Read Books and Shame the Devil

July 20, 2009 by djackson.

Shakespeare’s Hotspur taunts the Welsh wizard Owen Glendower to “tell the truth and shame the devil.” (Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1). Instead of that, I want to invite everyone to read books and shame the devil. In his thirteenth letter to his protege Wormwood, C. S. Lewis’ arch-tempter Screwtape berates the hapless trainee because “you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends.” In Lewis’ theology, then, reading a book one loves - whatever the contents (assuming, I assume, that they are not pornographic, heretical, etc.) is a powerful act of spiritual formation. In another of his books, the novel That Hideous Strength, Lewis has a character’s redemption begin when he finds sufficient humility to re-discover a book from his childhood.

Two shelves in the little sitting room were filled with bound volumes of The Strand. In one of these he found a serial children’s story which he had begun to read as a child but abandoned because his tenth birthday came when he was half way through it, and he was ashamed to read it after that. Now, he chased it from volume to volume till he had finished it. It was good. The grown-up stories to which, after his tenth birthday, he had turned instead of it, now seemed to him, execept for Sherlock Holmes, to be rubbish.

And then in yesterday’s paper, I find an article where several powerful, successful women talk about how the Nancy Drew books shaped them when they were girls: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/fashion/19drew.html. The really interesting thing is that each reader had her own “Nancy,” though they were reading the same stories.

So . . . I want to invite everyone to re-read a favorite book from junior high school. NOT a children’s book you discovered as an adult, NOR a book you had to read, NOR a book you should have read. I’m talking here about one you just plain old liked. And take a minute to think about it. It might be a book that your adult self, neurotic about childish pleasures, has forbidden you to recall.

I am currently doing this myself. Not long ago, out of the blue, I thought of Sinbad and Me, a detective story about a small-town boy and his faithful bulldog who solve the mystery of a buried treasure. It has pirates and caves and deserted mansions and secret codes and (did I mention this?) a BULLDOG! Re-reading the book has not only re-acquainted me with the characters and the story, but with an eleven-year-old kid who found it in the library at Royal Palms Elementary School in Phoenix, Arizona back in 1971. He noticed it on the shelves because the cover art had a picture of that dog on it. He started reading and couldn’t stop. Turns out he wasn’t such a bad kid; likable, in fact. In fact, I think I like him better than some of the later versions of him.

I hope you’ll take the invitation and let me know what you read and a little bit about the experience.

Posted in General | 2 Comments »