Editor's Picks
J. Bottum
April 1, 1997
What I do is read for a living: scanning, browsing, studying, and trying to master hundreds of books a year. And when I come home from work, I relax by reading even more: mysteries, science fiction, odd
classics, and anything I can find on my hobby of Victorian literature. But somehow, what I've lost in all this reading is reading, really reading--"reading as if for life," as Dickens had his good Victorian David Copperfield put it. So, when RQ asked me for a reading list, I found myself oddly incapable of deciding on any serious books.
But perhaps that's for the best. Readers of these pages probably don't need to be told how good are the writings of C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton, J. I. Packer, and Richard John Neuhaus. They probably don't need to have thrown at them such novels as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter and Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest, or the poetry of George Herbert and T. S. Eliot.
Though I have been astounded in the last year by Oscar Hijuelos's novel, Mr. Ives' Christmas, and the Christian poetry of the Englishman Geoffrey Hill, not even these came to mind as items that needed recommending.
What did come to mind were sweet books and funny books and books about unified lives in worlds where the unity of life was possible—stray volumes that I have stumbled on and have always wanted others to read. Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner, for instance- is as fine a collection of mystery stories as anyone has ever written. In the small genre of Christian mystery fiction, only G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories stand comparison with Post's work, set in the early nineteenth-century hilts of West Virginia. But, for my money, biblical theology and Christian faith are even better integrated ...
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