Their lives looked vastly different—Merton became a monk in a Kentucky monastery, and O’Connor was a young writer struck with lupus, forced to abandon her career to live with her mother in rural Georgia—but both existed within the small sphere of the ordinary, unnoticed (at first) by the larger world, hungering for meaning. The book chronicles the way they both struggled to accept the limitations of their circumstances. They were both restless, prone to depression. But they both wrote. They both read. They never ceased to see themselves as empowered in their limited spheres by the presence of the written word. And from those enclosed, faithful, engaged lives, they crafted the books that have spiritually shaped the generations that followed.
I remember staying up late after that driving day, with fresh insight in my heart like a burning star. I sat on my rickety hotel bed furiously journaling out the conviction that had come to me as I listened. “I must not be afraid anymore,” I wrote. “I must not doubt whether my thoughts are worthwhile or wonder if I’m not up to it. I just need to read and learn and try from my own small corner of the world.”
Gwen Todd
Gwen, as you will know from the stories in this book, has been my kindred spirit, beloved mentor, and fellow lover of novels for as long as I can remember. Her taste is superb, her savoring of a sentence a wonder to behold, and her book recommendations treasures.
My Ten Favorite Books
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
Adam Bede by George Eliot
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith
Tiny as that moment of epiphany may seem, it was a turning point for me. The next year brought two refused book proposals and three denied college applications, but each of those efforts stemmed from a heart renewed to learn and risk. It was five more years before I arrived at Oxford and seven before I began to write this book, but in that moment of epiphany, I regained the zest and joy, the confidence in my birthright as a reader and a learner that eventually led me to the joy of studying at Oxford and the words I write on these pages.
If there is one thing I would want you to know as we open this exploration of reading, it is simply that you were made to be a learner, and that identity is constantly available to you through the written word. You have the capacity for wisdom, discernment, and understanding, the power to engage in a rich and lifelong journey of education, conducted from whatever reading corner you’re in at this very moment. If you’ve ever known the same kind of self-doubt that came to me or if you’ve ever listened to those whispers that learning is something mysterious that happens away from ordinary life, my goal in this book is to lead you back to the curiosity and wonder, the capacity to discover that has been your inheritance, your gift, since childhood. I think this gift is holy, set in us all by a God who made us to respond, grow, and discover through the power of language. He is, after all, the living Word who spoke the world into being. His first gift to Adam was to assign him the joyous work of discovering the world by naming it, to explore the dazzling new creation word by word, entering into its splendor as he learned to describe it.
The startling thing is that we are created from infancy to do exactly the same. One of the most fascinating things I have discovered in my research about reading is the way the human brain develops in response to the language around it, growing, discovering, expanding as it encounters new ways to describe reality. We understand our worlds through the words we are given. Parents are narrators, introducing children to the “pretty flower” or the “nice lady,” using words to teach them how to view and treat people, how to experience the beauty and diversity of the world. That is exactly what books do for us as adult learners and discoverers.
Few things can change my view of someone more quickly than a novel. I remember having a fight with one of my brothers as a teenager and then reading a description by Chaim Potok of the difficult grapple of two boys to find their footing in the adult world. Suddenly I saw my brother afresh as someone in the midst of a pretty tough journey. Words revealed him to me in a new light, one that helped me to respond in the formative language of love rather than resentment.
Words are also one of the marvelous ways by which God gives us the gift of ourselves, enabling us to connect with other people and shape the world around us. I’ve seen this firsthand in the way that Gwen, a friend of my mother’s and now as close as family, cared for her elderly mother, Larla, when she was struck with Alzheimer’s. When Larla could no longer remember the people around her, Gwen became her narrator. Every time I came to visit, Gwen would use words to bring me into her mother’s story. “This is our Sarah girl. We love her; we’re happy she’s here.” As Larla eased and became happy in my presence, I realized Gwen was teaching me about the power of words to connect us, to revive or broaden our experience. What Gwen helped me to recognize was how deeply we are formed by the narrative of our conversations, the books we read, our spoken affection or disgust, our love when it spills into speech. In this light, the power of a word like “welcome” is as good as “once upon a time”; both open the possibility of friendship, of laughter, of a new way of looking at the world. Every book we read does the same thing Gwen did for her mom; it broadens our view of existence and connects us to other people. Words give us the capacity to articulate our dreams, to express our feelings, to speak of the truth that forms us most deeply. And when those words are written and offered to the world, they become our window into a whole different view of what it means to exist, love, desire, believe.
We take hold of that power by reading.
