Also by Peterson:
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (reviewed on page 117)
Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers
Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory (especially volume 4) by Hans Urs von Balthasar
I haven’t included too many academic-type books, but I’ll set this here for those whose curiosity is piqued. Von Balthasar is one of my favorite theologians, a brilliant, respected systematic theologian who called for a renewal of “kneeling theology,” the kind only accomplished by a life of prayer. He seems almost incapable of writing anything short (The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics—his systematic theology based on a contemplation of beauty, truth, and goodness—is seven thick volumes long), but I waded through his Theo-Drama and understood more about sin and evil, human choice and divine freedom than I have from any other source. His theology is epic in scope—he is a visionary who sees the larger picture of redemption and strives to communicate every detail of its intricate plot and particular beauty. But his tone is one of warmth and wonder, a brilliant consciousness formed by prayer. Try his Credo: Meditations on the Apostles’ Creed for an easy first taste.
Own Your Life: Living with Deep Intention, Bold Faith, and Generous Love by Sally Clarkson
Ask any of the Clarkson siblings what one phrase our mom used over and over again when we were growing up, and you’ll get the answer in chorus: “You have a choice to make.” If there was one thing my mom wanted us to grasp, it was that we kids (no matter how we felt) had the capacity to choose: love, forgiveness, gentleness, joy. As an adult, I am so grateful for that deeply formative message because it helped me early on to see myself as capable, responsible, able to change the world around me simply by my capacity to choose. How interesting, then, that one of the most fascinating ideas I stumbled across in my theological studies was how vital it is for people to understand themselves as agents, able to shape their own stories, to choose to create, resist evil, or fight for the good. It’s what God communicated to Israel throughout the Old Testament, it’s what I think Gandalf was trying to tell Frodo, and it’s what my mom communicated to us every day of our young lives. Own Your Life is my mother’s personal exploration of what it means to be an agent, to own the story God has given you with grace, purpose, and chosen joy. I pass it on to you now. You, too, have a choice to make.
Also by Clarkson:
The Mission of Motherhood: Touching Your Child’s Heart of Eternity
The Ministry of Motherhood: Following Christ’s Example in Reaching the Hearts of Our Children
The Lifegiving Table: Nurturing Faith through Feasting, One Meal at a Time
The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming (with Sarah Clarkson)
Different: The Story of an Outside-the-Box Kid and the Mom Who Loved Him (with Nathan Clarkson)
Dancing with My Father: How God Leads Us into a Life of Grace and Joy
Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find? by Philip Yancey
Yancey was one of the authors who most helped me to live out my mom’s directive to struggle with, rather than away from, God. The book deals in questions: How do we relate to a God we’re never sure is there? Where is God in pain? How do I know my prayers are heard? All these are questions that have shaped my own wrestle with faith. With his usual mix of story, anecdote, research, and personal reflection, Yancey helps me to realize that doubt is not a threat to faith, that it is part of the journey we walk in belief, in trust, as we reach in faith for the “invisible God.”
EpilogueBooks Are Meant to Be PASSED ALONG
The Ongoing Legacy of the Reading Life
My best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
THERE ARE DAFFODILS in the vase by my window as I write, and my belly is just about too big for comfort as I sit here in the Saturday quiet of my little Oxford living room. I wrote the opening to this book when the first autumn leaves flecked the grass and the sky was just beginning to darken with the long winter nights that come so early here in England. Back then, my little book girl was my secret, barely visible joy. Now she kicks as I write so that I squirm on the couch. The light grows every evening, the days stretch along with my belly, and we stand on the cusp of spring. As this journey through the gifts of the reading life comes to a close, I am rich in the knowledge that I will soon meet the little book girl to whom this book is dedicated.
In preparation for her coming to our tiny Oxford house, we have kept our baby shopping to a list of the absolute essentials, including, of course, an ever-growing stack of our favorite books. It should come as no surprise that half of the gifts I open for this little one are books—baby books, children’s classics, picture books—the ones beloved of my friends, the stories they hope will enrich and liven our days together. Amid these treasures are three special books that make my heart both ache and exult every time I see them. They are worn, even ragged, their illustrations from a different era. But they are precious, the image I want to leave you with as we complete our journey together through the reading life.
These picture books were a gift from an elderly woman in my church. I first knew Alice and her tall, friendly husband as one of the beaming older couples who took real delight in welcoming Thomas and me into the parish church. As we planned our wedding there, I discovered that she, too, had come to that church as a bride. Their wedding gift to us was an antique etching of the church sanctuary that she had treasured for decades, and I felt a sense of deep camaraderie, of shared strength as I walked down the aisle on my wedding day and saw her there with her husband, their marriage and kindness so rich a source of life and joy to those in the church, and to me.
