone-deep knowledge of what is good. Like the heroes and heroines in fairy tales, they need stories that begin in a powerful picture of joy. They need minds stocked with the imagery of love, beauty, laughter, and song before they can have the necessary hope to shield them in their battle against sin and evil.
I think the same idea applies to us as adults as we evaluate the content of the books we read. Read what is good, cram your imagination with nuanced characters and truth-telling authors, and you will know how to handle books that have questionable content. If you read Goudge and Tolkien and Chaim Potok and Chesterton, you will be equipped to evaluate a just-released novel that deals with more common modern discussions of sex or an ambiguous worldview. Because the soil of your imagination is rich in what is good, you will know how to deal with what isn’t.
Now let us briefly turn to the books themselves.
As a Christian who seeks to live out my faith in every area of my life and who sees reading as a formative force to that faith, I have often asked myself, What makes a book acceptable for me as a Christian reader? What I have found in my own process of discernment is that I need to ask what a book communicates as a whole rather than if it explains or mentions the Christian message. What does the book seek to have me believe through the development of its characters, in their choices, in the consequences that follow, and in the way it frames belief? Does it portray the human capacity for choice? Does it deal with the reality of sin? Does it affirm what is beautiful and kind? Does it value human life?
The quality of a book’s worldview cannot be measured by the number of times the name Jesus is mentioned or Scripture is quoted. We get confused at times, I think, in contemporary Christianity and particularly in evangelical culture about the difference between Christian form and Christian vocabulary. A novel can be crammed with “Christianese,” using recognizably Christian phrases but communicating in form and plot what amounts to a secular story.
Consider: Anna Karenina is a book about an adulterous affair, while your local bookstore may have a half dozen Christian romance novels with couples who get married and perhaps share nary a kiss until their wedding day. The dialogue of the latter may well include verses straight out of the Bible, while the former revolves round the decadence of Russian high society and its many gossipy intrigues. But many “Christian” romance novels have stories based far more on a secular model of romance and self-fulfillment, where emotion is valued as truth, where trouble miraculously disappears and the ultimate goals of ease and happiness are reached by the novel’s close. Anna Karenina, on the other hand, wrestles with the desires of the heart and the obligations of integrity; it shows us what it really looks like to “listen to your heart” and the consequences of putting self-fulfillment above other people, above morality, even above God. Anna Karenina tells us the truth about the world and confronts us with the realities both of desire and of choice in our own lives, and for this reason, I consider it a novel that has much truth to impart to every Christian.
This is not to say that all Christian romantic stories are lacking in content—far from it! (I cut my teeth on Janette Oke.) But it is to say that our standard for what makes something an acceptable book for a Christian reader must be one that looks to the truth the book is telling about the human condition, the possibility of redemption, and the reality of grace, whether that book is a romance novel, a murder mystery, a picture book, or a tragedy. This applies to the author as well. George Eliot is one of my favorite writers, an author I turn to for wisdom and moral courage and for her portrayal of profound, active compassion. She is well known for her impassioned rejection of the Christian faith, but her novels reflect a call to Christ-shaped mercy, a value for human life and dignity, and an awareness of mystery that I have rarely found equaled in an explicitly Christian novel. The capacity to see and portray what is true is part of what it means to be made in the image of God, something as true for those authors who struggle with faith as those who embrace it.
However, this is also not to say that anything goes when it comes to moral or graphic content as long as the book speaks spiritual truth. I take seriously the Philippians exhortation to dwell on what is excellent, lovely, of good repute. I don’t think this limits me to kittens and flowers, but I do think it means that I have to discipline my imagination and keep myself from temptation to paths that would lead me away from holiness. Here again we return to the theme of discernment—an inward standard rather than an outward rule. I have a vivid imagination and learned very early that I cannot expose myself to graphic written descriptions of violence or sex, so I just don’t read books with that kind of content. (To be frank, I think there are few who can do so without a sense of unease.) But some of my favorite contemporary novels do contain moderate scenes of both as integral elements to their plots. My evaluation usually runs somewhat toward the model of the biblical narrative—an epic crammed with all sorts of human depravity, sexual desire, and wanton violence—in which the discussion and account of evil is frank but there is no detailed soak in the finer points of egregious sin.
If you read The Brothers Karamazov, well, you’ll encounter a lot of sexual depravity. If you read Island of the World, one of the most remarkable contemporary novels I’ve encountered, you’ll have to face the wanton brutality of concentration camps and the senseless violence that can be inflicted even on children. But neither of these books presents the evil in which they necessarily deal in a way that glorifies it or makes it a graphic memory. You may love these books as I do, or you may decide to put them away. That depends on your heart, your walk with the Holy Spirit, and the nourished soil of your own discerning imagination.
The Art of Discernment
Discernment really is an art—a skill we learn in the doing, something we gain confidence in through practice. In that sense, it’s a forward journey, a habit we learn in the midst of reading, not a list we make before we start. If it still seems overwhelming at times to know how to choose the good and bea
utiful and best from the plethora of books out there, I find that a final question often helps me to come to a conclusion: What is it I hope to become?
My parents talked a lot about appetites and reading when I was a little girl. At the time, I usually associated this with the fact that they wouldn’t let me read straight through the fifty-eight available Nancy Drew girl detective titles. I was forced (I write this tongue in cheek) to read a good children’s novel, a piece of science or poetry, a book of history, and usually a biography before I could return to the next Nancy Drew. What my parents understood was that my mind and desires would be powerfully formed by what I read. They wanted me to have a hunger for good literature, for deep ideas and crafted words and the nuance and adventure of history. They wanted me to encounter characters who rang true to real life and challenged my decisions, who helped me to imagine what I might create or attempt or love. Of course, fun and relaxation were part of it (and oh, I did indeed make it through all fifty-eight Nancy Drews), but they weren’t the first or most formative force in my reading.
As an adult, I’m profoundly grateful for the way my reading desires were set as a child; I’m also keenly aware that I’m now the one in charge of my own development. I know that the books I read deeply shape the person I am becoming day by day. When I come to a dilemma of discernment, I often find that if I examine what the book produces in me—in my emotions, my imagination, my desires, my sense of what is real or true—I can quickly identify whether the book is one I want to continue. In his fascinating sermon “The Weight of Glory,” C. S. Lewis writes that we are all helping each other to grow, day by day, into either the divine beauty that reflects the fullness for which we were created or a corrupted self that would shock us if we could see the end result. I try to choose the books that help me toward glory.[7]
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