On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

Indeed, there is something in the very form of reading—the shape of the action itself—that tends toward virtue. The attentiveness necessary for deep reading (the kind of reading we practice in reading literary works as opposed to skimming news stories or reading instructions) requires patience. The skills of interpretation and evaluation require prudence. Even the simple decision to set aside time to read in a world rife with so many other choices competing for our attention requires a kind of temperance.

A book that requires nothing from you might offer the same diversion as that of a television sitcom, but it is unlikely to provide intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual rewards long after the cover is closed. Therefore, even as you seek books that you will enjoy reading, demand ones that make demands on you: books with sentences so exquisitely crafted that they must be reread, familiar words used in fresh ways, new words so evocative that you are compelled to look them up, and images and ideas so arresting that they return to you unbidden for days to come.

Reading well adds to our life—not in the way a tool from the hardware store adds to our life, for a tool does us no good once lost or broken, but in the way a friendship adds to our life, altering us forever.

Reading well entails discerning which visions of life are false and which are good and true—as well as recognizing how deeply rooted these visions are in language.

We do like our rules. Some rules are strict, some unspoken; some apply to everyone, some to only a few. Some of us like rigid moral rules. Some of us like unwritten rules of political correctness. No matter what, adhering to rules is much easier than exercising wisdom.

On the surface, ridicule doesn’t seem kind, of course. But to ridicule what is wicked or foolish in hopes of preventing more of the same is much kinder than letting wickedness or folly continue along their merry, destructive way.

This fact points to an interesting quality of vice: it is just as likely to be accidental as intentional. In this way, virtue opposes vice not only in its moral content but in its acquisition as well. Vice is natural to human beings in their fallen state. But virtue must be practiced, become a habit, and be inhabited by a person in order to attain excellence.

If only the ideal will do, the good will likely never be realized. Perfectionism is the foil of prudence.

It is also unlike the other virtues in centering not on actions but on desires. Since we desire what is pleasurable, temperance is “the virtue that inclines us to desire and enjoy pleasures well.”2 It helps us to desire pleasures in a reasonable manner,3 desiring them neither too much nor too little, the virtuous mean between the vices of self-indulgence and insensibility.

Temperance is not simply resisting temptation. It is more than merely restraint.

God has built balance, a form of temperance, into the natural order. Night tempers day. Water relieves earth. The four seasons comprise two pairs that offset each other in the stages of life: birth, fertility, decay, death.

This ping-ponging between excess and deficiency in the indulgence of our animal appetites manifests in endless ways in American culture today: all-you-can-eat buffets and detox diets, pornography and purity culture, fast food and slow food, the sexual revolution and the death of sex,10 McMansions and tiny houses, the prosperity gospel and the gospel of self-denial.

When the justice system becomes a form of entertainment, it surely is unjust. This is as true of the ancient Roman coliseum as it is of twentieth-century American public lynchings and of today’s trials by public shaming on social media.

If justice is making right, then seeing people rightly is a form of justice.

The truth about justice in this world is that it can never set things exactly right. We never will, whether on the personal, the public, or the cosmic scale, be able to bring those delicate scales of justice into perfect balance.

Although the words just and fair are often used interchangeably, justice usually involves objective, universal standards of judgment, while fairness is often felt subjectively as a sense of right proportion within particular circumstances. In a perfect world, what is just is also fair. In a fallen world, however, justice does not always feel fair. In our fallen humanity we often bristle at the holiness of a God whose justice does not always strike us as fair.

Beauty arises from the unity of the separate parts. A note that sounds off in one song sounds lovely within the context of another. The Victorian settee that looks garish in a beachside cottage is perfectly suited to a turn-of-the-century mansion. The elegant neck of a giraffe would be absurd on a short-legged creature like a dachshund. Justice, likewise, cannot exist apart from the context of the community of people it serves.

We often think of justice as parcels of land, and we concern ourselves with the size and distribution of its lots. But justice is less like finite land and more like the wildflowers that grow there, continually spreading as they bloom and re-seed themselves. Justice—like beauty—is rooted in infinity.

It might seem hard at first to see the connection between courage and desire, but courage, ultimately, demonstrates that one’s desires have been rightly ordered to put first things first—even to the point of laying down one’s life for something of even greater value.

A brave act must be for a noble end in order to constitute the virtue of courage.

We can understand a great deal about a culture—its strengths, its weaknesses, its blind spots, and its struggles—when we examine the literature that it not only produces but reveres.

Some doubts cannot be expressed apart from faith in God.

But the purpose in reading this novel—or any novel—is not to find definitive answers about the characters. It is rather to ask definitive questions about ourselves. To read about an experience of faith as it falters is an opportunity to seek resolution not in the work of fiction but in the work of our own faith.

The virtue of faith, if God has given it, might be diminished by lack of exercise and nourishment like any other virtue, but that decrease does not mean that one never had it or that it has been lost.

The four conditions of hope are that it regards something good in the future that is difficult but possible to obtain.

We live in a society so obsessed with “the best” that good is seldom good enough. But good is good. It is very good. It is the way God characterized his own creation in Genesis.

There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a desire that draws us away from God.

There is perhaps no more apt object of pity than he who thinks himself exceptional but turns out to be merely ordinary. The tragedy, of course, is not in failing to be exceptional but in the greater loss of rejecting the glories of everyday gifts.

When love is unmoored from unchanging truth, it becomes mere sentiment or tenderness. Sentiment and tenderness are opposed to suffering and can do anything to avoid pain.

Sloth involves not only a lack of effort but also a lack of care.

The virtue of diligence is necessary, therefore, to persevere. If perseverance is successfully staying afloat in the water, diligence is the treading feet that make floating possible. Perseverance is the what; diligence is the how.

Patience is a virtue, not in overlooking wrong, but in refusing to do wrong in overcoming wrong.

Because Anne suffers virtuously, she doesn’t let her pain cause her to turn inward upon herself. Rather, her patient bearing of suffering allows her to recognize the suffering of others.

In its etymology, kind means something radically different from mere agreeableness. Indeed, kind, rightly understood, can include all sorts of disagreeableness. Kind comes from the same root from which we get the word kin. To be kind, then, is to treat someone like they are family. To possess the virtue of kindness is to be in the habit of treating all people as if they were family.

Niceness has no inherent link to truth. Indeed, being connected etymologically to ignorance, niceness might have no connection to truth at all. Even the current sense of nice—agreeable or pleasant—can be at odds with the truth. The truth is often not pleasant or agreeable.

Choosing life is about more than sticking around to give love to others, as priceless a part of life as this is. Choosing life is also about receiving love.

Without humility, without an understanding of our proper place within the order of creation, we cannot cultivate the other virtues. We cannot even come to Christ, or to true knowledge, apart from humility.