The road not taken?
If you're on facebook or other social media, you may well have seen that challenge which has been doing the rounds: name 10 books which have changed your life. I've held back from doing it because a) nobody nominated me (awww) b) I couldn't get it down to less than 10 books without missing out some really important things. In case you're even remotely interested, this is my list; at least, this is what it looks like for today. They're not in order of importance, but roughly in the order in which I discovered them:
1. Nerve (Dick Francis). My transition from childhood pony books to adult reading came through Francis' horse-racing thrillers- not least because a number of them portray difficult relationships with parents, which was just what I needed as a teenager struggling with mine. This is one of his earliest books, and one of the best.
2. Cry, the Beloved Country (Alan Paton). Paton's classic story of injustice in South Africa under apartheid was my introduction to the sheer unfairness and wrongness of the world; the first book I can remember making me cry. It started me off as a peace and justice campaigner.
3. Dragonsinger (Anne McCaffrey). Another misunderstood teenager, who finds a home where her musical gifts are not only welcomed but enabled to flourish. My family rather geekily discovered the Dragonriders of Pern series when someone chose it as their specialist subject on Mastermind. When I discovered that she had modelled the dragons on her horses and fire lizards on her cats, I began to understand why I liked them so much...
4. Some Day I'll Find You (Harry Williams). By turns outrageous, sad and funny, this is the spiritual autobiography of a gay Anglican monk and theologian. I was given it when I was 17 and just starting to think about vocation. I get different things from it now than I did then, but its most valuable legacy has probably been the knowledge that it's all right to fail.
5. Does She Know She's There? (Nicola Schaeffer). The autobiographical account of a mother discovering that her first child has multiple disabilities. Set me off on a path of discovery of difference which I will always value.
6. In This House of Brede (Rumer Godden). A huge novel about life in a Benedictine convent in the 1950s. Very different from the kind of community I lived in, but still completely recognisable, honest and human.
7. Skallagrigg (William Horwood). A cracking story with lots of different layers, in which most of the main characters have some form of disability. It's not an explicitly theological book, but manages to discuss profound questions of identity and belonging in ways that make it hard to avoid theological reflection.
8. Angels and Men (Catherine Fox). The first of a series of novels with an Anglican theme- this one is set in a very thinly-disguised Cranmer Hall, a theological college in Durham- but more realistically drawn than, say, the Starbridge series by Susan Howatch. Manages to be profound about grief while also being extremely funny, and captures exactly the rather precious way some students talk: she had me for ever at the line 'Don't preach sociolinguistics to me, dickbrain'.
9. An Equal Music (Vikram Seth). Just one of the saddest, loveliest books I have ever read. A middle-aged classical musician is reunited with the girl he loved and lost as a student. It does not have a happy ending.
10. Clare of Assisi: Early Documents (ed. Regis Armstrong). Well, I had to include this, because I spent seven years of my life analysing it, and despite that it still has the capacity to surprise and interest me. Who knew thirteenth-century nuns could be so much fun?
So: no 'classics' (it was admittedly hard to leave out Pride and Prejudice, but hey, everyone picks that unless they pick Wuthering Heights- which was never, ever going to be on my list; I think by the time I read it, aged 19, it was already too late). No poetry, though I would have liked to make room for R.S. Thomas (miserable, Welsh, Anglican: he's got everything!) And no actual theology, though again it was hard to leave out W.H. Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense and Margaret Spufford's Celebration, which were the two books which meant most to me when I started reading theological books as an undergraduate. Margaret's son, Francis, wrote another of my favourite books ever, The Child that Books Built, which is, in a way, this page expanded into book form, and contains a lot of the other books which shaped me as they obviously did him.
As I compiled my list, I noticed something unexpected: how many of my chosen books feature music in some way. Either the characters are musicians, or music is in some way integral to the plot. Since I noticed that, I've spent some time thinking about why that might be. And I think it's maybe about the road not taken. There's so much music in these books that it sticks out- like an identity, like a vocation. As children, I was 'the academic' and my brother was 'the musical one'- he's one of those annoying people who can play pretty much anything. I enjoyed music and learnt a couple of instruments. I had a good natural ear and I enjoyed messing around with music, but I never practised hard enough to be really good- in fact, I got kicked out of clarinet lessons because of that. It was only later that I learnt to take it seriously- and learnt that I did actually have some ability, though not on either of the instruments I had learnt earlier! (And my brother's an academic now. A proper one. So there.)
I don't know where my voice came from. Certainly not either of my parents. I used to growl away in a low register pretending to be an alto, and nobody ever takes any notice of altos- and that was what I wanted. But suddenly (or that's how it feels now, anyway), I woke up and found I was actually a soprano- and that my true voice was nothing like the one I had hidden away with for so long. When I hear myself singing now, it seems to come from somewhere that isn't to do with me at all. That can't be me, making that sound. But paradoxically, singing is one of the things I do when I feel most true to myself. Vocation, for me, is about the process of 'finding a voice'; what it means to be uniquely made in the image of God, saying what is uniquely mine to say and having the confidence to say it. Or sing it. So it's not a coincidence that many of these books are also about that process- people finding out in different ways what it means for them to be who they are, use their gifts and express themselves. There isn't always a happy ending, because life isn't necessarily like that; but finding a voice is a life-long process. And amazingly enough, when you do, people do listen.
