How To Balance Your Literary Diet - a guest post by Suzannah Rowntree
via Pinterest board "Literary" |
Today, I am so glad to have a sweet new friend on Fullness of Joy. I fell across Suzannah Rowentree's blog through Schuyler's blog, My Lady Bibliophile when she linked her to an analytic "Lord of the Rings" review that I found really inspirational, and was delighted to see the stuff she shared! Suzannah writes amazingly insightful reviews of literature (new, old and obscure) on her blog and is a wonderful writer in her own right too :). In this post, she shares with us about literature, and balancing one's diet of reading. Enjoy!
- Joy
There are the readers who spend all their time reading
feminist chick lit about sassy heroines who defy their stodgy parents to study
chemistry or explore Asia. Peculiarly, these readers never seem to read
anything that’s actually about chemistry or Asian exploration.
Then there are the readers who spend all their time reading
inspirational romances set during the War Between the States, or the Crusades,
or in little Amish farming communities. Just as oddly, these readers have
apparently never read a history book on the War Between the States, or a
medieval chronicle, or actual books by Amish people. (Even some John Howard Yoder
would do. Anyone? Anyone?)
I’m not saying that it’s necessarily a bad thing to read
some romance here or there, or that novels about female chemists or explorers
are necessarily dishonest (although I would stay away from the trashy chick lit
if I were you). However, a limited bookshelf is evidence of a limited mind.
We all know that it’s important to get a varied physical
diet. Too much of the same thing, and we start to develop deficiencies and
health problems. It’s the same with reading habits. You may read a lot of
books, sure. But are you developing deficiencies anywhere? Here are just a few
categories which should be a regular part of every literary diet.
Old Books
“The past is a different country,” as the man said. We may
visit the past in historical fiction or history textbooks, but the only way to
truly understand the past is to read what people in the past actually wrote.
Because we grow up breathing the spirit of the age like air, it’s actually impossible
for us to imagine things being done differently or believed differently to
nowadays. For that reason, we need to read old
books. And we need to read books from all
over history, not just from the 1800s. Homer’s worldview was sharply
different to Edmund Spenser’s. The church historian Eusebius was a bit shaky on
the morality of suicide, and so was H Rider Haggard, but St Augustine got it
right. To paraphrase that giant of the faith, world history is a book, and
those who’ve never read anyone older than Jane Austen have barely read the last
footnote.
New Books
The Lord is always doing something
in the world. Right now, books are being written which will influence the
history of the world. Some of them will be remembered 200 years from now...and
some of them won’t be. Nevertheless, authors can write, but it takes readers to
make a difference. What if the next City of God for the next Christendom
was published forty years ago, but you never stumbled across it?
New books are our own legacy to future generations. Let’s be
diligent in seeking out and preserving the good ones.
Fiction
Stories are soul food. Stories come at us sideways,
unexpectedly, hitting us with an old truth we might have begun to overlook. Stories
take principles and apply them to everyday life. Stories run war games for the Christian life,
showing right and wrong behaviour in a host of different scenarios. If sermons
tell us what to believe, stories teach us to love what we believe. Stories bind
our hearts closer to the truth. Stories matter.
Nonfiction
But nonfiction matters too. The best nonfiction anchors us
to God’s reality. Memoirs give us eyewitness accounts of real history.
Biographies introduce us to men and women we will not get to meet on this
earth. Theology teaches us to distinguish truth from error. Books on music and
the arts help us to appreciate good art and produce it ourselves where
necessary. Philosophy, logic, and rhetoric train us in the forgotten arts of
thinking and writing well. Science teaches us to make the most of the physical
world and return thanks to our Creator. And history shows us God’s sovereign
hand at work in the greatest story of all time. Nonfiction is all about reading
the book of God’s general revelation. Should we focus on our own voices in
fiction, and ignore the voice of God in history and creation?
Girly Books
As women, we were created with a specific role in mind: to
help and encourage our men, and to act as nurturers, mothers, and wives. For
this reason it’s necessary for us to read books, old and new, fiction and
nonfiction, that encourage us and prepare us for these specific roles. Also,
certain things are important to us as women, and we tend to write about what’s
most important to us. For this reason I believe it’s also good for men to read
books by and for women.
Manly Books
However, the specific role to which most of us, Lord
willing, will be called in marriage, is that of a helpmeet to a man. We need to
know what’s important to men, and we need to cultivate a fearless and capable
attitude that will help us to fulfill this role. We need to have realistic
expectations of the men in our lives, and one of the best ways we can do this
is by reading the books they’ve written.
Books You Agree With
Non-fiction: You know what you believe. But do you know why you believe it? It’s easy for us to
simply accept the pronouncements of our parents, or of the charismatic
parachurch ministry leader with the perfect family, but we need to actually
test what we believe and make sure we know what the reasoning is behind it. We
need to be sure that we’re actually living Scripturally, and not just on a
bandwagon, following after our friends. Often, it’s this that makes all the
difference between a deep-rooted faith that endures, versus a shallow-rooted
faith that withers the moment it comes across difficulty.
