In one of my earliest memories from childhood, I'm sitting in a darkened room with my Beanie Baby panda, Fortune, tucked in my lap and an Alphapets book open before me. By the light filtering in through the windows next to the bookshelf in my preschool classroom, I read about Mortimer the mimicking mouse while my classmates nap. At only four years old, I am falling in love for the first time, and it is a romance from which I will never recover.
Between the bookshelves of both my own home and the public library less than a mile's walk from our house, I was never far from new reading material. I read steadily, voraciously, promiscuously. Fed by a consistent diet of novels, nonfiction, poetry, and short stories, I grew from the four-year-old with a stuffed animal in one hand and a book in the other into a gawky, bespectacled middle schooler with the nickname "the Human Dictionary," then into one of the only high school students in the history of mankind who has actually enjoyed Great Expectations, let alone finished it, then into a college student who kept one book at the breakfast table and one in the bathroom in order to guarantee at least some reading each day that wasn't mandatory, and then into a woman who could stand up in front of a class full of middle school students and unironically declare that reading is fun. In every phase of my life, reading has been a constant.
When people learn that I love to read (which never seems to take long), one of their first questions tends to be what my favorite book is. Maybe there are people in the world who can, without hesitation, answer that question, but I have never met one and probably wouldn't trust them in the event that I ever do. I have loved far too many books to ever choose just one favorite. Of those books I have loved, however, there stands out a select group of books--the ones that have not merely entertained me, but those that have shaped my soul and maybe even changed my life. I couldn't fit all of them into one blog post (Part Two to come), but here are a few.
Ecclesiastes, King Solomon
Until my pastor preached through it a few years ago, I had never read Ecclesiastes. Lacking the pithiness of Proverbs and the sex appeal of the Song of Songs, it sinks to the bottom of the list of "Most Popular Books of Hebrew Poetry." To be sure, it is dense. The metaphors are convoluted, and the subject matter is heavy, even depressing at times. (Nothing says "Happy reading!" quite like the first line "Vanity of vanity, all is vanity!") But in all the Bible, no other book so clearly lays out the decay of existentialism into nihilism. When man creates his own meaning, life ultimately becomes meaningless to him. Only when we understand the true nature of reality and our fundamental purpose as laid out in the final chapter can we live fully.
Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl, N.D. Wilson
Disclaimer: this book is weird. Neither novel nor memoir, it's an explosive theological manifesto that will leave you unable to ignore even the smallest and most mundane parts of our human existence. Snowstorms, water, and even ants are all transfigured by Wilson's fervent prose. When I first read this book as a high school senior, I saw the world for the first time as a story and myself as only a character in it. Wilson challenged me to be the best character I can be in a world that is "beautiful but badly broken." As he bounces from topic to topic with a Tigger-esque enthusiasm, Wilson explicates the reason for suffering, the purpose of human existence, and the wonder of being alive to experience all the world has to offer. Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl is an utter joy.
The Christian Imagination, edited by Leland Ryken
The imagination is one of humanity's most powerful tools, yet it is also one of the most maligned. It's "a waste of time"; it's "impractical." But our sense of wonder and creativity is not a mere childish amusement to be put away with adulthood. Imagination is an essential component of our humanity, and it provides a compelling apologetic for the Christian faith. This collection of essays, which one of my favorite college professors often recommended and cited, thoroughly explores the human compulsion to create and the ways in which our creativity can glorify our Creator.
Love Thy Body, Nancy R. Pearcey
At the core of many contemporary issues (right to life, hookup culture, etc.) stands one fundamental problem: modern society has divorced the concept of self from the physical reality of the body. Another recommendation from another favorite professor, this book demonstrates how a holistic view of the self enables us as human beings to value ourselves and others as we are meant to do. It could easily have been a dry philosophical treatise on personhood, but Pearcey's lucid, compassionate writing brings Truth to light in the most beautiful way.