Five Books Everyone Should Read
Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago to name five books I think everyone should read. As an habitual maker of pop music lists (see the movie High Fidelity) I was intrigued, but the scope of the charge was really impossibly broad, so I had to narrow it somewhat by adding the reason why the books should be read. I couldn’t pick five books as being the best or most important (why else would they be books one should read?) without any further qualification of “best” or “important.” And it seemed that the reason should be the most important I could think of. So here are five books I think everyone should read for the purpose of becoming wise in this life and, by practicing the wisdom so learned, saving his soul in the next.
The New Testament. What could be more important than the discovery of what life is for and how it is to be lived, and why it matters? This book contains the answers, with the Resurrection as proof of its authority. If you want to know what happens after death, who better to tell you than the one who had the power to enter it and then return to us? And the historic truth of the Resurrection has far more support than the casual materialist usually imagines. My first thought was to name the Bible as a whole, but I think it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to understand the Old Testament in isolation from the religious traditions which regard it as Scripture. Almost the same could be said of the New Testament, but I think one could get the general idea from reading it in a way that one could not with the Old.
Walker Percy: Lost in the Cosmos. Here you can find an account of what the New Testament is talking about in terms that bring it home to the modern mind in a striking way. It is, essentially, a diagnosis of the Fall of Man, a description of original sin—the catastrophic flaw in human consciousness that so reliably makes both the external world and every human spirit such a very troubled place. One aspect of the book that makes it so useful for our time is that Percy is not particularly concerned with the specifics of how the Fall occurred—the Garden, the temptation, the fruit—but with the psychology of it. It’s also one of the funniest books I know.
C. S. Lewis: The Great Divorce. Read this one to learn what is at stake in the choices we make throughout our lives, to understand how our own free will can determine whether our lives end in an eternity of bliss or of misery. And to learn something important about the nature of good and evil.
Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov. The list should include one great novel in the realist tradition that shows the big ideas working themselves out in individual lives. That sounds too philosophical: what I mean to say is that we need to see that the ideas are not merely ideas, that they operate powerfully in determining how we live. It’s been many years since I read The Brothers K, but if my memory is reasonably accurate it fulfills this purpose as well as anything ever written.
Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings. And here is a great novel in the non-realist tradition that is not only one of the most enchanting and powerful stories ever written but also a profound meditation on time, providence, fate, free will, love, and virtue.
I could have made the fourth item a list from which to choose one title. Other possibilities: Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the stories of Flannery O’Connor. I can imaging others nominating, say, Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, although to my thinking they don’t quite come up to these others in wisdom.
The Screwtape Letters might do just as well for the third item.
Why not include Dante and Shakespeare? For one thing, I found myself thinking of the person to whom such a list would be recommended, and I could only think of this person as a citizen of our times: intelligent and interested but only superficially educated, spiritually both naïve and cynical—or, more accurately, naïve because cynical without really understanding the object of the cynicism. So I had also as a mental guideline that the books be ones that such a person might be willing and able to read without too much difficulty presented by archaic language and culture. Dante, I think, almost has to be taught to one—at a minimum you need a certain amount of support in understanding his cosmology and theology. Shakespeare suffers less from this, but presents also the very practical question of what constitutes a book for this purpose. One play? Impossible to pick one. All the plays? Too broad and wide-ranging for the stated purpose.
And this is not a list of the books I consider greatest from the literary point of view. For that list, I might well include something by Faulkner, but as great as he is at his best he does not possess the deep wisdom that these others do. Likewise for Joyce, and many others. I really wanted to work T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in there; it might do in place of The Lord of the Rings, but is much less accessible.
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a comment