One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned in the years that I’ve studied language is that words form the way we look at the world and each other. We almost literally see things differently from other people based on the language we have been given to describe the reality around us. Consider how powerfully language enters into modern debates on ethical issues such as personhood, death, or even what human life is—when it begins, what it’s worth, how we ought to protect it. The words each side uses describe vastly different realities. Owen Barfield, a twentieth-century British philosopher whose thinking about language and consciousness influenced C. S. Lewis, writes in Saving the Appearances about the way we humans experience and know the world:
I do not perceive any thing with my sense-organs alone, but with a great part of my whole human being. Thus, I may say, loosely, that I “hear a thrush singing.” But in strict truth all that I ever merely “hear”—all that I ever hear simply by virtue of having ears—is sound. When I “hear a thrush singing,” I am hearing, not with my ears alone, but with all sorts of other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling and (to the extent at least that the act of attention involves it) will.[2]
Before you could hear a thrush sing, someone had to teach you what singing is and had to show you a certain bird and teach you its name and even had to tell you that you could use your will to stop and listen to the song of a bird because it is something beautiful. In each step in this marvelous progression, words play a central role in identifying and naming the experience of hearing a thrush sing. Every time we read, the words we encounter are teaching us what to pay attention to, how to perceive it, and what value to place upon it. Imagine, then, the power of reading in fellowship—the insight and the strength of conviction created when stories are shared, when friends have a common way to describe the world or a shared vocabulary to describe what is good, beautiful, and true.
Right before I began the writing of this book, I spent three years studying church history and doctrine, and one of the things that amazed me was the way the early church was formed by words. The Gospels and the Epistles were read aloud in the young churches, memorized by new believers, carried by hand from church to church as Christian doctrine and belief were formed. The letters of Paul, each one opening with a powerful reminder of his readers’ identities as saints, or the Gospels, those central stories of Jesus that weave every believer into the same epic story, were the powerful words shared by the early church, read aloud and woven into a common language of faith. The early Christians drew such power from this shared vision that the gospel spread throughout the Roman world within decades.
Words make worlds, and when words are shared, communities, movements, and revolutions form around them.
But another aspect of shared reading is the way it teaches us to look beyond our own view of the world. Reading changes our consciousness on the most personal level by challenging us to consider the way someone else might experience life, and this is where compassion often begins. I was fascinated when I began the research for this book to discover that scientists now believe reading a novel can help a reader to expand what researchers call a person’s “theory of mind” or, in simpler terms, a person’s capacity to understand that other people think and feel differently.[3] Reading actually helps us to tune in to someone else’s emotion or point of view, and the better the writing, the more insight we are given.
A recent series of studies looks at the different levels of empathy or emotional insight shown by people who were given different things to read.[4] Those who had been given nonfiction or genre fiction (plot-driven stories with little character development) and then asked to identify the emotional expressions on the faces of people in a series of photographs had little luck. But those who read literary fiction (character-driven stories that explore the inner worlds or thoughts of multiple characters, exposing the reader to different ways of seeing) scored significantly higher. What this suggested to the researchers is that reading allows us to place ourselves in another’s shoes, seeing the world through another’s eyes, empathizing with views different from our own.
Further, when scientists looked at brain activity during such reading, they found that they could actually see imaginative empathy from a neural or biological point of view. In a study that looks at the way a novel impacts the brain and lingers in the mind, researchers found that when people read a description of action in a good book, the part of their brain that receives language was still active and awake long after they had finished their reading. The reading seemed to signal the part of the brain that processes motion. Just as thinking about walking can actually stimulate your brain and muscles to remember the feeling of walking, reading a book stimulated the brains of readers in such a way as to suggest they were imaginatively “feeling” the story as something real.
Imagine the power that gives us to feel the pain of another, to understand someone else’s struggle, stubbornness, or need. The kind of compassionate insight offered by a perceptive story is one that drives us toward connection. We are given the insight both to understand and to reach across the barriers of confusion or suspicion that so often separate us from the people we might come to know as friends, or even those who stand in need of our offered presence.
The memory that sprang to mind when I read this research was of two little girls, myself and my soon-to-be best friend, Katrina, sitting silent, stubborn, and shy in the back seat of a car on a hot summer’s drive twenty years ago. Our mothers were friends and had determined that we should be too, but for some reason now beyond recall, we didn’t feel like complying. We had an hour’s weekly drive to a shared lesson, and for the first few weeks we sat side by side without talking, convinced of the other’s hostility. Until Katrina brought a book. One week she opened a novel and began to read. I tried so hard not to look, but curiosity and boredom made me steal a glance, then a longer look, until I was surreptitiously reading whole pages over her shoulder. When she finally caught me, we both blushed and stared. And then she moved the book a little in my direction. I took the page in hand. I can’t remember how many more hours it took before one of us made a comment about a character, but once that conversation began, a friendship was born. It lasts, threaded by other books we love, hundreds of handwritten letters, and more than twenty years, to this day.
