What Aren't You Reading?

Oh, Meg, don't take the whole post down. . . .

LibraryThing has this nifty new tool called the UnSuggester, where you can put in the name of a book and see a list of books least likely to be owned by somebody who owns that book. The lists you can come up with are revealing, and sometimes a little frightening. If you put in Bill Clinton's "My Life," the first book on the list is Calvin's "Institutes of the Christian Religion," and a number of the others are also Christian-themed books, particularly quite a few by John Piper. Put the Institutes in, and you get a list of things like Dan Brown, Anne Rice, and Stephen King books. However, we're also not supposed to like "Ella Enchanted," "The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants," or Steve Martin's "Shopgirl." Okay, fair enough. But when you start putting in other popular religious titles, the lists start to get a little unnerving. For example, put in Nancy Pearcey's "Total Truth," and you are told that most people who own this book do not own Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "Love in the Time of Cholera," Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar," Zadie Smith's "White Teeth," Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," William Makepeace Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club," or Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey." I haven't read all of these myself, but we're talking about well-renowned literature that Christians apparently aren't reading. I can personally vouch for "White Teeth" as being a compelling psychological study of both Jehovah's Witness and Islamic characters, and if the adultery described in Madame Bovary is too risque for you, you probably shouldn't be reading the book of Judges, either. And just in case you don't think much of this list, note that owners of "Total Truth" also are not supposed to own "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Disturbed now?

I think what we ought to learn from this is that of course, we can expect people with certain ideals to gravitate to books that express those ideals, but we should start to worry when it gets to the point that it becomes a noticeable trend that people with a lot of Christian books in their library don't read much else. I'm not saying we should all run out and buy "My Life" or "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," and granted, maybe Christians are reading these books but just don't own them. But I think we should at least be open-minded to the perspectives of people who write non-fiction that we don't agree with and read some of what they write so that when we want to critique it, we can do so in an informed and factual way, and not just by using, ahem, not to sound too right-wing here, slander. And we should definitely recognise that art and literature that explore themes of sin and immorality (or even fantasy and science-fiction) may hit on truths that reveal something to us about human nature in a way we hadn't realised, which ought to help us understand what other people are going through and empathise with them when trying to draw them to Christ. I don't want to see Christians start reading pornographic novels and calling it "research for evangelism," but I don't want to see us retreat entirely from the academic/artistic realm either. We shouldn't be afraid of anything--even vampires.