Why should we read, and what should we read? These are the questions that drive and shape the reading journey of a book girl on her way to holy discovery. They are questions I didn’t begin to ask until I was well grown, because reading was introduced to me as a way of life. My parents decided that one of the lifelong gifts they would give me and my siblings was the love of books. I am the first of four, with two brothers next in line and a sister whose later and long-desired arrival was the delight of my eleventh birthday (and created the sibling arrangement that we now call the “boy sandwich”). We are about as diverse in personality as can be: two introverts, two extroverts; a hearty mix of broody dreamers, driven writers, actors, and musicians ready to take the world by storm. We all share a penchant for strong opinions and vocations to arts or study (we can write you a novel or a thesis, sing you a song, or make you a film—just don’t ask us to balance a checkbook). We are, in short, a family culture shaped by story.
We come by our ideals and artistry honestly, born to parents whose strong dreams led them into a life of ministry and writing, and the determination to raise children who loved to read. Our parents wanted us to love learning, to be curious about the world, and they understood that one of the best ways they could give us this gift was to introduce us to riveting stories written by passionate and creative authors. We learned early on that to read is to delight—in endless worlds of imagination, in relationships woven by words, in the possibility that expands on and on from the open pages of a great book.
But reading is one more choice among countless distracting options in the modern world, and we need not only the vision to make it worth pursuing but the will to make it a formative activity in our daily lives. The identity of a book girl is something that must be chosen, singled out, and claimed amid many other choices as a defining way of life. Most of the recent research on reading agrees that it’s a skill and a pleasure that we in the Western world are quickly forgetting. In a world that draws us into the instant pace of the internet, with information literally at the tip of our fingers, with countless activities drawing our attentio
n, new distractions, blogs to scan, things to buy, places to go, why should we sit down for a solid half an hour (or more) to read a mere book, with no extra links or clickable side notes? What I am coming to understand is that the reading life is a chosen gift, one we have to give ourselves and our children and our culture again and again. We can be strengthened in that choice when we understand exactly what comes to us through reading: the real, measurable growth that takes place on the level of mind, education, and childhood development.
Another way to answer that first and fundamental question—Why should we read?—is to look at the gift of reading from the point of research, something I discovered quite unexpectedly on a sunny morning on my very first visit to England.
I was twenty-one years old, sitting amid the honey-toned stone and weathered pews of an old church, on my first visit to the land of Lewis and Tolkien, Austen and Eliot, taking part in a conference based on the work of C. S. Lewis himself. With tea and biscuit in hand, and a rainbow spatter of stained-glass light over my face, I was pretty sure that whatever anyone said that first day would strike me as brilliant. What I didn’t expect was a talk by a quiet, gracious poet who happened also to be the current chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and whose message that day would shift the direction of my life and work for a decade to come.
The poet was Dana Gioia, and the subject was, very simply, reading. Or really, the death of reading. What I heard about that day was a recently completed report on one of the most comprehensive surveys of American reading habits ever conducted. The survey was commissioned to look at the amount of time Americans spent reading “literary books,” such as good novels, essays, or poetry, and even further, to see if reading had any influence on how people spent their free time or invested in the kinds of things that deeply form cultural identity (e.g., the arts, charity work, sports, and civic life).
The report was called Reading at Risk, because all the research pointed to the startling fact that Americans across the board were reading less and less. Age, education, location, finances—these made no difference. Americans as a whole just weren’t reading (though they were spending a huge amount of time on various screens instead, a fact I will address in chapter 9 from the dizzying height of my soapbox). What was startling as well was that the survey made a clear connection between the fact that people who read less were also far less likely to go to a concert or volunteer for charity or even take part in as traditional and common a thing as a baseball game.
That talk set an urgent sense of curiosity right into my bones. Why? Why were readers more likely to be involved in the arts or charity? How do words actually form us? And if reading was this important, this vital to forming strong minds and creative selves, what could be done if it was in decline? I left the conference and began a season of research into reading, imagination, and language that catapulted me into years of writing and speaking on the power of reading that, well, still hasn’t ended. Since those early days of study, I pretty much want to hand out books to children on the street. I want to press novels into the hands of my friends. For reading, I discovered, really does change a reader’s reality. An open book opens possibilities to its reader that are startling in their power, and my deep belief in that fact drives my work to this day and my conviction that you, book girl, were made for the glory and growth of reading.
Consider this: at just the level of measurable brain activity, reading kicks the brain into acrobatic motion. After hearing Gioia’s talk, I discovered an article by researcher Sebastian Wren describing the many tiny wonders taking place as you read even one line of printed words.[2] Even as you read this sentence, your brain is decoding the little black marks, turning them into words that are then translated into sound (you are actually “hearing” these words inside your head as you read). At the same time, your brain is already figuring out what those words mean, comparing the message with all the other ideas you have stored in your memory about brains and reading—the articles you’ve read about books, the headline you saw recently about literacy—and you’re already beginning to decide if you think what I’ve written here is true.
