Why Books Matter: The Sequel

            Last month I suggested we should spend some time talking about books. I said we should talk about how to read books and what the best are, but I began with a discussion on why books matter. I suggested two reasons: pleasure and patience. That God wants us to enjoy the pleasures of creation is apparent in Ecclesiastes: “Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love...” (9:7-9a). That He wants us to enjoy the pleasures of a good story or a good poem is clear in a book like The Song of Solomon, a carefully crafted poem written to celebrate the joy of romantic love.

            Christianity is not a religion of don’ts but of right pleasures, including those pleasures that come from self-sacrifice and self-denial but also the hobbies, beauties, games and laughter in life that we sometimes feel guilty about, thinking we shouldn’t enjoy life so much for fear of becoming worldly. God uses all the good things of life to draw us to Him. And one of the truest pleasures He gives us is books, especially stories. Books also teach us patience. More than any other art form, books take time. They slow us down and improve our ability to learn and work through problems that require patient thought. This month I want to finish talking about why we should consider books an important part of our lives.

            Books matter, especially fiction stories, because they teach us in ways that lists of facts or outlines of truths can’t. We remember stories more easily than facts or ideas. How many of us can define Paul’s key Christian ideas of justification and sanctification versus how many can tell the story of David and Goliath? Books are also important because they familiarize us with allusions. Allusions are those references to past history or literature that occur all the time in written and spoken communication which all of us are supposed to know but we often miss. Any time we hear a reference to “brothers keeper,” “Achilles hill,” “bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” “the patience of Job” or any number of hundreds of other allusions, our ability to understand them depends on information we’ve learned, especially from stories in fiction and history—books. I tell my Christian college students that they’ll be much better off than their counterparts attending secular universities who will be clueless to all the biblical allusions that float around in movies, books, newscasts and songs every day. People who know their Bible will pick up on all the extra meanings that everyone else misses.

            Books are also important as a means of connecting to the past. We often look at the problems of the world as being unique to our own time and circumstances. Reading about similar problems others have faced all over the world and all throughout history helps ease our sense that some uncharted doom is just ahead. Stories put the present in perspective. Next, books matter because they enlarge our experience. They take us on adventures to places we could never go. They help us experience achievements we could never accomplish. They let us see life the way others do—and not just people but animals, aliens and elves as well. As such they also make us think differently. Books take us outside of the box of our own perceptions and thinking. They help us think about life in ways that can only come through experiencing other people and places, even fictional ones.

            Books also force us to think more consciously. Movies and television don’t have to make us passive receivers (a fancy way of saying couch potatoes), but they often do. Books always require that we get engaged in the act of reading. We can coast through films without thinking a conscious thought if we want to. But books often clarify truths in ways that film either does not or even purposely tries to avoid. With a book we can stop and re-read a passage and reflect on it. That’s something we don’t usually do with movies (and can’t at the theater).

            Lastly I’d argue that books are beneficial because they improve our Bible reading and this in two ways. First, the more we practice anything, the better off at it we’ll be. Any reading we do will improve our ability to read. But more significant is the fact that books, including fiction books and poetry (not just books about the Bible or Christian living), can improve our understanding of the Bible. It was Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov that first helped me understand what the book of Job was about. Moby-Dick helped me make sense of Ecclesiastes, and John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14” opened the door to my making sense of The Song of Solomon. I remember that it was once hard for me to understand how God could be all loving and vengeful, merciful and terrible. But then I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and came across Aslan—a Christ figure of a lion who was not in any way “safe” but was completely good. Reading many books improves our ability to read the one book that matters most to us. All the more reason to spend our time reading more than just that one book.