On Living Well

On Reading Well is remarkable for how cleverly structured it is. When you are looking at a Great Painting, you first notice the image, but as you look at it longer, you notice that the brilliance of the painting is not the object which was painted, but the way the author constructed that image. What separates Michelangelo and me is not the thing being represented—I can draw a stick figure of Adam—but the fact that his image is so carefully and artfully crafted. Don’t get me wrong—the Sistine Chapel is more impressive than On Reading Well. But, On Reading Well is so much more impressive than the typical book in this genre that the comparison to Michelangelo seems apt.

The genre? Books about other books. You know the type. Author picks a bunch of books and writes short chapters about each, telling the reader what is noteworthy about the book in question. Organize these chapters into sections and (presto!) another book about books! I enjoy this genre a lot—it is a great way to learn about new books and to discover things about books I have already read. (As the readers of this here blog will note, ruminating about books is something which intrigues me…)

To be honest, when I picked up this book, I was expecting it to be at best a pleasant addition to the genre. Prior is a genial narrator, obviously excited for the opportunity to share her love of books. She talks to the reader (and presumably her students) as if they are fellow travelers in a journey of discovery; she is less the captain and more the person who has been this way before, pointing out some of the fascinating things she noticed on a previous trek. The more you read Prior’s work, the more you can see why she is viewed with complete Adulation by an adoring crowd. Following the fun on Twitter is like watching a friendly cult in action. (There is even KSP Swag—Target sold a T-shirt with a picture of a woman who looks a bit like Prior; it was amusing watching people asking one another how they could get one of those shirts.)

On top of Prior’s engaging style, the set of books she chose to discuss promised many pleasant ruminations. Twelve Books and every book she chose is well worth reading. It is a mix of well-known Great Books (Gatsby, Tale of Two Cities, Huck Finn, Persuasion, Pilgrim’s Progress ), lesser known Great Books by Great Authors (Fielding, Tolstoy, Wharton, O’Connor), and much to my pleasant surprise a trio of relatively recent authors, all of whom should be much better known than they are (Shusaku Endo, Cormac McCarthy, George Saunders).

By this point, we have an author with a great prose style and a fantastic set of books, but the final touch is the selection and organization principle. The Books are presented as illustrations of assorted Virtues. For example, Huck Finn is Courage; Silence is Faith; Persuasion is Patience. Glancing at the Table of Contents presents a fun thought experiment—what book would you pick for each virtue? Why did the book which was chosen strike Prior as the best example to illustrate the Virtue?

Given all that, I settled in to read the book, hoping it would live up to its promise. (I am sad to say that many books in this genre do not live up to their potential; there are a lot of dreary books about books.) Happily, this book did live up to its promise. Take any chapter at random, and it is a chapter worth reading.

However, the genius of the book is not the individual chapters; the genius is the structure. In a surprising twist, as you set off on the first chapter, you discover that this really isn’t a book about books at all. Chapter 1 is “Prudence: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding.” Given the genre, you would expect this is a chapter about Fielding’s novel, and how it illustrates the virtue of Prudence. But by about half-way through the chapter, you realize that it is the reverse. This is a chapter about Prudence, and Fielding’s novel is just an example. The same thing happens in every chapter.

It dawns on the reader that this isn’t actually a book about books; it is a book about virtue. Chapter by chapter, Prior is explaining the Cardinal Virtues and the Theological Virtues and the Heavenly Virtues. She is admonishing the reader to understand the virtues and to strive to live out the virtues. This is really obvious when you flip to the back of the book and see the “Discussion questions.” For each chapter, Prior provides five discussion questions, the type of thing which could be used to spark a conversation at a book club. What is fascinating about the questions is that for most of the chapters, only one or maybe two of the five discussion questions is directly about the novel discussed in the chapter. “What is the relationship between prudence and morality? Between prudence and immorality?” “What is the relationship between justice and beauty?” Why does materialism so often replace love of people?” “How is nice different from kind?”

The title of the book is On Reading Well. It would be more properly titled On Living Well. Prior hints at this in the title she gave to the Introduction: “Read Well, Live Well.” If you want to learn about the virtue of Hope, you could read Aquinas or N.T. Wright, or you can turn to McCarthy’s The Road to see how hope works out in practice. Armed with Prior’s discussion, a reader who has little interest in struggling through the Summa Theologica can learn a lot about Hope by reading McCarthy.

But, to say that Prior’s book is about how to Live Well misses the point she is making, and this is where Prior’s genius comes through. Consider this excerpt from the chapter on Diligence and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

Modern ways of thinking cultivate a flatter approach to language and stories—as well as to the world and truth—than the ancients had. This modern preference for the literal over the symbolic, metaphorical, and poetic lends itself to a fundamentalism that the Puritans would never have recognized. For the Puritans, the world, even language itself, was charged with meaning both originating in and pointing toward God….Even the word progress in the title Pilgrim’s Progress is suggestive of how allegory functions. Allegory operates on a built-in expectation that readers will “progress” from the literal, material level of the story to the symbolic, spiritual truth beyond. It has an explicit assumption of interpretation that is implicit in all literary writing, indeed and all writing and all use of language. In other words, allegory requires and assumes the exercise of diligence by the readers.

If you want to learn about Diligence from Bunyan, then you have to learn how to read Bunyan well.

Generalize that thought from Bunyan to all the other virtues. Learning to read well is more than just learning the meaning of words and how sentences are formed. Learning to read well means learning how to interpret the book you are reading. One of the unfortunate products of schooling is that while many people learn the skill of reading, they never learn the art of reading. They can read Gatsby for the plot and it is a nice story, well told. But to grasp the meaning of Gatsby requires understanding how literature works, what Fitzgerald is trying to do.

There are lots of books that show people the art of reading. (My personal favorites: Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book, C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism.) What is clever about Prior’s approach is that she demonstrates by example, showing the point of learning to read well. We learn to read well because when we read well, it teaches us how to live well.

All those high school English classes full of the tedious exercises of “Find the theme of this story” missed the point. What conceivable good is it simply to find the theme in order to get full credit on an exam? Why destroy the pleasure of a story in the pedantic hunt for the theme? Prior subtly, but masterfully, shows up the pointlessness of that type or reading by showing that the reason we find the theme is to ask ourselves what the theme teaches us about how to live better.

On Reading Well is making a deep point. If you want to learn how to live well, then you need to learn how to read well. While Prior doesn’t put it this starkly, the book seems squarely aimed at all those people who are very sloppy readers of the Bible. On the one side you have people who reject Christianity based on incredibly poor understanding of Christian theology because they have never actually bothered to read the Bible well. But, on the other side are the people whom I suspect are Prior’s real target audience, Christians who do not read the Bible well because they do not read any book well. A person who learns to read well the twelve books Prior discusses in her own book might just realize that the book of Judges or gospel of Luke may also need to be read well in order to understand the ideas the authors are expressing.

That is why this book deserves such Admiration. Prior has written a fascinating argument about how to understand God and learn to live a Christian Life. The book doesn’t look like that it is what it is doing. You could easily read this book and then merrily have Book Club discussion about Prior and the novel being evaluated in the chapter. But if you do that you are absorbing a much deeper lesson. It is surely not mere happenstance that God speaks through a book. Prior is adroitly showing that learning how to read well is an important step in learning how to understand God.

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