To read is to waken and engage multiple aspects of mind and eye, a process that makes you active in the process of learning, an actor in your own drama who is able to discern, decide, accept, reject, and grow.[3] Reading has long been seen as “the golden key” to educational success. One report, responding to Reading at Risk, boldly claimed that the research seemed to “suggest that the key to unlocking the door to higher education regardless of the student goal, whether work, transfer, graduate degree, personal development or engaged citizenship, is reading.”[4] This is a massive claim to make, because it links reading to pretty much every area of adulthood and growth. But it’s one educators across the board recognize as true. Reading, whether you are four or twenty-four, provides you with the words and comprehension to encounter a new idea and understand it; to walk forward into new subjects, new facts, new possibilities, and thus a constantly expanding self.
Words make worlds, and the more words we encounter, the richer our concept of the world becomes, the more we are able to see what is possible. This exact phenomenon was described decades earlier by the bookish C. S. Lewis, who rejoiced that good books allow us “an expansion of being,” so that when we set a book down, we “become what [we] were not.”[5] It’s the power described by Madeleine L’Engle, author of the beloved A Wrinkle in Time, when she said that we are a “vocabulary-deprived culture,” in need of imaginative expansion so we can have a vocabulary large enough to “recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it.”[6] What these delightful authors recognized was that reading gives us the capacity not just to experience reality but to name it, shape it, and do something to change it.
It’s a fact echoed throughout Scripture. The Bible is rich in its descriptions of the way we are formed by the words we read and remember. It’s why God commanded the Israelites again and again to “impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul” (Deuteronomy 11:18, NASB), to “meditate . . . day and night” on the Book of the Law (Joshua 1:8). It’s why Paul begins his letters with the story of the gospel, reminding his readers through his stirring words and heavenly narrative exactly who they are. It’s why the “word of Christ” must “richly dwell within you,” and why believers are supposed to speak to one another with “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Colossians 3:16, NASB). It’s all because the words we speak and read make the world around us. They open our eyes to the reality of God; they liven us to what is possible; they draw us onward into maturity, wisdom, and love.
To be a book girl is to own the identity of holy learner to the full.
[1] Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Celestial Surgeon.”
[2] Sebastian Wren, “The Brain and Reading,” Balanced Reading, http://www.balancedreading.com/brain.pdf.
[3] This becomes even more intriguing when you compare the activity of the brain when reading to watching TV. Half an hour of TV consumption actually shuts down the left side of your brain, the side that helps you to reason and discern, to accept something as false or true. See Wes Moore, “Television: Opiate of the Masses,” Journal of Cognitive Liberties 2, no. 2 (2001), http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/5jcl/5JCL59.htm. The right side, which deals in image, emotion, and memory, remains active, receiving the images and ideas presented on screen without the filtering power of the left hemisphere.
[4] Janet Fulks, “Reading May Be the Key to Unlocking Basic Skills Success,” Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, April 2010, https://www.asccc.org/content/reading-may-be-key-unlocking-basic-skills-success.
[5] C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3.
[6] Madeleine L’Engle, “Do I Dare to Disturb the Universe?” in a speech delivered to the Library of Congress on November 16, 1983.
The Beloved Dozen: The Novels That Taught Me How to Live
(OR, IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, READ THE
SE)
AUTUMN LIGHT sifted thin and golden through the curtains at the window of Gwen’s study, casting a late-day sheen over the bookshelves. I was on my annual autumn visit to Kentucky, but I had forgotten what is usually the first item on my packing list: a novel. Gwen’s bookshelves, however, in whatever place I have visited her, are a treasure mine for a book lover.
Gwen was the roommate, fellow missionary, and beloved friend of my mother when she lived in Vienna before she got married. My mom and Gwen were committed to the kind of lifelong friendship that meant Gwen came to visit my family at least once a year. From tiny girlhood, I grew up delighting in the exotic gifts and loving presence of my tante (the German word for “auntie”). When I reached my teens, I had the gift of inheriting my mom’s friendship as I began to visit Gwen regularly on my own.
Gwen and I have always shared a love for books; she is a wide and discerning reader, so on this visit, I felt I was in safe hands as she led me to her collection of favorite novels. A slim yellow book sat halfway down the shelf, with the name of an author I knew Gwen loved.
“How about this one by Wendell Berry?” I asked. “You’ve told me for ages that I should read him.”
Gwen took the book into her gentle hands and gave the cover a thoughtful dusting. For a moment she was silent. Then she smiled, still holding the book to herself. “I don’t know,” she said. “You should only read this one when you have enough quiet in your heart to give it full focus. You have to savor it. It’s precious.”
Book Girl Page 6
