stack of books

Startled Awake: Novels That Kindled My Delight in Existence

(OR, BOOKS TO MAKE THE WORLD COME TO LIFE)

I TEND TO MEET deadlines in a writing vortex: I eat, breathe, sleep, and think the book to completion, and all else falls by the wayside until the moment the thing has to be sent off. I must admit to submitting the first draft of the book you hold in your hands at three in the morning. My faithful husband sat nearby plying me with water and gummy bears (you’d be surprised at how effective these can be in maintaining mental strength), with all the candles in our little living room lit to keep me awake and inspired.

One might assume that after such a late evening, the next day would find me too groggy to have any eye for the autumn beauty of Oxford. But I found my vision heightened instead of dimmed, an experience that felt like a fresh revelation to me. I strolled through water-cool air under a sapphire sky, watched leaves flicker like golden flames in a friendly wind, and felt profoundly grateful as my feet pounded these old Oxford cobbles. What I realized as I walked was that my kindled vision came from the many books I had read afresh during the writing of this manuscript.

Throughout the long months of writing, I daily immersed myself in rereading the novels that first taught me to love the beauty of God’s good earth, to revel in the gift of existence. Their words lingered in my mind that morning as I encountered the turning trees and remembered Anne’s joyous proclamation, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers” (from Anne of Green Gables). I chuckled at the many characters on the street with the hilarity of Juliet’s letters in the back of my mind (from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society). I made my tea and cake that afternoon steeped in the pert and delicious observations of Prudencia, who found the many teatimes of her new home excessive . . . at first (in The Awakening of Miss Prim).

Silly as it may seem, I was startled to realize how richly reading had reshaped my vision. It’s the very thing I argue for, but ah, the gift of it as it comes afresh continues to amaze me. And it is a gift. For one of the things I have come to realize in composing this book is the fact that novels like the ones on the following pages are acts of generosity. Each is an offering rooted in the author’s sense of responsibility and gratitude for some goodness or truth deeply perceived.

In writing about wonder in Book Girl, I have become deeply aware of the fact that I write and live from what I have been generously given. I am a lover of books, a learner, keen for new adventures because so many people before me—my parents, my favorite writers, the friends who pressed good books into my hands, the tutors at Oxford who were faithful to communicate what they had discovered—were generous with their words. They spoke me into wonder. They startled me awake. They took me by the metaphorical hand and pointed at the rainbow just out the window. Consider the list below my way of passing on their grace.

Remembering by Wendell Berry

I can’t recommend this as the first Berry novel you should read, and it might seem an odd choice on a list of novels to kindle delight because it opens (very purposefully) by evoking the deep sense of disconnection and disorientation known by Andy Coulter, a middle-aged farmer who is injured, depressed, and estranged from his family in a San Francisco hotel room. As a reader, I felt profoundly disturbed. But that was exactly what I was supposed to feel, because this is a novel of pilgrimage, exploring the isolation and loneliness of life in the modern world. We walk with Andy as he is drawn out of anonymity and back into belonging, as he is “held, though he does not hold” (one of my favorite lines in literature) by the memory of those who were faithful before him, by the knowledge of those who wait in faith back home. In remembering, Andy and the reader are drawn together out of isolation and into the belonging formed by our love of both person and place. The description of gratitude toward the end, where Andy discovers the “blessedness” he has “lived in . . . and did not know” is one of my favorite descriptions of thanks in literature.

Also by Wendell Berry:

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

“It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is,” says one character in this arresting novel, but Doerr puts language to work in a way that conveys the height and depth of the world in its splendor. It’s not a happy book, its central characters a reluctant, orphaned recruit to the Nazi army and a blind girl whose village lies in the path of war. But it’s a book that glories in the richness of the world—its beauty, its intricacy, and our own capacity to behold it and be connected through it even amid the atrocities of war.

The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

Miss Prim is a neat, modern woman; a competent librarian; and a principled feminist who still considers herself old fashioned. But when she is immersed in a small town where feasts accompany the smallest town meeting, children sprawl in the library reading Latin, and the third item on the agenda at the Feminist Society is to find her a husband, she finds her ideals and assumptions turned on their head. A delightful, slightly tongue-in-cheek critique of the modern age so dotted with accounts of good teatimes I usually feel the urge to bake a cake halfway through a chapter.

A City of Bells by Elizabeth Goudge

Henrietta, the heroine of this novel set in the sleepy city and hidden beauty of Wells Cathedral, is one of those characters who makes me feel that the author has glimpsed my soul; Henrietta is touched by the beauty of the world, determined that people should be whole and happy, and also a bit impatient with the processes of redemption. She embodies all this in a story of a tragic and missing poet, a grandfather who is a workaday saint, a mischievous small boy, and her experience of a cathedral world shot through with love.

The Keeper of the Bees by Gene Stratton-Porter

Jamie is a wounded veteran of World War I, with an open wound that won’t heal and a heart in about the same state. Unwilling to spend his final days in a tuberculosis ward, he hobbles onto the open road in California for a last taste of freedom. To his shock, he soon finds himself the startled caretaker of a stricken beekeeper’s cottage and discovers that he may not be quite ready to die after all. Porter is in her usual glory here as a strong storyteller for whom God’s good creation is as much a character as the people it challenges, restores, consoles, and slowly heals, like Jamie, whose interest in life intensifies after his meeting with a troubled and mysterious young beauty.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This is the book I read when I’m in the mood for sheer delight: in books, in friendship, and in the kind of beauty that can endure even amid Nazi vagary. “Reading keeps you from going gaga,” puts one colorful character succinctly, and this is the story of a few brave and imaginative souls on Nazi-occupied Guernsey who talk a friend out of a tight spot by inventing a book club on the spot . . . and decide to make it real. It’s also the story of Juliet, the wry, quirky, book-loving columnist who discovers the tale of the Guernsey Literary Society after the war and decides to write their story. Written entirely as a series of letters between Juliet and various delightful (and maddening) correspondents, this hysterical, dear tale draws both Juliet and the reader into the windswept beauty of Guernsey, into the grief of loss, and into the power of friendship, imagination, and kindness to remake and heal the world. It’s almost an effortless read, but poignant—the kind whose world I hate to have to leave at book’s end.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

The second word in the title gives it all away—this book is a tale of enchantment, not by inexplicable forces of magic, but by the sheer power of beauty. The charming tale of the downtrodden but determined Lottie, who, upon glimpsing an advertisement for a Tuscan villa to be let for the month of April, decides on the spot to take it, convincing three other reluctant and prim British women to join her. Beauty—in house and weathered vine, in golden days and quiet hours—thus begins its transformative work.

The Journeyman by Elizabeth Yates

I love this story of a young artistic boy in Colonial times, misunderstood by his family but given the gift of an apprenticeship to a journeyman painter. It’s the kind of book that lingers in imagination and conversation for years. As a young reader, I was deeply intrigued by Jared, a boy gifted differently from those around him who used his remarkable skill to bring beauty into the simple houses of early New England farmers and homesteaders, using his craft to brighten their walls and liven their souls. A story about art and the different strengths by which we may shape the world around us.