March 11, 2025
One of my stated goals of the sabbatical I took between April-December 2024 was spend more time reading for the joy of it.
Do you love to read? I do, in theory. But in ordinary life, it seems I love less the reading, and more self-improvement. I’m mildly embarrassed at the designation of ‘self help’ that accompany many of the titles gracing my shelves. Each individual book has its place, but taken collectively, they underscores a subconscious message I’ve struggled with all my life: the good life is found elsewhere, in being a better [fill in blank, varyingly: organized/mission-focused/loving/accomplished/healthy etc.] version of myself.
Once my spiritual director, observing the squirm of this false belief and related tensions, asked provocatively if I could experience God’s love as the unimproved version of myself. What if that thing I want to work on never gets fixed? What if my awkwardness persists, I continue to run late, my anger and self-absorption remain the subject of every weekly confession for the rest of my life? What does that mean for how God sees me? In theory I know I’m loved as is, but sometimes the constant focus on trying to become a better version makes it hard to experience that.
(I wonder if and how you might experience versions of this?)
So it was that as an act of radical resistance against my relentless drive to improve I set about reading, during my sabbatical, *novels.
A delicious act of protest against my yearning to always be a better version of myself, to practice being accepted as I am: replacing for a season the usual striving self-improvement books, underlined and replete with actionable tweaks to implement, with lounging poolside, drowsily flipping through a beach read.
*I didn’t limit it to novels, per se, but embraced, broadly speaking, reading for its own sake, and not what it would do for me. That encompassed, for example, sociological studies and history. I also had an obligatory reading list for my spiritual direction training, though the time of sabbatical allowed for reading through with a pace and attention driven less by ‘getting through’ and more by savoring what spoke to me.
After reviewing the list of books I read, in whole or in part, these ten, in five categories stood out as having stuck with me as I’ve returned to work. Even if you can’t take a full sabbatical, I hope you can experience the luxurious joy of reading for pleasure.
1. Poolside Reads: The Girl In His Shadow/The Surgeon’s Daughter
Granted, I read many books on this list poolside at some point. But if we’re talking a novel that straddles breezy and engaging, entirely enjoyable in the act of reading but without leaving the bitter bellyache of a mindless binge, these two, under a nom de plume of a two-woman writing team, fit the bill. Historical fiction novels set in 1840s England, they tell the story of the female ward of an eccentric but skillful doctor who dares to desire to practice medicine herself, in an age when it is actively forbidden. The bravery and perseverance of the heroine + the engaging stories of medical discoveries we now take for granted told as they were unfolding made these winners for me. I finished the second book and immediately searched for a third—which doesn’t exist, yet. Here’s hoping it comes out by next pool season.
2. Sagas: A Covenant of Water/Twilight Territory
Moving on from pool reads, these novels go deeper, more substantive—each is thick enough to stop a door—but still entirely enjoyable; you finish the book wishing it had more chapters. Both books tell inter-generational sagas of families grappling with historical events—world wars, colonialism and its unraveling—rapidly changing realities that both unsettle and create new opportunities. Both stories offer portraits in miniature of a family story completely different from my own, Twilight Territory in post-World War 2 Vietnam, A Covenant of Water, in early 1900s rural India. Reading these books, I got to see something new. In contrast, an Indian friend shared the recommendation for A Covenant of Water as a mirror to his own family’s saga. What a gift writers offer in opening a window to worlds outside our own experience.
3. History: American Nations/Dominion
If you’ve talked to me over the past few years you’ve probably heard at some point an observation like, “oh that’s like in this book that describes the various cultural nations comprising America!” After years of talking about American Nations with a friend who’d actually read it, continuously intriguing me with actual insights, I finally came off the library waitlist and read it myself, all the better to slide it into conversation. I can’t help it: its theory, and depiction of each of these nations and how they’ve allied and fought over time, explains so much of where we are now, as well as helping me trace my own family history.
Dominion was a gift I put off reading—another door-stopper, with a cover and title that didn’t draw me in. But as Tom Holland fans know, it’s crammed with engaging story-telling that makes the centuries whiz by. (Confession: I’m only at the Reformation. 500 years and many chapters to go!)
Both books are sweeping historical accounts with different perspectives—American Nations of the history of immigrants to North America and Dominion of the spread and evolution of Christianity and its impacts. These accounts offer a historical wide-angle lens to make sense of so many modern dynamics, an effect I find both soothing and exhilarating in these fraught times.
4. For Your Heart: Our Missing Hearts / Demon Copperhead
Stories opening up the lives of others is the recurring theme here. Our Missing Hearts unfolds a theoretical future world where things have gone badly amiss. Fear and anger have so overtaken the American experiment that its been corrupted into an Orwellian version of itself. The fact that its believable, all the more so these days, makes it all the more frightening. Yet it is kept from being purely bleak by courageous self-giving love. Does a risky act of love change anything? I left the book feeling greater resolve to offer it even if the answer is, not as far as you can see. Demon Copperhead is all too real, a painfully intimate account of how evil and broken systems impact one boy in particular, struggling to navigate a world that sets him up to fail. Both books have the effect of enlarging the heart, igniting compassion, something we need all the more these days.
5. For Your Soul: Silence & Honeycakes / Solace of Fierce Landscapes
Having held so many stories, the heart may wonder how to live well in the holding. What do you do with all this previously unknown beauty, all this far flung pain and brokenness? These books offer an answer by way of suggesting how to become, not by active effort but by being acted upon by the extreme forces of the desert, literal and metaphorical. Self-improvement means something entirely different here. In my spiritual direction program’s required reading list, which is long, the poetry, beauty and mystery of these books captivated me.
Silence and Honeycakes is a series of short meditations drawing on the sayings and wisdom of early desert fathers and mothers—those eccentric-seeming, intriguing individuals who fled ‘modern’ life to the Egyptian desert in the 300s-400s. What could their life have to offer ours? You might be surprised. Solace of Fierce Landscapes is a genre-defying combination of the author’s auto-biographical navigating his own ‘desert’ season, a series of gorgeous short accounts of pilgrimage to specific desert places, and meditations on the desert and what it holds. Lots of underlining and writing in the margins, “yes!” They may not be for everyone, and there’s probably little I could say that would sell them to someone not already intrigued by a book “for your soul,” but if you have any curiosity at all, why not see where the desert might take you?
