I’ve thought often of that afternoon scene as I composed this list. Having now read Hannah Coulter (the slim yellow book), I understand that Gwen wanted me to encounter that book in its full power, because it’s the kind of story that summons me to a new understanding of the world. I think Gwen knew my heart was hungry for the kind of wisdom that Wendell Berry offers in his themes of rootedness, faithfulness, and place, and she knew that Hannah Coulter was one of those quietly powerful books that might just shape the course of my future. The novels I discuss in this chapter are the ones that have formed and gripped me with the same kind of power, and I recommend them to you with the same tenderness and sense of possibility with which Gwen recommended Hannah Coulter (at the right time) to me.
How in the world can I possibly choose just a dozen stories as core to my heart? It’s close to impossible, but these novel essentials are the ones whose narratives shaped my idea of who I am, of what is possible, of what should be fought for, delighted in, created afresh. These are the books that broadened my world, drove my discovery, shaped my idea of self. They inspire the same sense of transformation in my mind as Gwen observed in Hannah Coulter. I won’t tell you to wait for quiet though; I want you to dive in, to just begin, to pick even one of these stories and know that I have set it here because it has in some way been essential in forming my heart and directing my life.
If you read nothing else, read these. They’re treasures, all.
Persuasion by Jane Austen
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid”; with this slightly tongue-in-cheek comment by one of the world’s sanest novelists, I offer you the matchless Jane Austen. Wisdom, wit, and a calm but excellent humor are the terms that come to my mind when I think of Jane Austen’s classic works. Her stories are all “romances” that end, of course, with a wedding, but there is nothing of the agony and ecstasy or the wild, indulgent emotion of a romance novel. There is, rather, the gentle and expert probing of a woman who observed human nature with sympathy, wisdom, and kindness, demonstrating the way that love in ordinary time must often travel the rocky ground of pride, silence, and inherited prejudice. She is patient with her characters, allowing them to confront their own obstinacy, selfishness, or regret, but she is also plain funny.
Austen’s famed classic Pride and Prejudice opens with the matchless line “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” thus beginning a story of five sisters in want of just such a husband. While Pride and Prejudice is one of those books that everyone should read, it is also one of those BBC miniseries that everyone has watched (with the unforgettable Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy). Because of this, I’ll assume you will read Pride and Prejudice and take this chance to list one of Austen’s lesser-known novels as my first and favorite, the one not often read but the one I wouldn’t want to miss. Persuasion is a bit more rueful, more mature in its portrayal of Anne Elliot, a self-giving, gentle woman past her prime who lives with the knowledge that she passed up the opportunity to truly love and be loved by the good and manly Captain Wentworth. She rejected his proposal on the worldly advice of an older friend worried about fortune.
The book opens eight years after the fact, when Anne and the captain (both still unmarried) are thrown back into each other’s company, forced to face the frustrated hope, the bitterness, the yearning of their old love amid the small dramas of their mutual friends and local society. I said above that there is little of the wild, intense emotion of the romance, but Austen was no cynic. When passion breaks through, it is something that has grown up from the depths, rooted in patience, suffering, and self-revelation; Austen so wields her pen in this book that Captain Wentworth’s single line “You pierce my soul” is enough to make a grown reader go breathless.
Also by Austen:
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Emma
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
This was the book put in my hands with the caution that I was only to read it “when my heart had space to be quiet.” Love, as the divine life in which all things living have their being, and also as the action by which we humans join that reality, is the theme of this quiet story. It is the simple narrative of a Kentucky housewife—Hannah Coulter’s recollections from her childhood on a hardscrabble farm and her marriage to Virgil Feltner and the farming “membership” she subsequently joined in the small town of Port William. From her early days as a young bride to her widowhood in World War II and her remarriage to a man whose desire for a rooted life of farm and family is formed “by going through everything that was opposed to it,” Hannah narrates the quiet drama of rural farm life, a story illuminated by her understanding that her daily work could be “one of the acts of the greater love that holds and cherishes all the world.”
Berry never whisks his readers away to exotic realms; he settles them down, roots them into the workaday loves and ordinary heartbreaks and miniature miracles of normal life in Port William. In doing so, he also roots his reader in the present, challenging his readers to look up from his novels onto their own lives with a rekindled sense of the way that grace can invade our smallest actions, the way the Kingdom comes in this moment, this choice, this claimed bit of earth. Berry is one of those authors whose stories directly shape the way I live; the rhythms of outreach, of homemaking, of work. He helps me to a vision of why I am faithful to love, relate, cook, and create order when those actions at times seem meaningless. I may live in a cottage on a backstreet of Oxford, but Berry’s Kentucky life walks alongside me, modeling what love looks like enacted on the scale of the everyday.
