This category of posts began in 2007. At that point, for reasons no longer remembered, I decided to try my hand at reviewing books. The reviews began with a simple list of my three all-time favorites: "The Lord of the Rings," "The Idylls of the King," and "The Oresteia." From there, it mushroomed out to include everything under the sun. In all, I've reviewed about forty-seven books in genres ranging from science fiction to philosophy, comics to classics. In short, whatever has caught my fancy. After all that effort, it seems like it would be worth while to sit down and put into words what I've learned. Cliche, I know, but here we go:
1. Read Broadly There are a lot of books in the world. You can't read them all. Most of us are merely content to visit one a favorite genre or two and read from a few favorite authors. This may be pleasant, but it stunts the mind and constricts literary taste. In order to grow as persons, we need to have both our views and our tastes challenged. We pity or roll our eyes at the man who still has the same taste in foods that he did when he was seven but tolerate the same stunted appetite in our reading. Sometimes, we need to sit down and read a book because it's a book worth reading (I'm discovering that now on a trip through Wendell Berry). This advice goes for genre, but it also goes for time periods. Do you have a literary "friend" in each century (as Dr. Fred Sanders puts it)? How long is your own literary "Dark Age?"
2. Always Connect "Always connect" is a modern historian's maxim but it holds true for our reading habits as well. People write because they have something to say. That's true whether its conscious or subconscious. What they have to say hasn't developed in isolation, but is connected with other authors that they've read or whose thought they've encountered. Every book is a part of the "Great Conversation" that humans have been having down through the ages. In the West, Homer got the ball rolling and people have been picking it up and running with it ever since (often in opposite directions!). Authors are always talking to each other and if you're tuning that out, then you're missing half the fun and half the good of reading. For instance, Tolkien hated Lewis' Narnia books and Lewis disliked the lion's share of Tolkien's poetry. Lewis created worlds in miniature while Tolkien sought to create one as vast and sweeping as our own. Lewis was an Ulster Protestant and Tolkien a Roman Catholic. Yet both men were friends, shared a common commitment to Christianity, and a common effort to see the kind of stories they liked written for a modern audience. When reading their books, you can see how they worked out their common commitments in differing ways. You can hear the dialog and it enriches the experience of reading both authors. If you want to look at the conversation across time, pick up the "Iliad" and read it back to back with Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" or Sartre's "Existentialism and Human Emotions." Better yet, pick up Virgil's "Aeneid" and watch him try to "undo" Homer through literary magic.
3. Read In Community One of the things I've enjoyed most about this thread has been the increased opportunity for dialog; sometimes in the comments and sometimes in person. I think my favorite comments thread has to be the almighty "Iliad" row. If "it is not good for man to be alone," then it is not good for him to read alone either. When we read by ourselves, even if we read broadly, our thoughts become ingrown. We are limited beings and those limits, left unchecked, eventually begin to warp us. Have you ever met an intelligent person who's done a little too much reading alone? They usually turn out as cranks.
4. Make Your Reading Personal When I was growing up in church, I remember a man talking about a certain kind of Christian who "missed the Gospel by six inches: the distance from the head to the heart." Now I do believe that everything we read has an impact on us, but that impact can be passive or active. A passive impact is akin to "brainwashing:" it gets in over time and colors the way we see things without you even noticing. An active impact is more akin a devotional or a spiritual discipline: you are working knowingly with the change for a set purpose or goal. Even reading for fun fits into the active category when we accept what we're doing as part of an ordered program, not just a passive habit or entertainment addiction. Coming back to the anecdote, I think what it meant was that one can't passively slip into the Gospel, it has to be a conscious choice. Just so, much of the benefit we get out of reading comes from a conscious choice to engage the art and ideas of the books we read. When something is Good, True, and Beautiful, we ought to let it down into the core of our being. When something is Evil, False, and Ugly, we need to resist it. In so doing, reading can be a means of spiritual formation; a way to take an active role in shaping who we are.
Perhaps these four lessons could have been phrased better, but the beauty of a blog is that it allows us a venue to get our thoughts out and not wait until they're perfect before sharing them. The common wisdom in the writing world seems to be that perfect books don't get written. Imperfect books get written, then revised, then revised again, and then sent out into the world. A book or a blog post is a lot like a human life: it is a reaching for perfection, not an attaining of it. What does that mean practically? It means that out of a hundred posts, most of this thread has been junk. Still, there have been a few posts that have sparkled and caught people's eyes. Those are the ones that make the others worthwhile. In those posts, as always, the Platypus speaks Truth.
