With his one good foot he nudges Josip, pushing him gently, making him turn to face the opposite wall. The bar of light is climbing higher now.
“Do you see?”
Josip shakes his head.
“Surely you see,” says the man.
“I see the light, but the walls imprison it.”
“The light has entered the prison. Nothing can keep it out.”
“If there is no window, the light cannot enter.”
“If there is no window, the light enters within you.”
Lila by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson’s Gilead was the favorite book of my most-respected bookish friends for several years in a row. I tried to read it three times and failed. But when Robinson herself arrived for an evening reading in Oxford with a new novel called Lila just out, I decided to give that one a try. The end result was that both Lila and Gilead now list among the books I pretty much consider necessary for life.
Gilead, Robinson’s first novel published, is a book of letters written by an elderly pastor in small-town Iowa to the young son whose adulthood he knows he will not live to see. Lila, mother of that son, glimmers in the background of the book, her presence a grace that still startles the old man to wonder. We know, from the old man’s words, that his marriage was surprising, if not scandalous, to the small town and the flock in his keeping. We know that Lila was a drifter, a woman with an unknown past.
In Lila the novel, we are taken into Lila’s mind, seeing the story, the marriage, and the coming child through her own eyes. Through a masterful stream of narrative, in which Lila’s thoughts leap between memory and present, past events and current meaning, we encounter not just a story but the shape of a mind that has been molded by loneliness, suspicion, and a long, hard life on the road. Lila’s inner voice is inclined to distrust everyone, and yet . . . she has married this “old man” purely on trust, a decision that surprises her as much as it does him. Her journey toward a heart that can live by that trust is the pith of the novel, a story so masterfully written that I often forgot that I was not Lila, thinking her thoughts along with her. Lila is in many ways the story of two inner voices wrestling for primacy in Lila’s heart. First of loneliness, the one that says “That’s one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don’t let them.” Then of love, as the child grows, as she begins to think she may just stick around:
She thought, If we stay here, soon enough it will be you sitting at the table, and me, I don’t know, cooking something, and the snow flying, and the old man so glad we’re here he’ll be off in his study praying about it. And geraniums in the window. Red ones.
Also by Robinson:
Gilead
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The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien
What can I say about this beloved story? The realm of Middle-earth has etched itself into my imagination and formed the way I think about my own story in the world. This epic tale, forged in Tolkien’s imagination in the trenches of World War I and written in part to reestablish “sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty in everyone’s breast”[3] has been one of the defining novels of the twentieth century. I assume you know the general outline of the plot after the blockbuster success of the movies and the bestselling status of the books (and of course the books are better than the movies). I will simply add two reasons why you should read them. First is the sheer intricacy of Tolkien’s creativity. I don’t think the world has yet seen his equal in the creation of an imagined universe: in the elvish languages; in the rich and historic cultures of Rohan and Gondor, Hobbiton, and Lothlorien; in the crafting of the refuge city of Rivendell, “the last homely house”; and in races as distinct as they are delightful, hobbits and dwarves, elves and men.
The second reason I think every person should read this epic trilogy is because it stands, I believe, as a great and profoundly Christian defense of hope in an age of despair. The Lord of the Rings is based on the belief every person alive has the choice to be an agent of goodness, love, and courage in the face of evil. The heroes and heroines in Tolkien’s tale are those who give their lives for the preservation of beauty, the choice of compassion, and the will to resist evil. Tolkien was remarkable as a writer in his age, partly because he was a member of the “lost generation,” with authors like Hemingway, Owens, and Fitzgerald, whose writing reflects their turn to existentialism and despair in the face of World War I. In stark contrast, Tolkien wrote a story in which the humble hobbit Sam could look up out of Mordor’s filth to see
a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
To read The Lord of the Rings is to taste that beauty and know that it is eternal.
Also by Tolkien:
The Silmarillion
The Hobbit
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
If you know anything about this Russian classic, it is probably the basic fact that it chronicles an affair, that of Anna Karenina, young and passionate, married to a man stunted in his capacity to love, unable to show her affection. Anna’s choice is the core theme of this novel—her hunger for love, for peace, and the process of thought and decision by which she chooses to defy society and tradition in order to follow her heart’s desire in an affair with the dashing Count Vronsky. Anna’s reasoning tugs powerfully at the heart; we yearn with her for her happiness. But can the road she has chosen lead to peace?