Also by Berry:
Remembering
The Memory of Old Jack
Jayber Crow
A Place on Earth
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
There is no one quite like Dickens, and for me there’s nothing quite like David Copperfield, in which the young and innocent protagonist, David—fatherless and oppressed by the intractable Mr. Murdstone—sets out to discover if he will “turn out to be the hero of [his] own life.” This was the first Dickens novel I read, my introduction to his skill as an intricate weaver of plot, a prophet of social ills in the Victorian era, and the creator of characters as memorable as they are idiosyncratic. I can still recall, almost verbatim, the passages describing the “shadowless red eyes” of the villain Uriah Heep; the bluster of the generous-hearted Betsey Trotwood, who tells David to “never be mean in anything” and speaks of her past romances in the third person; and the quiet good humor of the loyal Peggotty, whose own courtship is sealed by the famed words “Barkis is willin’.” In his grasp of human nature in its foibles and beauty, his care for the forgotten of society, and the sheer knotted brilliance of his plot, Dickens is an author who ranks among my most beloved.
Also by Dickens:
A Christmas Carol
Our Mutual Friend
Bleak House
Hard Times
Little Dorrit
Middlemarch by George Eliot
George Eliot (the pen name of the Victorian author Mary Ann Evans) is one of those authors whose every work I want to read before I die. I am fascinated by her stories and her passionate belief in mystery, in a Christ-shaped compassion, and in the sacred beauty to be glimpsed amid the ordinary. When I studied theology at Oxford, I wrote one of my papers on her as an example of someone who embraced and later rejected evangelical Christian faith. What is curious and compelling about Eliot is that her rejection was based on her strong conviction that the Christianity she saw lacked what she believed was the real depth of Jesus’ compassion for the suffering. She left formal religion (if only she could have had a chat with Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Thomas Merton, I wonder if she might have remained) but continued to live in awed awareness of the “roar which lies on the other side of silence” and to create characters who embodied her belief that “
the immediate object and the proper sphere of all our highest emotions are our struggling fellow-men and this earthly existence.”[1] I encountered her first in her novel Middlemarch, which ranks in my top ten of all time.
I read this book when I was in my late teens, and when someone asked me what I thought of it, I blurted, entirely without previous thought, “It reminds me of the Bible.” It still does. What I meant is that Eliot has a profoundly realistic but deeply compassionate grasp of human nature. Of her novels she said that “if art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.”[2]
The whole of this thick novel is set in the town of Middlemarch, centered on the private dramas of its various inhabitants: their marriages, their money troubles, their faith or hypocrisy, their discontent or joy. It opens with the tale of Dorothea (a would-be Teresa of Avila), who, as a well-off young idealist, yearns for a life of meaning, service, and noble action. Her marriage to the much older Casaubon begins her journey to an actual grasp of what love in action may be, formed far more by suffering than by triumph. Her story is one of several woven through the book, each driven by the deep desires, reluctant compromises, and consequences of choice lived out by each character.
I wish that everyone could read this masterpiece of a book before embarking upon adult life, or even the choosing of a spouse (read this with an eye to the three romances, and watch what it tells you about marriage). The closing quote of the book is one I can only hope could be applied to me upon death; it contains what a priest friend of mine said is one of the best descriptions of Paul’s “quiet life” (1 Thessalonians 4:11), as lived in real Christian devotion:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Also by Eliot:
Silas Marner
Scenes of Clerical Life
The Mill on the Floss
Daniel Deronda
Pilgrim’s Inn by Elizabeth Goudge
I love Elizabeth Goudge. She is one of those authors to whose pages I come with the same deep relief I know in arriving on the doorstep of home: here I am known, here I will be sheltered, here there is strength for the road ahead. I didn’t encounter Goudge’s writing until adulthood. Her novel Gentian Hill was the first of hers I read, placed in my hands by a mentor in literature. It was given with an injunction similar to that accompanying my first Wendell Berry book: “Oh, save this one until you can really enjoy it.” I did. And then I tumbled headlong into a vivid tale of life in Devon in the eighteenth century, when the green hills and cupped valleys still brimmed with sacred presence for those who lived in them; when plowmen chanted ancient music to the oxen as they tilled the soil; and where a small, gifted, orphaned girl grew up amid the hearthside magic of Weekaborough Farm.
As a writer, Goudge combines a Dickensian talent for character description and plot twist, with a Montgomeryish delight in the created world and the sacramental vision of a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her books are a juxtaposition of wry, amused, and very English evocations of human folly and desire, with an almost mystical vision that recognizes in the beauty of the earth, in the making of home, and in the rhythms of worship the real presence of God, charging the earth with his grandeur, as Hopkins would say.
To be honest, I’d list every Goudge book as one of my favorites. But if I had to pick one, I’d go with Pilgrim’s Inn, a novel that more than almost any other I have read evokes the power of home as “a brick in the great wall of decent living that men erected over and over again as a bulwark against the perpetual flooding in of evil,” as a tangible space in which we may “taste and see” the goodness of the Lord (Psalm 34:8). The story is of the Eliots, a large family shattered by the brutality of World War II, who make the somewhat crazy gamble to buy a rambling old house in the English countryside. Headed by the cool and elegant Nadine (and her divided heart) and the irresistibly idealistic matriarch Lucilla, the Eliots claim the old house as their own, discovering along the way that it used to be a pilgrim’s inn, one of the religious hostels run by monks for pilgrims on their way to one of the great English cathedrals in medieval times. The house seems to take them to itself, drawing them one by one out of their bitterness, grief, and regret into a health that allows them, in their turn, to take part in the sacred hospitality for which the house was built. A novel exploring both beauty and home, and their power to restore, this is a book I read just about every year.
