If you know me, you know that I am an unrepentant bibliophile of the highest order. You’ll also discover quickly that I freely recommend books to friends (and the odd stranger) across genres and generations. Yes, my wife and I even attained the recovering English major’s dream of launching a book club. All of this should be roughly as surprising as rain in April. “A wannabe writer who reads all the time? Gasp!”
Of the mountain of paper and ink (or e-ink—no hate for the Kindle here) that passes my eyes each year, novels make up a healthy proportion. I thoroughly enjoy well-wrought nonfiction on almost any subject, but the best fiction brings me back time and again. I seldom re-read nonfiction; good novels, like last night’s lasagna, are always better the next time around.
Why? The best fiction is true even in the made-up details—novels, short stories, and poetry plumb the depths of thought and experience, giving them voice, teaching, reading you back. Aristotle said that poetry (a broader term then than now—we get our word “poem” from the Greek “ποιέμα”, which means “workmanship”) was better than either history or philosophy alone because it could articulate a principle (like philosophy) by showing an example of how it is lived out (like history).
In a previous job for a small (now-defunct) magazine, I reviewed lots of books, but didn’t have the opportunity to review works of fiction there. Our readers expected recommendations to equip them for preaching and ministry, making literature a low priority. Taste was also a consideration, as the quality of such works is somewhat “in the eye of the beholder” and it can take decades for the cream of a generation’s literary crop to rise. Continue reading
Hardscrabble 