That is the question spun out in the plot of the novel. But Anna’s story is not the only one in this sprawling book, considered by many to be the greatest novel of all time; the counter theme to Anna’s affair is the dutiful life of Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, also faced with the choice of whom he will love and how he will live as he, too, searches for peace and happiness. His quieter tale parallels the drama of Anna, presenting the reader with different ways of living, two roads by which the self may be expressed and fulfilled. “You have a choice,” my mother often said to my siblings and me in childhood, and her words echoed in my mind as I encountered this remarkable novel of choices and the paths on which they set us: those of life and those of death.
Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
One of the fundamental Lewisian stories, to me, is one of his last full pieces of work, a tale that reimagines the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. (Before becoming a medievalist, Lewis studied the Greek and Roman classics.) The tone of this strange and compelling “myth” is different from anything Lewis wrote before; narrated in the stark and accusing voice of Orual, the ugly sister of beautiful Psyche, it is Orual’s complaint, her accusation of the gods for what she feels is the utter unfairness of her fate. It took me three tries to get into this book. It isn’t comfortable reading; Orual isn’t a woman whose company you’d readily seek; and the bloody, bawdy reality of ancient pagan culture shapes the atmosphere. But ah, this is a story of excavation—Lewis’s exploration of fate and suffering, choice and culpability in which the veiled and belligerent Orual (and with her, the reader) is forced, by her own outraged narrative, to this fundamental question: “Are the gods not just?” And a startling answer: “Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”
Also by Lewis:
Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength
[1] From a letter to Francois d’Albert-Durade, 1859.
[2] From a letter to Charles Bray, July 5, 1859.
[3] From a letter from G. B. Smith to Tolkien, quoted in John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 105.
Books That Talk Back: My Favorite Books about Books
(OR, WHY READING IS IRREPLACEABLE)
HAVING BEEN A DAILY and voracious reader for most of my life, I had never thought deeply about how
I read until my seventeenth year, when I began a mentorship with a wise and generous professor of literature who agreed to guide me through a course of reading. Entirely through handwritten correspondence, this kind lover of literature taught me how to read all over again and, in the process, began my conscious passion for the formative power of great books, one that drives my writing to this day. He opened our course by challenging me to examine my habits of reading. Did I interact with the ideas on the page? Did I “talk” with them in notes and underlining? Did I write out or memorize portions I loved? How did I make sure that I would remember the life-changing things I read, the moments when the world opened to me in a fresh or convicting way?
What came alive to me in those months of study, deeply confirmed later on by the research I discovered through Dana Gioia and other authors, was the formative power of reading and the great need to teach people to read well. Reading had first come to me as a gift through my parents and a childhood home filled with books. It came to me now as a responsibility, a power I needed to cultivate and yield. Dr. Wheeler summoned me to read with attention, not a thoughtless consumption of story but a dance and conversation with it that allowed its full power to shape my thoughts and change my ideas. The following books bear the same kind of wisdom, the same challenge to read thoughtfully, to recognize the power present in the books we read and their capacity to change the very way we live.
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
In this classic and eminently practical guide to reading well, Mortimer Adler explains that “a good book deserves an active reading. . . . It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement. . . . He also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.” Adler is determined to make demanding readers of us all, and this is the primary resource I’d recommend as a guide to reading with attention, intelligence, and discipline.
A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz
This is a humorous and lively memoir, written by a young graduate student who thought the old-fashioned Jane Austen had nothing to teach him . . . until he read Emma and confronted his own arrogance. A book that vividly explores the formation of character and affection that comes to an Austen reader and the way classic stories can bring us to helpful (and sometimes painful) self-knowledge, this is a delightful tribute to the matchless Jane from a very unexpected reader.
Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian
In this nuanced look into the classic fairy tales and fables we associate with childhood, Guroian argues for the power of classic stories to shape children from infancy. These stories, he contends, have the power to teach children a love of what is good by presenting them with characters that embody virtues like goodness, kindness, and honesty. This warmhearted work is a celebration of the power of story to form virtuous imagination.
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs
This is a “playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers,” written by a professor who encourages modern readers to reject the idea of reading as the equivalent of eating brussels sprouts and instead read for delight. Read what you love, urges Jacobs, in a more positive exploration of reading in the modern era, one crammed both with insight and practicality.