1. Read Broadly There are a lot of books in the world. You can't read them all. Most of us are merely content to visit one a favorite genre or two and read from a few favorite authors. This may be pleasant, but it stunts the mind and constricts literary taste. In order to grow as persons, we need to have both our views and our tastes challenged. We pity or roll our eyes at the man who still has the same taste in foods that he did when he was seven but tolerate the same stunted appetite in our reading. Sometimes, we need to sit down and read a book because it's a book worth reading (I'm discovering that now on a trip through Wendell Berry). This advice goes for genre, but it also goes for time periods. Do you have a literary "friend" in each century (as Dr. Fred Sanders puts it)? How long is your own literary "Dark Age?"
2. Always Connect "Always connect" is a modern historian's maxim but it holds true for our reading habits as well. People write because they have something to say. That's true whether its conscious or subconscious. What they have to say hasn't developed in isolation, but is connected with other authors that they've read or whose thought they've encountered. Every book is a part of the "Great Conversation" that humans have been having down through the ages. In the West, Homer got the ball rolling and people have been picking it up and running with it ever since (often in opposite directions!). Authors are always talking to each other and if you're tuning that out, then you're missing half the fun and half the good of reading. For instance, Tolkien hated Lewis' Narnia books and Lewis disliked the lion's share of Tolkien's poetry. Lewis created worlds in miniature while Tolkien sought to create one as vast and sweeping as our own. Lewis was an Ulster Protestant and Tolkien a Roman Catholic. Yet both men were friends, shared a common commitment to Christianity, and a common effort to see the kind of stories they liked written for a modern audience. When reading their books, you can see how they worked out their common commitments in differing ways. You can hear the dialog and it enriches the experience of reading both authors. If you want to look at the conversation across time, pick up the "Iliad" and read it back to back with Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" or Sartre's "Existentialism and Human Emotions." Better yet, pick up Virgil's "Aeneid" and watch him try to "undo" Homer through literary magic.
3. Read In Community One of the things I've enjoyed most about this thread has been the increased opportunity for dialog; sometimes in the comments and sometimes in person. I think my favorite comments thread has to be the almighty "Iliad" row. If "it is not good for man to be alone," then it is not good for him to read alone either. When we read by ourselves, even if we read broadly, our thoughts become ingrown. We are limited beings and those limits, left unchecked, eventually begin to warp us. Have you ever met an intelligent person who's done a little too much reading alone? They usually turn out as cranks.
4. Make Your Reading Personal When I was growing up in church, I remember a man talking about a certain kind of Christian who "missed the Gospel by six inches: the distance from the head to the heart." Now I do believe that everything we read has an impact on us, but that impact can be passive or active. A passive impact is akin to "brainwashing:" it gets in over time and colors the way we see things without you even noticing. An active impact is more akin a devotional or a spiritual discipline: you are working knowingly with the change for a set purpose or goal. Even reading for fun fits into the active category when we accept what we're doing as part of an ordered program, not just a passive habit or entertainment addiction. Coming back to the anecdote, I think what it meant was that one can't passively slip into the Gospel, it has to be a conscious choice. Just so, much of the benefit we get out of reading comes from a conscious choice to engage the art and ideas of the books we read. When something is Good, True, and Beautiful, we ought to let it down into the core of our being. When something is Evil, False, and Ugly, we need to resist it. In so doing, reading can be a means of spiritual formation; a way to take an active role in shaping who we are.
Perhaps these four lessons could have been phrased better, but the beauty of a blog is that it allows us a venue to get our thoughts out and not wait until they're perfect before sharing them. The common wisdom in the writing world seems to be that perfect books don't get written. Imperfect books get written, then revised, then revised again, and then sent out into the world. A book or a blog post is a lot like a human life: it is a reaching for perfection, not an attaining of it. What does that mean practically? It means that out of a hundred posts, most of this thread has been junk. Still, there have been a few posts that have sparkled and caught people's eyes. Those are the ones that make the others worthwhile. In those posts, as always, the Platypus speaks Truth.
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