An Endless Bookshelf

Sometimes when I am starting a column, I look back to see what I wrote for this space roughly a year ago. I did so earlier this week, and I have to admit, the result was depressing, though I enjoyed re-reading the column, one of a number I’ve done that take up books on walking. (“I like this guy’s style” was my judgment.) I was depressed not by the column itself but by the reflection that, starting last June, I have walked less (far less) than at any time in my adult life.

But fear not. I’m not going to ruminate again (not today, at any rate) on the ravages of age, the routines of caregiving, and such. No, because what followed that dismal thought was a happy counter-thought: Even though it’s harder for me than it has been in the past to enjoy long stretches of reading time, I still am able to read a lot, and there is always more, more, more beckoning me. And I have an abundance of things to read (books, magazines, more) on an astonishing range of subjects.

Confession, for instance; see James M. O’Toole’s For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America, to be published next month by Harvard University Press (I have a bound galley) and to be reviewed in the pages of First Things.

As you already know if you have followed this column for a while, I was raised in an evangelical setting (and I am still an “evangelical” today). I’m immensely grateful for the witness of my mother and grandmother, who raised me and my younger brother. I’m grateful that I grew up having many missionary connections. But no setting is perfect, and my brother and I were given a very narrow and in some ways deeply prejudiced understanding of Catholicism, including the subject of “confession.” Of course, for their part, many Catholics grew up with deeply prejudiced conceptions of “Baptists” like us and Protestants more generally, and as I learned down the road, the lurid accounts of confession I heard and read had more than a grain of truth sometimes. In any case, to read O’Toole’s account is to be made aware, yet again, of the sometimes dizzying mutability of our common life.

But that is just one of the many new or forthcoming books surrounding me as I type. Among the most recent arrivals is Daniel Schwabauer’s The God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling (Baker Books). Schwabauer (here I’m quoting from the publicity sheet that came with the book) “teaches English at MidAmerica Nazarene University and writes award-winning fantasy and science fiction novels. He earned an MA in creative writing under science fiction legend James Gunn [a superb teacher as well as a gifted writer, so I’ve been told] and completed his doctoral work in semiotic theology with Leonard Sweet [who provides a foreword]. He lives in Olathe, Kansas, with his wife and dogs.”

Some of you out there are shaking your heads. You never want to read so much as another essay, let alone another entire book, devoted to the Bible as story—especially not one that begins with a foreword by Leonard Sweet invoking the Inklings. I understand. And if you don’t want to give The God of Story the time of day, that’s fine. But what I have found so far—I’m about halfway through—is that Schwabauer has an interesting point of view, one that keeps me reading even after I encounter a sentence that drives me nuts. (See for example Chapter 6, on the “chiastic structure” of the Book of Job.) In fact, I have resolved to read one of his science fiction novels.

I could go on and on. So many interesting books, so many angles on our common world! The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, and Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, and A Natural History of Empty Lots (a book to which I will devote an entire column sometime this spring), an inexhaustible abundance. Praise God.