One year later, she stood as a widow where I had so recently stood as a bride, and I sat where she had, watching as her beloved was laid to rest after a brief, grieved fight with cancer. But there was no bitterness in her face. There was peace, a gentle quality I’d witnessed in her often as her husband’s life faded and she began the process of sifting through their home and marriage, cleaning things out, letting things go, and—great gift to me—passing things on. For Alice had been a teacher, one who loved children’s books and pored over the old guides to literature with the same fervor that I do in preparation for my baby. We quickly recognized each other as kindred-spirited book girls, and when it came time to pass on the books that had shaped her as a teacher and companioned her as a young mother, she brought them to me. Her face, even in that time of grief, was so bright and sure as she put the stacked books into my hands.
“I know you’ll love them—and use them,” she said. “And I know you’ll pass them along in your time.”
Alice is my image of what a book girl grows to become: a giver. One who, out of the richness of her reading life, out of a soul made quiet with wisdom, passes on the treasure she has found. In closing Book Girl, I hope that you will do the same with all you have discovered in this book. The reading life is, I’m convinced, a form of love, a way of encountering the world in its splendor and drama. The reading life comes to us as a gift and, as it fills us, drives us to fresh generosity. As you read and imagine, learn and grow in the company of great books, I hope you, too, will find that joyous urge that comes of a heart grown rich to hand out books to the children in your life, to pass on novels to your best friends, to press a good story into the hands of a struggling teen.
It’s what my mother did for me, what I hope to do for my daughter, and what I hope you have experienced in reading this book. If I could press a few of my best-loved old novels into your hands, I would. I wish I could set my battered copy of Pilgrim’s Inn in your hands or pass along my bent-edged Miss Rumphius. I’d give it to you with the same joy and surety I saw in Alice’s eyes, the same
sparkle-eyed, kindred-spirited camaraderie of the book-girl fellowship. Since I can’t do that, consider the whole of this book my way of passing along the glory. I’ll end by saying to you what Alice said to me: I know you’ll love these books in their beauty and imagination. I know you’ll use them—to learn and grow, to gain hope, to battle well. And I know that when it’s time, when another book girl just on the edge of discovery comes into your life, you’ll pass them along.
And the book-girl story will begin in joy all over again.
Lists for the Growing Book Girls in Your Life
Years ago, when I was in a phase of fascination with Scottish history and legend (prompted by the discovery of Scottish heritage in my family ancestry), I came across an intriguing set of historical figures called seanachís. These were the cultural descendants of the early Celtic bards whose vocation was to be the storytellers, the legend keepers for their people; to memorize and recite the love poems and haunting songs, the battle-forged epics of history, the stories in whose brave deeds the identity and history of a people were rooted. Seanachís were documented well into the twentieth century, often traveling village to village, keeping the old tales and songs alive with evenings of song and story by the fire in the local pub. People came away thrilled and heartened by the tales they heard, and children were quickened to life with new dreams of courage or creativity, sparked by the stories woven around them by the gifts of the seanachí.
After many years of thinking about books, researching reading, and writing about the power of story to shape the way we understand ourselves, I am convinced that our world needs adults willing to be seanachís in the lives of the children they love. In a world of confusing headlines and worldviews, amid the countless distractions of technology, children need adults who will draw them into the gift and wisdom of great stories. They deeply need imaginations formed by beauty, vocabularies big enough to articulate their dreams. One of the most powerful ways that you as a book girl can be a giver, passing along the gift of the reading life, is by cultivating reading in the life of the children in your care. Whether you are a parent, determined to make the reading life a rhythm and a joy in the everyday structure of your home; or a teacher, with a whole bevy of curious minds in your daily care; or a mentor, a friend, or an auntie to a few budding book girls, you have the power to give the powerful and soul-forming gift of reading. The research is clear on the power of reading to drive education, to widen possibility. But beyond that, books offer children the chance to enter life itself as a story, to see themselves as heroes and heroines with great adventures and battles and loves just beginning. That is an irreplaceable gift.
As we close, here are a few lists to help you in that wondrous project of passing along the reading life.
Picture Books
When I delved back into all my favorite picture books from childhood (a delightful task) for my first book on books, I came across a collection of illustrated fairy tales that I suddenly remembered was a treasure to me in little girlhood. It was the book I’d take into my room on a long Sunday afternoon or a rainy day so I could pore over the intricate images, the whimsical tales. When I rediscovered the book as an adult, I was intrigued to realize that the illustrator was Michael Hague, an artist whose work I’d long admired for its intricacy, detail, and depth, for the way it reflected the qualities of the classical masterpieces of art I loved as a teen. As I stood there flipping through the old pages, I realized that this was no coincidence. The more old picture books I rediscovered (by illustrators such as Barbara Cooney, Thomas Locker, and Trina Schart Hyman), the more I became aware that those picture books exposed me to beauty in a way that formed my appetite and trained my imagination to exult in good art as an adult. Those picture books, in their small way, prepared me to enjoy the works of Monet and Vermeer, Caravaggio and Fra Angelico, just as their carefully crafted scripts readied me for Dickens, L’Engle, and Lewis.
