Books
Jason Cherry
Jan 27, 2025
What follows are seven quotations made up of truthful statements about reading, each followed by a brief commentary about the statement. May you be established, renewed, and encouraged to read good books.
#1 G.K. Chesterton, “People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature: people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are … Life is always a novel.”¹
To say that life is a novel is to say it is a story. Your life story includes moral situations, individual people, and hard choices. Life contains richness and complexity. Every day you deal with temptation, vanity, sadness, fear, love, joy, and trouble. A book of moral philosophy trains someone’s moral imagination about as effectively as a thermometer trains the wind. Novels treat the hidden layers of the soul in ways that reveal, for example, bitterness for the poison it is and that there is a spiritual means by which repentance is possible.
Why is this the case? Because, as J.K. Smith says “Stories capture our imagination precisely because narrative trains our emotions, and those emotions actually condition our perception of the world.”²
Chesterton says elsewhere, “The Christian gospel is literally a story; that is, a thing in which one does not know what is to happen next. This thing, called Fiction, then, is the main fact of our human supremacy. If you want to know what is our human kinship with Nature, with the brutes, and with the stars, you can find cartloads of big philosophical volumes to show it you. You will find our kinship with Nature in books on geology and books on metaphysics. But if you want to find our isolation and divinity, you must pick up a penny novelette.”³
#2 David McCullough, “Learning is not to be found on a printout. It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”⁴
Neither is social media making you wiser. Keeping up with the latest publicity spat on X doesn’t sanctify you. Neither does it give you something interesting to talk about.
Reading is more than taking letters from a page. The word "to read" links to the German reden, meaning "to speak," because reading is never just listening to the babble of printed lines. No, to read is to speak—to speak and to answer. And it does not end in self-promoting chatter. In German, reden connects to raten, which means "to counsel," as if reading is a quiet council chamber where the author and reader sit down together, like old friends scheming or sages whispering.
To read well is not merely to absorb but to debate, to accept or rebuke, and above all to understand and respond, saying, "Ah, yes, now I see," or, "But, have you considered…?” In this way, reading a book is an intellectual conversation. You have a conversation with the text; you have a conversation with the paragraphs; you have a conversation with the author and the ideas expressed in the book. The more good books you read, the more meaningful conversations you have. To refuse to read those books is to refuse to have informed conversations that matter.
#3 Dr. Samuel Johnson, “A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good. A young man should read five hours in a day, and so may acquire a great deal of knowledge. His principal concern should be to avoid useless particulars, and to collect what comes near to him, and is useful, and what he can carry away, and will tend to the improvement of his mind, and increase of his wisdom.”⁵
Chrestomathic is a word that refers to one who is devoted to the learning of useful matters. A common pitfall for readers is reading to say you have read. To avoid this blunder, adopt this tripartite approach: Read for personal growth. Read for wisdom. Read to satisfy curiosities.
Or, as Johnson says, collect what comes near and is useful. When you read, don’t be afraid to locate the practical. C.S. Lewis put it this way, “Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs.”⁶
#4 Sir Francis Bacon, "Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider."⁷
Books offer entertainment, knowledge, and fuel for the imagination. They provide new distinctions, ways of thinking, and mental mapping. Or, as Bacon says, reading gives you something to weigh and consider. Books provide a grist for the mill of the mind to do its work.
Good books are thoughts that have been thought out. Chesterton once said that people have no alternative except between “being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out.”⁸ You are going to be influenced by thoughts of one kind or another. The option is between composed thoughts or uncomposed thoughts. Each has an unseen system of values hiding in the shadows. Reading causes the presuppositions to rise from the mysterious depths. Only then can you get down to the business of understanding the argument on the whole rather than be taken with the first superficial repartee that corresponds to your prejudice. Reading books helps you ripen your thoughts so that even a bad book can have a salutiferous influence.
#5 Blaise Pascal, “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber … Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible.”⁹
This is the agony of the human spirit: the soul grasps, contradicts, and sweats. In Adam, man labors under a curse, living not out of love but out of lust, pursuing victories without meaning, and treating people without pity or compassion. The human heart conflicts with itself, which is why solitude is a horrible punishment for the conflicted soul.
Some people avoid the permanent questions, so they are much on their devices, twittering away their humanity, leaving no room in the workshop for the old verities and truths of God’s universe. There is one path in life that writes an ephemeral story, which is doomed. There is another path that lifts the heart to the courage of Christ, the joy of Jesus, and the curse-crushing effect of the crucifixion. This is not just the record of one man, but of the One True Man that is the pillar upon which all future men transcend the basest of all things. This is resurrection. One that keeps the scars and discards the tears.
These are things worth thinking about quietly and without distraction. And what is reading if not thinking?
#6 G.K. Chesterton, “This repudiation of big words and big visions has brought forth a race of small men in politics, so it has brought forth a race of small men in the arts.”¹⁰
There is a richness to the English language. When vocabulary is expanded, learning is expanded. God made human beings in his image as people who require knowledge (Prov. 18:15). To argue otherwise, to argue that we don’t require knowledge, is to spit in the face of the doctrine that says that human beings are made in the image of God. When we say otherwise—that people don’t require knowledge—we treat people as if they are less than image-bearers of the God of all knowledge. C.S. Lewis wrote, “One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.”¹¹
If Lewis is right, then that means seeking out new and, even, big words, is the happy and healthy byproduct of being human.
#7 Plato, “The beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed.”¹²
A child’s character is formed, first, by his heroes. If something is lacking in the character of the youth, it is because they have made heroes of gangsters, sportsmen, and Barack Obama. Heroes can’t be formed without cruel enemies to overcome. The knight is brave when the enemy he defeats is cruel. The warrior is courageous when the enemy threatens the weak. Literature helps prepare young people to admire the right heroes, which in turn fills their moral imagination with courage and resilience.
The love of reading is best developed at an early age. It must be prioritized in the first ten years of life. It is hard to remediate what is lost in childhood. Parents must read to their children when they are young (and when they get older!). Children must learn to read for themselves, and then learn to read good books as young as possible. And parents are responsible to make sure it happens. This requires two things. First, surround your children with quality age-appropriate books. Second, scrupulously limit screen time, not as punishment, but as training. One day they will have to choose for themselves a book or a screen.
If you enjoyed this article you might enjoy these:
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/collection/seven-educational-truths
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/collection/seven-truths-about-art
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
Footnotes
¹ Dale Ahlquist, ed. The Story of the Family: G.K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves its Own Citizens (Ignatius, 2022), 47.
² Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen, The Augustine Way: Retrieving a Vision for The Church’s Apologetic Witness (Baker Academic, 2023), 55.
³ G.K. Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity (Ignatius, 2011), 85.
⁴ David McCullough, The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For (Simon and Schuster, 2017), 143.
⁵ Samuel Johnson, The Idler, No. 74, published in 1759.
⁶ C.S Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 5.
⁷ Francis Bacon, Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, Essay 50, "Of Studies" (1625).
⁸ G.K. Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity (Ignatius, 2011), 336.
⁹ Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, Letters, and Minor Works, ed. Charles W. Eliot, trans. W. F. Trotter, M. L. Booth, and O. W. Wight (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910), 52-53.
¹⁰ G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (Sam Torode Books, orig. 1905), 4
¹¹ C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 108.
¹² Plato, The Republic, Book II, 377b. Translated by Benjamin Jowett.