In praise of novels

On my schedule there is a new slot, each Saturday and Sunday night, from 7:30-9pm.  It is called “Novels.”  See, some people are list people. I’m a list person.  I’d probably qualify as a hyper-list person because lists aren’t sufficient for me.  I must then take my list and actually schedule out all the moments of my day (at least those which are “mine”, which are few), in order to get things done and give myself the structure and routine that my sanity requires.  Someone once said a budget enables you to tell your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.  I’d apply that to schedules as well.  I schedule my time to tell myself where to go, otherwise I wonder where I went.

So, after a few very busy weeks, I scheduled in a week of rest–no studying, no teaching, no meetings–nothing except working on house and yard projects, playing with my children, and finally allowing myself to indulge in the stack of unread fiction novels that sit on my nightstand.  Oh, I love fiction.

My source for good fiction is a blessing that came with marriage: My mother in law. She’s a voracious reader, preferring it to sleep, in fact, and knows my appetite for well-written, wholesome, thoughtful fiction.  I am a hopeless INTJ in personality; thus, the drive to accomplish and be efficient and purposeful is as ingrained as the fight or flight response.  Therefore, I want to read something that will provide both pleasure and betterment.  I want to learn without knowing it.  I want to study the world without studying.  Carry me along in a well-written story and show me the world from a perspective wholly other than my own. Now we’re talking.

She began as my novel source when I was pregnant with my son, Dutch.  The first 6 months of Dutch’s life were my allotted novel-time, and I allowed myself to read whenever he was nursing, but only then. Jeff bought me a clip-on booklight,and I’d sit up through 2am feedings, chapter after chapter.   I must have read at least 25 books those first few months.  Ella Minnow Pea, Year of Wonders, and the Rumple series still stand out as my shining favorites from those early days of quiet. Later, the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, The Hawk and the Dove  and a Liz Curtis Higgs trilogy had me savoring, laughing, weeping, and repenting, sometimes all in one sitting.  Those were a sacred 6 months–the only time of my adult life when I was involved in nothing. No school, no ministry, no work.  For six months I nursed my baby and read books.  I hardly left the house but I felt as though I traveled the world.  Contemporary Botswana, 1790s Scotland, a small Derbyshire village in the plague of 1666.  As music often takes one back to a season or moment, I can still remember turning the pages of Peter Mayle, my orange stiped Boppy nestled around my waist, propped up in bed, eyes squinting in the dark, tiny Dutch nursing contentedly and Jeff sleeping soundly at my side.

But now life is much different.  Heidi’s early months brought many things, but novel-reading was certainly not one of them.  I wouldn’t change anything about my life.  All the rich busyness is my choice, and my blessing.  But I’m reminded afresh that there are two things necessary for this girls’ mental health:  fiction and running.  Running will be another post.  For now, I say: Fiction has its place.

So what shall we then read?  And how can we keep our fiction reading from becoming like a habit of soap operas or some other form of slow brain-rot?  A few ideas:

1. Is it helpful? We are free to read what we like; that doesn’t mean everything is helpful for us to read.  I love to read perspectives that are other than my own.  However, I have more than once put a book down, and tossed it, when it painted images in my mind that I do not need.  Raunchiness, raciness, and vulgarity are for people who have dim intellects and lack imaginations.  Consider that humor usually requires a victim.  I love humor; but be mindful of the victim.

2. Is it challenging? This could possibly mean reading a book from a wildly different perspective from our own.  That said, the most challenging book I have ever read, hands down, is the Bible.  Nothing challenges us to the core more than this.  A quick dive into the story of the Rich Young Ruler will cure us of the stubborn acedia that renders us spiritually lethargic.

3. Do you have to look up a word? Another favorite of mine, The Quotidian Mysteries, is a fascinating thin little book which is essentially the Sacredness of the Mundane, written by the hand of a genius.  When I picked it up I did not know what quotidian or acedia meant.  I had to look them up. I love that!  I just finished Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood and had to look up arcana.  Really, spending our lives using a quarter of our given vocabulary is like spending our whole life eating nothing but potatoes and pancakes.  Let’s learn some words and use them!

4. Does it broaden, deepen, widen, enrich? Yes, this is similar to the first question, but this takes it a step further.  Sheer pleasure, I believe, can be a perfectly acceptable purpose. It enriches.  But does it also make us think, challenge us, take us beyond our picket fences and help us understand a world that’s not our own. History comes off the page and impacts our daily lives when it’s told in a story, told through tears sometimes, allowing us to step inside and feel the dirt between our toes.  Fiction should help us understand.

And now, it seems, I have spent my first officially-scheduled novel time not in reading novels but in blogging about them.  Oh well.  I always welcome suggested reading, so pass along your own favorites.  And I wish for you this summer at least one good wholesome novel, an ice-cold lemonade, and an afternoon or two beneath a shade tree, turning pages.