On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

Reading well is, in itself, an act of virtue, or excellence, and it is also a habit that cultivates more virtue in return.

Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains that “the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.”

Seventeenth-century Puritan divine Richard Baxter writes, “It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good; but the well reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best.”7

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.

Form is what sets literary texts apart from informational texts in the same way that a painting differs from paint that covers a wall: same materials, different form.

Our desires as human beings are shaped by both knowledge and experience. And to read a work of literature is to have a kind of experience and to gain knowledge.

Human excellence occurs only when we glorify God, which is our true purpose. Absent ultimate purpose, we look for practical outcomes.

Although very different, both satirical and allegorical language employ two levels of meaning: the literal meaning and the intended meaning. In satire, the intended meaning is the opposite of the stated words; in allegory, the intended meaning is symbolized by the stated words. Satire points to error, and allegory points to truth, but both require the reader to discern meaning beyond the surface level. In this way, allegory and satire—and less obviously, all literary language—reflect the transcendent nature of the human condition and the “double-willed self” described by Paul in Romans 7:19.28

All literature—stories most obviously—centers on some conflict, rupture, or lack. Literature is birthed from our fallenness: without the fall, there would be no story.

In part 3 we consider what are called the heavenly virtues. There are seven of these (a number of special significance in the Christian tradition, one that symbolizes perfection or completion). These heavenly virtues are charity and temperance (discussed in previous sections of the book), chastity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility. Traditionally, the heavenly virtues were cataloged as those that specifically countered the seven deadly sins (a list that has also varied throughout church history).

Prudence is a form of wisdom. The ancients distinguished between two kinds of wisdom: speculative wisdom (sophia), related to the world of abstract ideas, and practical wisdom (prudentia), related to the concrete world of particular actions.

Tom Jones is a traditional bildungsroman, a novel of development.

We can learn so much about God’s economy, his nature, and the way to human flourishing by observing the marvelous ways in which 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. Even creating as male and female those who bear forth his image (instead of making humans capable of reproducing from one rather than two, like bacteria) reveals something about how we are to live. Yet, so often in human affairs, balance seems unnatural, prone as we are to careen from one extreme to another, both as individuals and collectively within culture. The ancients showed wisdom in understanding how foundational temperance is to human excellence.

Unlike God, Nick does not see everything. Moreover, he cannot even be trusted to report what he does see. For good reporting requires good judgment, and Nick refrains from judging. The novel opens on this very point, with Nick confessing that his father cautioned him against being too quick to criticize others. As a result, Nick is “inclined to reserve all judgments.” This “habit” of withholding judgment has made him the confidante of people’s “secret griefs,” of the sort that were told to him by Jay Gatsby.52 Nick assumes the posture of an innocent observer who reserves judgment, but beginning this story in this way cues the reader to withhold trust—for how can trust be given to one who will not judge?

The narrative demonstrates Nick’s active effect on the story—even in his passive way—in a subtle scene at the end of the novel. When Nick returns to the vacant mansion sometime after Gatsby’s death, he reports, “On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone.”53 Nick’s act of erasure is a reminder that every telling of every story requires judgments, choices of what to leave in, what to leave out, what best to remember, and what best to forget. In showing us Nick’s choice to erase the insult to Gatsby, the novel reminds us that we too are unreliable narrators of our own stories. And therefore the judgments made by our own limited perspectives must be tempered against the all-seeing eyes of God.

The just society is the one that frees people to do good.

The excellence of one’s faith can be measured a number of ways: by the strength of one’s conviction, by the response to that conviction, and by the actual trust one places in the object of faith.7 Similarly, a colleague who is a New Testament scholar describes faith as having three primary elements: belief (cognitive), trust (relational), and fidelity (obedience).

There are two kinds of hopelessness: presumption and despair. Presumption (or false hope) assumes that one’s hope will be fulfilled; despair anticipates that one’s hope will never be fulfilled. Both presumption and despair “are in conflict with the truth of reality.”

In his book The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis famously explored four types of love, each associated with words from the Greek language: empathy (storge), friendship (philia), desire (eros), and the highest form of love (agape).

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

Lauren Winner explains, “The community is not so much cop as it is storyteller, telling and retelling the foundational stories that make sense of the community’s norms.”48 Marriage is not only about mutual companionship and romantic love, but it is the institution “out of which cultures and societies are formed.”49 Marriage “is about children, and household economy, and stability. And marriage is also about God.”50 Marriage forms a little society. And the health of that little society depends to some degree on the health of the larger surrounding society.

The nature of the world is that it is fallen—but will be created anew. Because it is fallen, the world is filled with people who are fallen—but who have the possibility of redemption. Nevertheless, pain, suffering, wrongdoing, and injustice are, because of this fallenness, inevitable. Failure to recognize either the current condition of the world or the promise of its future will lead to either of the vices that patience moderates: wrath owing to an unwillingness to accept this reality of the world or dispiritedness that is a form of withdrawal from this reality.

To be human is to struggle with pride. A few have too little of it; most, too much.