I’ve found this kind of book-bred empathy to be powerful as an adult, too, particularly in the realm of my faith, as I’ve wrestled with theological ideas—and people—I disagree with. To think about theology at all is to enter a debate that’s been going on since the Garden of Eden, and from the moment I arrived in Oxford and delved into doctrine, I was surprised to find how quickly the battle lines of opinion and belief got drawn between the students in my first-year doctrine class, myself included. There we were, a group of passionate people who were in that place precisely because of our shared commitment to the core tenets of the Christian faith. Yet there we were also, week by week, increasingly divided by our different understandings of what Scripture really said, what grace really looked like in action. I found that one student in particular said the opposite of what I thought every time he spoke. He hit all my sore points, embracing the very aspects of God that I found threatening. I found that even as I grew quickly friendly with the larger group, I avoided him and his “lot” (as they say in England). The fact that grace (that oh-so-important topic) was quickly draining from our larger interactions as a class, or even that our reactions with each other often reached to the roots of our own backstories of struggle and belief, was lost in the heat of opinion that burgeoned that first year . . . until one of the tutors started a weekly reading group for our class.
Two particular points made the optional class unique. First, we gathered to discuss an excerpt from a classic book that all of us had already read, so we began from the common ground of the author’s time-proven thought. Second, there was space for real discussion, as it rose from the words we read in company for the work of questioning
and listening, which is so different from the defensive quickness of debate. I was amazed at how quickly understanding, insight, and respect bloomed within the circle of those early morning classes as our common reading became a way of reaching toward each other. As we read the quotes we loved and argued about the passages we didn’t, we began to ask each other “Why?” Why do you love that line? Because that’s the one I hate. Why do you think about grace in that way? Why do you think this aspect of judgment is so important?
Slowly but surely, we entered into the way the other saw the world, allowing us both to understand how different people had come to their beliefs and also to inhabit a different way of viewing God. The fact that the one student who drove me nuts was also the quickest to be frank, to admit fault, to ask the direct question forced me to a begrudged respect that became deep and genuine as I encountered his stark, unquestioning belief, his uncompromising faithfulness to hold himself accountable to Scripture—a way of believing very different from my own wrestle and dance of faith, often marked by questions and shaped by my love of paradox. Our reading became a way of reaching out to the other, beginning the journey toward understanding, which is the work, I think, of love, of the God who acts unceasingly to renew our communion with himself and each other.
The fact that love uses books to do that is a wonder . . . and our gift.
May the books you encounter in this chapter startle you with just that kind of unexpected reconnection, that startled friendship. May you, bookish girl, in whatever circle you find yourself—that of new friendship, of difficult siblinghood, of opposing faith, of marriage, or of a strange new home, find yourself able to connect through the relational power of words, by the possibility of love and friendship that always opens when a good book is shared.
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1960), 113.
[2] Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 20.
[3] Alison Flood, “Literary Fiction Readers Understand Others’ Emotions Better, Study Finds,” Guardian, August 23, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/23/literary-fiction-readers-understand-others-emotions-better-study-finds.
[4] David Kidd and Emanuele Castano, “Different Stories: How Levels of Familiarity with Literary and Genre Fiction Relate to Mentalising,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11, no. 4, 474–86.
The Books We Shared: My Family’s Favorite Read-Alouds
(OR, BOOKS TO KNIT HEARTS TOGETHER IN FRIENDSHIP)
ASK ME FOR A SINGLE memory or image that captures my family culture growing up, and I will no doubt describe a moment of reading aloud (or eating—my family is very talented at feasting, but that’s another story). My core family image is of us siblings curled in various corners of the couch (or sprawled on the floor with Legos, if you were my brothers), dusk out the window, hot chocolate very possibly in hand, as one of my parents read aloud from our latest novel. This scene could shift in countless small ways—set on the porch on a warm afternoon, in a local café, or with all of us crammed in the car for a road trip, peaceful for just as long as the riveting audiobook played. What is core is the stories we shared, the worlds in which we were immersed together by the enchanted habit of reading aloud.