1. Nerve (Dick Francis). My transition from childhood pony books to adult reading came through Francis' horse-racing thrillers- not least because a number of them portray difficult relationships with parents, which was just what I needed as a teenager struggling with mine. This is one of his earliest books, and one of the best.
2. Cry, the Beloved Country (Alan Paton). Paton's classic story of injustice in South Africa under apartheid was my introduction to the sheer unfairness and wrongness of the world; the first book I can remember making me cry. It started me off as a peace and justice campaigner.
3. Dragonsinger (Anne McCaffrey). Another misunderstood teenager, who finds a home where her musical gifts are not only welcomed but enabled to flourish. My family rather geekily discovered the Dragonriders of Pern series when someone chose it as their specialist subject on Mastermind. When I discovered that she had modelled the dragons on her horses and fire lizards on her cats, I began to understand why I liked them so much...
4. Some Day I'll Find You (Harry Williams). By turns outrageous, sad and funny, this is the spiritual autobiography of a gay Anglican monk and theologian. I was given it when I was 17 and just starting to think about vocation. I get different things from it now than I did then, but its most valuable legacy has probably been the knowledge that it's all right to fail.
5. Does She Know She's There? (Nicola Schaeffer). The autobiographical account of a mother discovering that her first child has multiple disabilities. Set me off on a path of discovery of difference which I will always value.
6. In This House of Brede (Rumer Godden). A huge novel about life in a Benedictine convent in the 1950s. Very different from the kind of community I lived in, but still completely recognisable, honest and human.
7. Skallagrigg (William Horwood). A cracking story with lots of different layers, in which most of the main characters have some form of disability. It's not an explicitly theological book, but manages to discuss profound questions of identity and belonging in ways that make it hard to avoid theological reflection.
8. Angels and Men (Catherine Fox). The first of a series of novels with an Anglican theme- this one is set in a very thinly-disguised Cranmer Hall, a theological college in Durham- but more realistically drawn than, say, the Starbridge series by Susan Howatch. Manages to be profound about grief while also being extremely funny, and captures exactly the rather precious way some students talk: she had me for ever at the line 'Don't preach sociolinguistics to me, dickbrain'.
9. An Equal Music (Vikram Seth). Just one of the saddest, loveliest books I have ever read. A middle-aged classical musician is reunited with the girl he loved and lost as a student. It does not have a happy ending.
10. Clare of Assisi: Early Documents (ed. Regis Armstrong). Well, I had to include this, because I spent seven years of my life analysing it, and despite that it still has the capacity to surprise and interest me. Who knew thirteenth-century nuns could be so much fun?
So: no 'classics' (it was admittedly hard to leave out Pride and Prejudice, but hey, everyone picks that unless they pick Wuthering Heights- which was never, ever going to be on my list; I think by the time I read it, aged 19, it was already too late). No poetry, though I would have liked to make room for R.S. Thomas (miserable, Welsh, Anglican: he's got everything!) And no actual theology, though again it was hard to leave out W.H. Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense and Margaret Spufford's Celebration, which were the two books which meant most to me when I started reading theological books as an undergraduate. Margaret's son, Francis, wrote another of my favourite books ever, The Child that Books Built, which is, in a way, this page expanded into book form, and contains a lot of the other books which shaped me as they obviously did him.
As I compiled my list, I noticed something unexpected: how many of my chosen books feature music in some way. Either the characters are musicians, or music is in some way integral to the plot. Since I noticed that, I've spent some time thinking about why that might be. And I think it's maybe about the road not taken. There's so much music in these books that it sticks out- like an identity, like a vocation. As children, I was 'the academic' and my brother was 'the musical one'- he's one of those annoying people who can play pretty much anything. I enjoyed music and learnt a couple of instruments. I had a good natural ear and I enjoyed messing around with music, but I never practised hard enough to be really good- in fact, I got kicked out of clarinet lessons because of that. It was only later that I learnt to take it seriously- and learnt that I did actually have some ability, though not on either of the instruments I had learnt earlier! (And my brother's an academic now. A proper one. So there.)
I don't know where my voice came from. Certainly not either of my parents. I used to growl away in a low register pretending to be an alto, and nobody ever takes any notice of altos- and that was what I wanted. But suddenly (or that's how it feels now, anyway), I woke up and found I was actually a soprano- and that my true voice was nothing like the one I had hidden away with for so long. When I hear myself singing now, it seems to come from somewhere that isn't to do with me at all. That can't be me, making that sound. But paradoxically, singing is one of the things I do when I feel most true to myself. Vocation, for me, is about the process of 'finding a voice'; what it means to be uniquely made in the image of God, saying what is uniquely mine to say and having the confidence to say it. Or sing it. So it's not a coincidence that many of these books are also about that process- people finding out in different ways what it means for them to be who they are, use their gifts and express themselves. There isn't always a happy ending, because life isn't necessarily like that; but finding a voice is a life-long process. And amazingly enough, when you do, people do listen.