Also by Goudge:
Gentian Hill
A City of Bells
The Little White Horse
The Scent of Water
The Bird in the Tree
The Dean’s Watch
The Rosemary Tree
Green Dolphin Street
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I first read this when I was sixteen; I remember finishing it in the front seat of a car, feet propped on the dashboard in the Colorado sun as I waited for my mom and siblings to emerge from some lesson or event. I can still recall the silence that enveloped me when I finished the book and tried to narrate to myself the deep sense of sympathy—of insightful understanding, even of compassion—that tale summoned in a self-centric and teenaged me. The story, narrated by the tomboy Scout, introduces us to the small Southern town of Maycomb in the 1930s and the drama that descends upon it when Tom Robinson, a black man, is falsely accused of raping a white woman. Atticus Finch, Scout’s father and a respected white lawyer, steps in for the defense.
The novel is a masterpiece of indirect communication: a story exploring prejudice, hypocrisy, and violence through the matter-of-fact eyes of a little girl who is far more concerned about the escapades she shares with her brother and the neighbor boy Dill in their shared goal to lure the reclusive and supposedly mad Boo Radley out of his house at the end of the street. Both Scout and the town of Maycomb are challenged in their unquestioned prejudice by Atticus Finch, who insists that his children and fellow citizens see Tom Robinson, Boo Radley, and even the crotchety old widow up the street (mocked and hated by Scout) as people as valid and valuable as themselves. “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience,” says Atticus.
This novel offers a picture of a man willing to live and willing to risk much for the dictates of faith and conscience. The book called me as a reader to an honest evaluation of my own unquestioned reactions, judgments, and tendency to discount people I find difficult or different from me, and to a renewed understanding of what integrity and courage might look like. Scout says, “It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.” In finishing Lee’s story, I began to yearn for that bravery in myself.
The Anne of Green Gables Series by L. M. Montgomery
You will soon gather from the chapters that follow that I love the Anne books with a bright and abiding love. The series follows the radiant-eyed Anne, an orphan, from her girlhood days at Green Gables, where she has been adopted by dour, faithful Marilla and quiet Matthew. The books trace her life as she grows to young womanhood as an ambitious student and teacher (dogged by humorous and accidental escapades) and to her life as a new wife and mother (still with imagination and writerly ambition intact). These books are touchstones for me; they consistently help me to center my own life, to return to joy and creativity when I am discouraged. Their realistic view of small-town life and family relationships is so hysterically, cathartically true. Their delight in the natural world and the crafted comfort of home reminds me of the daily possibility of beauty in my own sphere. And their honor of loyal love and kindred-hearted friends kindles me afresh to cultivate relationships with the people I have been given in my own little world. The Anne books are funny because they are realistic—about gossip and household disasters a
nd the work it takes to get anywhere in the world. They’re radiant, like Anne herself, because they root themselves in the possibility of joy—lurking in a firelit evening with a book, in a meadow starred by spring, in the sometimes mute but deep affection of the people who make up our own small worlds. Every woman should get to know Anne, and that’s all there is to it.
Island of the World by Michael O’Brien
Imagine that a medieval mystic poet wrote a modern novel with Communist Yugoslavia as his setting and a little boy as his hero. Throw in a hearty dose of down-to-earth humor and word craft of the sort that sets scenes of both beauty and terror vividly in your imagination for years to come, and you will begin to get the feel of this tale. The story follows the almost Homeric journey of Josip Lasta, a Croatian boy raised in the joyous and remote mountain village of Rajska Polja (translation: “the fields of heaven”) as he travels from the mountains of his innocence into a turbulent adulthood as a mathematician, a professor, and a “cultural rebel” under Tito’s regime. From the book’s opening paragraphs, tragedy looms on the horizon. But the novel begins in an evocation of beauty so simple and profound—in the love of Josip’s parents, the homey delights of their home and farm, the deep faith in which they are led by the faithful Fra Anto—that you forget to be afraid. As the reader, you watch as love and light form a land at the center of Josip’s soul, creating a refuge right in his heart.
When Josip’s life is shattered and he is exiled, not just from his home but from that place of joy in his deepest heart, the journey begins. I warn you, this is a book that might cause embarrassment if read in public places. I laughed out loud in a quiet restaurant at the novel’s merry debate between a Croatian Catholic and a Pentecostal from Harlem. But I have also cried over this book, and the tears weren’t the surface kind; whatever hurt or struggle you bear, this story will touch it. This book will not spare you as a reader (and if you are squeamish about violence, be warned that it is squirm-worthy—not gratuitously graphic, but definitely matter of fact). Josip’s life—the brutality that comes upon him unawares, his fight to escape not only evil men but the “heart of Cain” in himself—describes the battle in which I think we all are daily locked. But it also offers the affirmation that through pain and despair, we are all truly walking toward a world remade by love, a world beyond this one, and yet one growing up and present even now in the innermost regions of our souls. For as one of Josip’s fellow prisoners explains,
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