The books on this list are the ones we still remember, the stories whose imagery and characters, quotes and quips slip into our conversations to this day. We might describe someone as “brave as Bilbo” or tease each other by mimicking the cool, suave disapproval of the ever-proper butler Jeeves. They are the kinds of books whose characters seem to leap off the pages, with voices that beg for dramatic interpretation even by the introverts (it’s no accident that my brother Joel now reads professionally for audiobook companies), with plots that keep even the extroverts in expectant hush (we are evenly split in this personality department), and with twists and turns that sate our never-ending hunger for the next adventurous tale.
In sharing these books with you here, I hope the delight continues.
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton
I read this in high school with a merry and opinionated bunch of siblings and friends. Half of us thought it was Chesterton’s unofficial masterpiece; the others thought he must have been high on something wild when he wrote it. The plot sounds ludicrous: a policeman tasked with exposing a group of anarchists in Victorian London decides to impersonate one himself in order to probe the depths of the anarchist’s inner circle, headed by an enigmatic leader called by the code name Sunday. It’s a wild tale of topsy-turvy pursuit, disguises, double identities, and bewilderment, but it’s also a symbolic romp, I contend—Chesterton’s bid to help us embrace the wild goodness and bewildering nature of faith in a fallen world. I can’t say much more without giving the story away, but the key line in the book for me is this one, spoken by the hero Gabriel Syme:
“Then, and again and always,” went on Syme like a man talking to himself, “that has been for me the mystery of Sunday, and it is also the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained. . . .
“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. If we could only get round in front . . .”
Also by Chesterton:
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
The Father Brown Mysteries
The Dark Is Rising Series by Susan Cooper
Drawing deeply on Arthurian legend, this is the tale of Will Stanton, the “seventh son of a seventh son” who discovers that he is one of the “old ones,” servants of the Light, tasked with protecting the world from the forces of the Dark. Set amid the history and beauty of Wales, with an intricate plot and characters of real depth, this story captivated my whole family as we listened to it aloud on a long road trip.
(Caveat: the underlying symbolism of Light and Dark in this series is more dualistic than Christian. I include the books because I think them to be a riveting depiction of good fighting against evil and of personal courage, and a rich immersion in the Celtic, Norse, and Arthurian myths shaping British culture. And it’s just plain fantastic reading.)
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
I have read this book twice aloud and once on my own, and wasn’t bored once. Neither were my brothers (the first group to hear it aloud), nor the hardworking gap-year students I mentored to whom I read it aloud in the evenings. Considering they had between four and six hours of lectures or reading a day, it’s a wonder they wanted another hour, but this novel is the sort that rivets its readers: a tale of murder and miracles, of love as inexorable as death, and characters quirky and brave and laugh-aloud funny. It’s the tale of Jeremiah Land, a South Dakotan janitor who speaks with God; of Davy, the teenage son with justice gnawing at his heart; of Swede, little sister and cowboy poet; and Reuben, the asthmatic boyish narrator who feels he was kept in the world to bear witness to it all. The word craft of this book is superb, the wry observations of various humanity some of the best I’ve read. Its capacity to communicate an almost Old Testamental sense of awe before the Almighty is a wonder. I can’t wait to read this aloud, yet again, to my future children and let them come to the paradoxical gleam of its final passage:
I breathe deeply, and certainty enters into me like light, like a piece of science, and curious music seems to hum inside my fingers.
Is there a single person on whom I can press belief?
No sir.
All I can do is say, Here’s how it went. Here’s what I saw.
I’ve been there and am going back.
Make of it what you will.
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
My siblings and I listened to this classic tale on tape (no, really, it was tape in those days) during a period of our lives
that required frequent long drives to piano lessons and Awana evenings through the rural back roads of Texas. We lived with my grandmother in Texas Hill Country, forty-five minutes from the nearest decent grocery store, and regularly had to pile in the car—four children under the age of twelve—for another half hour of driving. We were shockingly eager for this time in the car because it meant we could find out a bit more of what had befallen Oliver, the pitiable young orphan cast on the mercy of cruel orphanage keepers and the terrifying Bill Sikes. When Oliver escaped, would he follow the Artful Dodger in a career of pickpocketry, or would he maintain his innocence even at the sly hands of the con man Fagin? Dickens is at his famed best in this tale of intertwined lives, the dark side of London, and unexpected grace.
The Big Fisherman by Lloyd C. Douglas
This was one of our epic reads, a book I read aloud to my siblings that took a good few months. We stuck with it, though, for the vivid way in which it brought the historical era of Jesus’ coming and ministry to life. By weaving the tale of Fara, a young Arabian girl set on revenge, with that of Peter, the new disciple of Jesus and the “big fisherman” of the title, this story immersed us in the color and tension of Jesus’ world, helping us to imagine what it might have been like to encounter the startling man who called himself God’s Son.
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