- One book that shaped my imagination as a kid was Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. I read this novel about a friendship between a boy and a girl, interrupted by tragedy, at the dawn of my own adolescence. I remember sobbing at the end — the first time, I’m almost sure, I was moved by a book in that way. What moved me was not just the loss that the book narrates, but also Paterson’s simple, gentle, and beautiful language. There are probably many reasons, including many other books and authors, that I became a writer, but of all those reasons, I’m pretty sure this novel was the first.
- One book that helped me return to reading, or help sustain me as a reader, was Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. I don’t think I ever left reading, and thus never needed to return to it, but this book did reawaken something in me, or many somethings — a delight in food, a love of unrestrained and vivid prose, and an unshakeable belief that everything is ultimately theological. (The book’s most virtuosic, and maybe most worshipful, chapter is dedicated to the experience of slicing an onion.) I found an early edition on the dusty shelves of a retreat center library during a fit of procrastination one afternoon we were supposed to be spending in silent prayer. Not only did I end up spending the whole afternoon reading, I quietly took the book home with me, a theft I’ve never regretted.
- One book that was pivotal in my faith journey was A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. Peterson, of course, has become famous for his The Message version of the Bible — which, to confess an unpopular opinion, has never really sung for me — but much earlier in his life he wrote a few deceptively slim books of reflections on different Old Testament texts. This one, which lifts its title from Friedrich Nietzsche of all people, simply examines each of the Psalms of Ascents, the collection of psalms just before Psalm 119 that were sung on pilgrimage up to Jerusalem. I read it my first year in college, just a few years into my active Christian life. Peterson’s literary insight into Scripture and his graceful but earthy take on life and faith became a kind of benchmark for me of what great Christian writing could be and ought to be.
- One book I’ve read lately that introduced a powerful new idea was David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I’m working on my own next book, which is turning out to be in no small part about the power of mammon — the demonic force behind the love of money. Graeber, an anthropologist who does not write from any evident religious perspective, makes a powerful case that money has never been primarily a neutral medium of exchange or mere substitute for barter, as economists tend to conceive of it. Instead, it is an enabler of dehumanization and violence. His sweeping argument can surely be challenged at points, but if mammon is indeed the fundamental rival to God that Jesus said it was, this book offers exhaustive confirmation of the power that idolatrous force has had throughout human history.
- If I could make any book magically become a bestseller it would be Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. I suppose this choice shows that I don’t believe in magic, because this book was a bestseller and continues to be widely read nearly a decade after its publication. But I still cannot think of a more foundational book written in my lifetime for every American and everyone else who must reckon with American history. Our historical memories are so spotty and episodic; for many white Americans in particular, it’s all too easy for our story of race in America to skip straight from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Civil Rights movement. Wilkerson restores a crucial period of history without which you literally cannot understand American cities, especially Northern ones; our stubbornly racialized society; and ultimately the story of America itself. And she does it with journalistic precision, a novelist’s touch, and a profound respect for her subjects. You’ll never forget the three individuals whose stories she tells, whose lives (like all of our lives) run the full gamut from triumph to tragedy, and you’ll never see your neighbors or your neighborhood in quite the same way.
