15 Books

These are fifteen books that have "rocked my world." I take that to mean books that changed my living and thinking or marked out a new path. I don't take that to mean books I'm only proud to have read, or books I aspire to like or to be changed by. I also tried to make the list in fifteen minutes. The list is ordered chronologically by my first contact with them, beginning the summer before college. I include brief, fairly non-specific descriptions of the respective encounters.


1. Selected Poems (Robert Frost)
First book of poetry I read, and it connected with me.

2. In the Palm of Your Hand (Steve Kowit)
Bought because of the previous; insight into poetry, drive to write it (starting a year after I read the book).

3. God's Passion for His Glory (John Piper & Jonathan Edwards)
Includes Jonathan Edwards' essay "The End For Which God Created The World," the first text of any difficulty I ever tried to read deeply. It made me want to challenge my mind. Along with Piper's Desiring God a year or so earlier, it also re-energized my spiritual seeking at that time.

4. Blue Like Jazz (Donald Miller)
Freshness that reinvigorated my faith.

5. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter)
Still perhaps the most interesting book I've read; with its structural, linguistic, and logical play as well as its wide-ranging subject matter (and connections and analogies therein), it felt like it was designed just for me. It gave me a sense of awe and intellectual curiosity that I needed and have carried since. It's also influenced my ideas about life, God, the universe, and everything.

6. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
The first (and perhaps only) real magnum opus I ever read. Some of the ideas and themes have stuck with me: "In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. ... And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal."

7. Franny and Zooey (J. D. Salinger)
In many ways the beginning of a literary, ideological, and spiritual journey that I'm still on. When I first read this in the fall of sophomore year, I knew my life was about to change, possibly for the worse, possibly for the better, possibly both; and here I am.

8. The Essential Haiku (Bashō, Buson, Issa)
If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, I hope my praise of these writers (and Simic and Ryan, later on the list) is well-received. I didn't know words could do this.

9. A Generous Orthodoxy (Brian McLaren)
A significant fort along that spiritual journey; my first formal contact with emerging Christianity, which I'm still trying to discover and, even more difficult, articulate. It's hard to remember the kind of spiritual fatigue I was feeling before I came in touch with this book and others like it, but more importantly with the people and communities I know who bring it to life, whether they realize it or not.

10. The Voice at 3:00 AM (Charles Simic)
My first encounter with Simic, my first major poetic idol. I ended up buying twenty of his books (reading most of them) and again relearning what words do, what words are.

11. Silence (John Cage)
I wrote a paper about "The Philosophical Writings of John Cage" sophomore year for my 20th Century Music class. It ended up paving the way to a major change (a change of major) in my academic path.

12. Jesus and the Victory of God (N. T. Wright)
I first encountered these ideas in The Challenge of Jesus, and maybe before that in The Secret Message of Jesus (McLaren), but combined with some other related influences, Christianity hasn't looked the same to me since. This is also the first serious work of theology/scholarship I've read, although I'm only halfway through to date.

13. You Must Change Your Life (John Lysaker)
A book about the philosophy of and in Charles Simic's poetry. This was my first formal exposure to serious (post-18th century) philosophy as well as another major contributor to my switch to Interdisciplinary Studies.

14. The Niagara River (Kay Ryan)
Poems with love and hope in them. That makes them sound sappy, but far from it; real hope can never be sappy. Those things aren't as visible in Simic, and the wordplay, wit, and depth in these poems is still tricky not to mime.

15. The Call and the Response (Jean-Louis Chrétien)
This book is representative of my contact with postmodern philosophy during my spring semester Junior year: namely, more intellectually and spiritually challenging than anything else I've read. Other books just seem boring in comparison. I choose Chrétien in particular for eliciting the highest concentration of marginal asterisks and "!"s, and because his work will play a significant part in my interdisciplinary thesis as well as, hopefully, my artmaking, spirituality, and living.