Books That Matter

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good. ~ Lao Tzu

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. ~ Sir Richard Steele

The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. ~ Mark Twain

Never judge a book by its movie. ~ J. W. Egan

Books satiate our desire to know. Some books engender, forge, enhance, and alter what we know. They are the books that matter.

Here are a few that matter to me.

Hans Kung’s On Being A Christian is the first theological work I ever read—ironic, because Kung is a Roman Catholic theologian while I still remain a Presbyterian. I came across this book by sheer chance in the library. I was familiar with the author’s name because I had read about the controversy he had stirred up in the Vatican back in the ’70s. Out of curiosity, I started to read it and was soon mired in the deepest contemplation about religion and God I had ever had as a young man. Like most theological works, On Being A Christian is literally and figuratively heavy. And there are a few points of disagreement I have with Kung’s approach to Christianity as he defines it. Nevertheless, there are lines that still resonate with me all these many year later. One of those lines is: “Faith must not be blind, but responsible. Man ought not to be mentally coerced, but rationally convinced, so that he can make a justifiable decision of faith.”

Branch Taylor’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 is the first volume of a trilogy that chronicles the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. The other two volumes are Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968. While there are scores of prize-winning history books that chronicle the same subjects, Taylor Branch has a style of writing that makes the telling of history more of a story and less of a text. In Parting the Waters, he starts the story of Martin Luther King Jr. nearly half a century before most historians would have.

William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner remains as controversial today as it did over forty years ago when it was first published. I can surely appreciate why so many (especially African Americans) find cause to disparage the novel, but the writing itself is so equally fluid and disturbing that I cannot remember a novel having as profound effect on me as this one—except for maybe the novel Styron wrote a decade later, Sophie’s Choice.

We invite you to comment on the Books That Matter to you. Give a brief description about yourself (for example, school or profession), and tell us something about the books you would most recommend to someone else and why.

Sunny