I am thus very passionate about picture books, because these little treasures shouldn’t be seen as a substitute for “real” art and literature; rather, they shape the way a child sees the world, the art she craves, the beauty she learns to love. Picture books are the lovingly crafted, child-sized packages of art and literature through which little ones first encounter the intricacy of the written word and the realm of art. These slim books, the bedtime tales read over and over, the birthday gifts, the well-paged companions of every day are the missives of beauty and humor forming the hungers and delights of their little readers with every word and vivid illustration. With that in mind, the following is a list of the picture books I’ve stacked ready for my own little book girl. I can’t wait to watch her eyes come alight.
Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran and Barbara Cooney
Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney
The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant
The Boy Who Held Back the Sea by Thomas Locker
My Mama Had a Dancing Heart by Libba Moore Gray
Saint George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges
Brambly Hedge series by Jill Barklem
Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox
Fritz and the Beautiful Horses by Jan Brett
The Bear That Heard Crying by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock and Helen Kinsey
Alphabears by Kathleen and Michael Hague
Children’s Classics
Children’s books, I was fascinated to discover, are a relatively recent invention. Until about the Victorian era, there were few books written specifically for children and even fewer (if any) written just to delight and entertain (rather than provide moral instruction). A fascinating milieu of cultural trends combined with the vivid imaginations of a few early writers (such as George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll) to abruptly shift the terrain of the publishing world and bring the children’s book into being. That began what is now known as the golden age of children’s books, a time that lasted pretty much through the publishing of Winnie-the-Pooh and World War I. The books in this list were written in an era that prized childhood for its wonder and innocence, that sought to celebrate a child’s more compact view of the world, that appealed to the oh-so-elusive quality of childish innocence . . . and insight.
These books are timeless in their appeal and would easily suit the individual reading of a child around eight years old or older. While they fit a general category of late elementary/middle-school reading, they also make excellent read-alouds, with plots and characters that keep adults riveted as much as young children. I have to admit to an old-fashioned opinion that every child should grow up with these classic books. To that end, I may have started collecting my own leather-bound editions one by one—a good dozen years before I met my husband. Luckily, he was doing the same with Dutch classics of his own.
Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Little Men by Louisa May Alcott
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley
The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
The Story of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit
Heidi by Johanna Spyri
Children’s Fiction
This list could go on for pages, for the books on this list are the ones I look back upon as the stories that broadened my idea of the world. They’re the sorts of novels that met me in those formative middle years of childhood (roughly ages eight through thirteen), expanding my dreams for what I could do or try or become. Each bookish world I encountered, each character I met enlarged my understanding of peoples, cultures, crafts, and callings. They expanded my vocabulary. They opened new rooms of dreaming in my thought and introduced m
e to eras in history I had only begun to imagine. They helped me to come to a sense of self and purpose even before I reached the angst of the teenage years.
In the middle-school years of education, children are often already beginning to figure out their answers to what philosophers see as the fundamental human questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is a good life? What is a good love?
The books in the list below are the ones that equipped me to answer and enjoy those questions as my own story opened at my feet:
Little Britches series by Ralph Moody
The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor
Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink
Winter Cottage by Carol Ryrie Brink
Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes
The Good Master by Kate Seredy
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham
Ellen by E. M. Almedingen
Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt
I, Juan de Pareja by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño
Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939 by Julian Padowicz
The Trumpeter of Krakow by Eric Kelly
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
Fairy Tale and Fantasy
I think all children should come early to the great fantastical titles that follow mostly because I think every child needs to learn early how to hope, and hope with a great, joyous will. Hope has a lot to do with imagination, with our capacity to imagine a brave act or a happy ending beyond what we can see. Children are small philosophers, encountering the goodness and the darkness, the joyous and the grievous in their experiences with an intensity we sometimes forget as adults. Because of this, they need stories that deal in ultimates—stories whose images make a window into all that waits beyond the walls of the world, into the love that is always present to them, even in their fear. They need fantastical tales of knights and dragons, kings and castles, epic quests and fairy-tale love. They need books of wild, holy imagination, rich with hints of eternity on every page. They need fairy tales. They need myth. They need fantasy, because fantastical yarns and epic tales help children to picture a happy ending, to act bravely, to believe that beauty is possible. The books below are also simply some of the most intriguing page-turners I remember loving from my own little girlhood. They delight . . . and they nourish the deepest rooms of the soul.
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