Fiction: Remember what I said about soul food? What happens
if we’re constantly absorbing poison? I actually don’t believe that anyone can
read and love the enemy’s fiction without eventually coming to behave like
their enemy. Our heads may remain unconvinced, but our hearts have surrendered.
Fiction trains the affections, and we need to make sure we’re always training our affections in the
right direction.
Books You Disagree
With
This is not to say that we should avoid books we disagree
with. These are actually really important as well. Reading non-fiction we
disagree with is a vital part of testing our own beliefs. Do you really have a
better argument than your opponents? Have they pointed out real problems with
the things you believe, or are their objections hollow and unconvincing? Do you
really believe what you say you believe--or
are you just ignorant? Just is it’s easy to be led astray if you never
define your own beliefs, so it’s easy to go astray if you only hear one side of
an argument.
Not only this, but fiction written from a different
worldview is an extremely helpful tool in training us to recognise hostile
worldviews in practice in the world around us. Just as we should read books
from different times and places in order to come to understand those other
people, so we should read books from different perspectives in order to
understand what those worldviews look like in practice. In short, don’t read
Terry Pratchett just because he’s such an entertaining writer (and he is): read
him because you need to know what postmodernism looks like.
Clean Books
Because we live in a world of
deranged appetites, it’s possible to become so desensitized to decadence that
it ceases to shock us when it should. In CS Lewis’s Perelandra there’s a passage where the main character reflects upon
the rarity of experiencing an shatteringly intense and yet perfectly innocent
pleasure. But this needs to be our ideal: to experience clean things cleanly.
Too jaded a palate, too great a liking for the forbidden for no other reason
than that it is forbidden, and we render ourselves numb to simpler pleasures.
Read a lot of clean and bright stuff, because otherwise you may lose your taste
for it.
Icky Books
All the same, I’m going to come out and say it: There are
lots of books out there that you need to read, which are going to turn your
stomach and make you want to fetch the brain bleach. Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, Otto Scott’s James I: The Fool as King, and similar
books are not for the fainthearted or for the immature. However, they are for readers who are serious about
facing and killing the Dragon. We simply cannot fight evil with our eyes shut,
or avoid maturity because we are afraid that it will be uncomfortable. One of
my recent favourite non-fiction books is James Gaines’s Evening in the Palace of Reason, a double biography of JS Bach and
Frederick the Great of Prussia. Part of the book’s extraordinary power is the
juxtaposition of Bach’s faithfulness and goodness against the depravity and
despair that characterised Frederick’s life. Just as we need to learn to love
the goodness, truth, and beauty of Christendom, we also need to see the bitter
end of the ugliness, evil, and lies offered by the Enemy.
As Christians, we are not called to mediocrity. Christ is
Lord of everything, including our reading. We are exhorted to do whatever we do
with all our might, as unto Christ. We are called to redeem the time, for the
days are evil. So, to those of you reading this, here’s my challenge: Get
serious about your reading habits. Don’t just coast: push out of your comfort
zone. Take dominion. And when you do, may you find it just the kind of
thrilling adventure that I’ve found it.
--About Suzannah Rowntree of Vintage
Novels:
I love words--and the Word by Whom all came to be. I am a freelance writer and editor with a particular interest in theology, literature, law, history, and languages. Home educated, with a bachelor's degree in law, I now live at home with my parents and employ my time in volunteer and freelance work in my family, church, and community. I have always been fascinated by the art of writing, which embodies the author's most deeply held beliefs and hopes in a concrete, narrative form. When reading, I love to spot the deeper meaning behind an author's imagery and plot. I am a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. My article "Home Schooling: Education Outside the Box" was published in the June 2012 edition of Quadrant, Australia's leading general intellectual journal, as a result of which I was interviewed on national radio. In May 2013 I self-published a short ebook, The Epic of Reformation: A Guide to the Faerie Queene, which collects a series of blog posts written in January 2013 on Edmund Spenser's classic epic poem. I also occasionally copywrite for the Home Education Foundation of New Zealand. In early 2014, I became a regular contributor to Ladies Against Feminism/Beautiful Womanhood. Find my articles here. And, I am currently working on the fourth draft of a young adult fantasy novel.
Dear Suzannah,
ReplyDeleteIt has taken me several days to get through this article, but I enjoyed every word of it. You stated everything simply and clearly, and I loved the way you flipped back and forth. So much so that I don't have much to add but a hearty second!
I was looking through my stack of books to read by the end of the year, and they are rather unbalanced, so I may have to do some switching. :)
Love,
Schuyler
Schuyler, I'm so glad you enjoyed it :). I can't say my reading stack is perfectly balanced either--especially these days as I'm scrambling to read a bunch of urgent books of the same general flavour--but I always have an eye on my Goodreads log and try to mix some diversity into things based on what I haven't been getting much of lately :)
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