I love reading books, and this presents a problem. As summed up by a pair of decorative wooden blocks resting atop one of my shelves, I have “so many books, so little time.” Almost all avid readers end up echoing this lament at one time or another.
I wasn’t always overwhelmed by my books, though. In high school, I would’ve happily whiled away free hours with the Boston Globe sports page or ESPN The Magazine (fine publications featuring world-class writers). But serious books were something to suffer for the sake of good grades.
Then I went to college, where I fell in with a group of friends who genuinely enjoyed learning. I knew they were intellectually inclined because they subscribed to magazines like the religion journal First Things, which ditched glossy ads and splashy photography in favor of words on the page, page after page. But most importantly, they took delight in books—even books they weren’t reading for class.
In some mix of admiration and embarrassment, I decided I would read for leisure too. During the summer after my freshman year, I cracked open Dead Man Walking, Helen Prejean’s memoir of ministering to death row inmates in a Louisiana prison. Don’t read too much into that choice; the author had come to campus the previous semester, and I still had my free copy lying around.
It’s funny—I didn’t really care for the book. Despite opposing the death penalty (at least in practice), I found Prejean’s moral censures frustratingly shallow. But here’s where I’m obliged to reach for one of those metaphors—light bulbs brightening, sparks igniting, gears clicking into place—that convey a sudden, lasting change in perspective. Having begun reading books for pleasure, I felt a compulsive need to continue.
At first I gravitated, somewhat lazily, toward works of political punditry. Nursing fanciful dreams of occupying a George Will or Thomas Friedman–like perch at one of the nation’s major dailies, I’d been writing campus newspaper op-eds, and I read to suit.
But I could only stomach that kind of diet for so long. Soon I gained an appreciation for history through David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. I developed a love of literature through Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons and A Man in Full. Friends chipped in some more highbrow recommendations like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
And eventually I dipped a toe into the massive pool of evangelical and “mere Christian” classics, finding treasures like J. I. Packer’s Knowing God, Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, and Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. (Mere Christianity, too, and lots more C. S. Lewis besides.)
That heady phase never really cooled off. If anything, it only intensified. Today, I’m grudgingly aware of having overdone it—not in the reading itself but in the continual amassing of new things to read.
There’s my Instapaper page, so glutted with article links that a printout might stretch across a football field. There’s my messenger bag, forever stuffed with old magazines. And there’s the small mountain of books I might or might not get around to savoring. While reading still brings immense joy and edification, I often feel hopelessly stuck in catch-up mode.
That restless ache gave me the idea for this very column, The Beckoning Nightstand. It’s titled as an ode to the little table we invoke so wistfully, the one groaning under the weight of unread volumes. Fundamentally, I envision it as a way to celebrate reading books that aren’t brand new but aren’t exactly old either.
I understand the appeal of new books and the fresh conversations they can spark. As a books editor at CT for over a decade, new books are my professional world. Off the clock, however, I hardly ever read titles under a year old. They often interest me. But what else can I do but pile them up, leaving them to clamor for attention alongside their older siblings?
This aversion to newness is deeper, though, than a matter of oversupply. Maybe it’s the aftershocks of my first year at CT, when Rob Bell’s universalist flirtation, Love Wins, sent Christian thought leaders into a condemnatory frenzy. The book was certainly flawed, but I found something off-putting about such breathless engagement with What’s Happening Now—about tuning one’s reading choices to the frequency of what online types call “the discourse.”
The impulse to keep a healthy distance from daily news and social media doesn’t make me a partisan of old books—at least, not in the fashion of those whose definition of old runs closer to ten centuries ago than ten years.
Both intellectually and temperamentally, I’m on board with arguments for reading these old old books, like the one Lewis famously advanced in his introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation. Yet I’m rarely keen on reading them myself. I tend to prefer reading about the past from contemporary(ish) authors who’ve absorbed their Strunk and White lessons on crisp, clear, unpretentious prose.
That leaves us with the kind of book this column will consider: not a shiny new thing, but not (necessarily) a consensus classic. Something highly regarded, maybe even surprisingly relevant to today’s world—but selected mainly because I’ve wanted to read it for a good while now. We’ll range across genres, exploring Christian and secular works alike, hopefully inspiring appreciation for how books, in all their marvelous variety, speak to what CT readers care about most.
Book lovers, I feel your pain. Together, let’s rediscover how to stare at our stacks not with weary resignation but with a renewed sense of thrill.
Matt Reynolds is CT’s senior books editor.
