Review: Reading for the Love of God, by Jessica Hooten Wilson

I have a vivid memory of sipping lemonade while my mother read aloud the first volume of Elsie Dinsmore when I was about eight years old. Near the climax of the story, good little Christian girl Elsie is beset by a terrible choice: disobey her uncle, or (gasp!) play a secular piece of music on a Sunday. Elsie stands firm: she can only play hymns on the Lord's Day, just as she can only read the Bible on such a day. Anything else, she insists, would be a grave sin against God, whose authority must always trump human duty.

As for me and my siblings, we burst out in peals of laughter, spitting lemonade onto the picnic blanket despite ourselves. Even at such young ages, we understood that part of honoring God was to find him everywhere: in the world he made, in the beauty of a folk song, in the stories we read. If a song or story wasn't good enough for a Sunday, it probably wasn't good enough for any day. I daresay we even found some dim echoes of our Creator in silly and sentimental Elsie Dinsmore. We may have laughed at her standards, but we still admired her for sticking up for them.

I was reminded of this incident while reading Jessica Hooten Wilson’s spectacular Reading for the Love of God; How to Read as a Spiritual Practice. In an academic and highly engaging manner, Jessica faces some hard questions head on, beginning with: “Why read anything but the Bible?” She explores the importance of reading widely and reading well, considers the historical practices (not just the “why” but the “how to”) of reading both spiritual and secular texts, and delves especially into the value of reading literary (that is, poetic and fictional) work in order to come to know and love God more.

Jessica Hooten Wilson--backed up by no less than St. Augustine--would probably have laughed at Elsie Dinsmore along with eight-year-old me. The idea that only explicitly Christian work is appropriate for a Christian to consume goes against centuries of Christian tradition and is antithetical to what being a Christian is about.
I had a few minutes to chat with Jessica when I met her at the Winona Christian Writers’ Conference last year, when I was one of two people in the room (excluding her, the keynote speaker) who had read Dorothy Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker. (Thank you, husband, for giving the best writerly Christmas presents.) I suspected then that we could have easily wiled away an afternoon comparing favorite authors and works, and this suspicion was confirmed in her book. From Sayers to Flannery O’Connor to C. S. Lewis to Augustine (and many more), she touched upon so many of the authors I turn to in life—the authors that have brought me closer to God through their words, and the authors that have inspired me to keep writing my own. Experiencing Reading for the Love of God felt like finally having the chance to wile away that afternoon with a kindred spirit as obsessed as I am with both God and literature.
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On a final, practical note, the book includes in its appendices “Reading Lists of Great Books,” broken up into general age categories (for the ones suitable for children) and themes. While I might argue with some of the age recommendations (even my well read children would not be emotionally ready to tackle Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the age of twelve), I found this to be an excellent resource, and one which I was particularly excited to share with my fellow homeschool mothers.