An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis
This is Lewis’s slightly dense but highly worthwhile crack at what makes some books “good” and others “bad.” With his usual capacity to get to the heart of things, he turns the question of literary quality on its head by asking what kind of readers are made by the reading of certain books. A fascinating perspective, with a helpful exploration of genre and a marvelous definition of what makes myth.
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
I list this fascinating memoir here because I think it speaks to the power of books to keep a strong sense of selfhood, hope, and possibility alive in almost impossible circumstances. Based on Nafisi’s experience of living and teaching in Iran during the revolution, it follows the story of the secret book club she formed with seven young women, their reading of Western classics, and the way those books kept their determination alive.
Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me by Karen Swallow Prior
In this story of a soul formed by books, Prior explores the way that a series of great stories—from Charlotte’s Web to Madame Bovary—shaped the tale of her own faith. A thoughtful exploration of literature from the pen of a literature professor who also revels in the insight and wisdom that good books bring to the souls who read them.
Also by Prior:
Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist
Chapter 4Books Can Shape YOUR STORY
What If You Were the Sum of the Characters You’ve Read?
Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell . . . a story. Make some light.
KATE DICAMILLO, THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX
ONCE, in a blaze of book love, I sent a copy of Anne of Green Gables to an eleven-year-old girl I had never met. This happened because of a conversation I had when I was twenty-three, sitting knee-to-knee with an extroverted flight attendant on a plane so small it was termed a “puddle jumper.” The jumpy engines and rattling sides of our rickety old aircraft made conversation and peace of mind seem impossible. But not for my seatmate, who cheerily shout-chatted away about life and the flight and her young daughter, and who suddenly stared me down with a good dose of curiosity. “What takes you to such an out-of-the-way little place as Prince Edward Island?”
“Why,” I said, gripping my seat a little tighter, and introvertedly shouting back, “Anne of Green Gables, of course. I love the books, and I’ve always dreamed of visiting.”
“Anne of Green who?”
I fumbled. I stuttered. I was aghast. My bookish brain felt as shaken as my bones as I tried to explain why everyone should read the Anne books. Especially eleven-year-old girls. I was almost embarrassed at my own enthusiasm over this one old tale of a sprite of a girl coming of age in a remote Canadian village. But I rose to the fray, attempting to shout a description of Anne’s wonders to my new friend. As I did, scene after scene came into my mind—images of Anne’s spunk and imagination, her determined curiosity, her tender heart. I thought of the woman’s young daughter, hating that any girl should grow up without Anne as an imagined companion, and in a tumbled, startling moment, I looked the flight attendant in her bright eyes and said, “Give me your address, and I’ll send your daughter a copy.”
She did. And so did I.
In that half-startled act, I came to a full understanding of something I already knew in the depths of my heart after years of reading, a fact fundamental to what it means to be a wise woman reader. A book girl is storyformed, shaped in her very concept of self by the characters she has encountered on the written page, by the narratives that teach her what it means to be a woman. A book girl is one who has looked through imagined eyes vastly different from her own so that her view of the world is broad and bright with countless varied perspectives. But a savvy book girl also knows that she who walks with the wise becomes wise (Proverbs 13:20), and the viewpoints she inhabits in imagination will shape the woman she becomes.
I am, I must confess, of the immovable opinion that every young girl (and woman) should read the Anne books, not just for their beauty and charm, but because they offer a particularly hearty and healthful view of womanhood. I was confirmed in this conviction by a conversation with two other women a couple of years back, strangers until the moment we discovered that all of us had read the Anne books in our formative girlhood years. We met at a conference: all three wri
ters, all feeling a bit shy, but the mention of Anne pulled us out of our awkwardness and into a swift conversation that profoundly shaped my ideas about the power and development of self that comes to women who read, and read well.
For what we discovered was that each of us felt that the Anne books had helped to alert us to our vocation and creative capacity, challenging us to growth, grit, and wisdom. We listed the ways Anne had convinced us that we, too, were capable, creative, made for friendship, able to dream, created to learn. The Anne books, we realized, set a surprisingly powerful and attractive picture of womanhood before us in the years when we were beginning to wrestle with those fundamental questions of budding maturity: Who am I? Who should I be? What does it mean to live, love, work? What does it mean to be a woman?
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