Dear friends,
At the study center we are reflecting on building a library of formational books. Just as importantly, we are drawing from friends to learn what books to recommend when. Reading a good book at the wrong time might be just as bad as reading a bad book at any time. And reading a sequence of good books may be far better than jumping straight into a demanding book and only finishing the first half of it.
And, if you permit me a final thought, it may be very profitable to read a bad book at the right time -- after you have the resources to sufficiently critique it, or maybe as a way to exhaust the appeal of something so nakedly awful.
So, what books have been important to you? Was there a necessary order to reading them?
We'd love your thoughts. What follows are ways of answering.
Was there a ladder of books that you followed? Maybe you began with something familiar to your parents and ended up somewhere slightly different but also helpful. The dream would be a Great Books progression, but most of us just aren't that lucky. One such ladder for me was:
Colson's How Now Shall We Live
Willard's Divine Conspiracy
Lewis' Mere Christianity
Buechner's Telling the Truth
Newbiggin's Gospel in a Pluralistic Society
MacIntyre's After Virtue
While increasing levels of abstraction may be unhelpful, as our powers of reasoning and pattern recognition grow there is often a movement from familiar to unfamiliar, straightforward to what once might have been risky. No need to be fancy here — just let us know what took you where.
Or, if you are like me, books have been just as important for your emotional and aesthetic maturity. What fiction or poetry invigorated your moral imagination at just the right time? You grew up as you read and confronted various vices and virtues in a number of genres. For me Prince of Tides was invaluable. So was Brothers Karamazov. So was Lord of the Rings (which was required reading for a UNC course!). For many our students, Harry Potter was tremendously evocative and always comes to mind.
Given that we are interacting with hundreds of students who are in a crucial period of growth, what books were important in helping you grow up? Many of these probably weren't timeless, but they were helpful. A timeless and helpful book for me was Wolters' Creation Regained.
Or, maybe you are in a creative mood, and you would like to write a book recipe. Here would be one for getting over yourself that I really could have used my sophomore year of college:
Book of Romans
Keller's Counterfeit Gods
Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos
Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self
Back 1/2 of Mere Christianity (on personality)
Book of Proverbs
Feel free to send in your reflections to madison@ncstudycenter.org.
Happy reading this Christmas,
Madison