Disclaimer: The following includes only novels, is incomplete, and, like all accounts of the past, is subject to change.
Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White (early 2000s)
A strange choice by little me, I must admit, given my longstanding aversions to farm smells, county fairs, and spiders. But I loved the part (“The Hour of Triumph” is the name of the chapter) where things finally turn out right, where humility and radiance and someness are finally recognized by the outside world. And what truer words have ever been written than “when your stomach is empty and your mind is full, it’s always hard to sleep”?
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis (mid 2000s)
I see now, in early form, my fraught fascination with edges, with wilderness, with the unknown. I saw then a journey toward God filled with as much humor and mirth as terror and tragedy. I saw humans become dragons and back again, and I was primed—I think—to watch that happen in real life.
Black by Ted Dekker (2010ish)
I’m most ashamed of this one. Only slightly more subtly than the Left Behind books, Dekker’s novels turn faith into a fantastical battle: a holy war against bat-like creatures and malicious bioweapons and a “Horde” (yup, that’s their name) of people with scabby skin. I knew it wasn’t real—I know I knew—but I wonder how often my brain still uses these fifteen-year-old neural pathways. I do my best to replace them.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (2015)
The first book I remember crying while reading. I didn’t cry at the cruelty of the Christian characters. I’d learned by now to expect that. No, I cried when the characters who had been bulldozed by this fiery faith nevertheless found a way to keep living.
The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien (a long time)
My subcreation era. I saw in Tolkien’s mythology a chance to master something, to know every possible name and date and quirk of Quenya pronunciation. I saw this as a way to know humanity, a way to know God. I’m nervous now about looking for God in what is essentially an idealized Europe, but I’ve never stopped listening for the sorrowful beauty that is, for Tolkien, the universe’s unceasing refrain.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (another, later long time)
I needed a new way to believe, and I found it here. I found a faith that did not need purity, that saw brokenness and vulnerability as givens rather than obstacles. I found a world aglow with grace. I thought it might last me forever. It didn’t, but is it such a bad thing to stop reading a book like scripture and start reading it like a book?
The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami (2020ish)
A nonzero amount of my love for this book was due to its gorgeous cover. But I found in it a new-to-me kind of American story: one of violence and courage and resistance coexisting, right from the earliest decades of European colonialism. I didn’t call myself a historian yet, but I think Lalami’s book also showed me a bridge between literature and history: both fields demand both imagination and caution, both a kind of deception and a kind of truth.
The Ensemble by Aja Gabel (now)
I miss playing in a string quartet. Sometimes I also miss the unlikely, parallel-universe version of my life where I’m a professional musician. This book both feeds that desire and slakes it. It’s about how music flows through and between people, how physical and emotional injuries can bring life to a halt, how new lives can replace old ones more seamlessly than we expect. It, miraculously, makes me want to practice.
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (also now)
When I read this book in March 2020, I found myself thinking of intractable powers: political structures, patriarchy, fear fuelled by falsehood. On my recent re-read, I instead saw happenstance and fragility in the story of the New Zealand gold rush: we can hurt people we hardly know, we can forge new families over coincidence and circumstance, we can choose to love someone just because they’re there. Calling all of this “fate”—seeing it written in the stars—doesn’t mean we’re doomed to make certain choices. It means our choices are, like the stars, both bright and distant, both understandable by children and confounding to astrophysicists. The world is big, it makes no sense, and that’s why we keep watching.
Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.
