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In this episode Trent reveals the top 10 novels every Christian should read.
Transcription:
Reading classic literature shouldn’t just be about trying to pass your high school English test. Knowing the classics is a great way for Christians to better understand and share their faith. St. Paul even quoted Greek philosophers and writers in his own letters to better connect with his audience, and we should be able to do the same.
Classic novels also can help us better articulate Christian doctrine, classical virtue and give us a deeper understanding of our own humanity and how God redeems it. So today we are not going to review the top ten Christian books, but the top ten classic novels, the ones most widely discussed in the Western canon, that a Christian would most benefit from reading. So let’s jump right in.
#10 – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Written in 1932, this one of the classic dystopian novels and it’s amazing how much Huxley correctly predicted. For example, he describes a reproduction process similar to in-vitro fertilization over 40 years before IVF was invented. The novel follows the residents of a society so firmly committed to utilitarianism that the concept of childbirth is considered a vulgar joke.
I include Brave New World on the list because it’s a kind of anti-Gospel, the bad news of what life is like when humanity embraces a cold, utilitarian, technocratic way of thinking. This is especially the case when one of the characters who is considered a savage visits the so-called civilized world and is disgusted by what he sees.
I recommend this book because it holds up a disturbing mirror to our own society and shows why the Gospel is so badly needed.
#9 – Dracula by Bram Stoker
Written in 1897, Dracula is one of the pioneers in Gothic horror, a genre that focuses on ancient supernatural threats often in the context of dreary places like castles and cemeteries. The novel is written as a series of letters and diary entries so it has a kind of “found footage” quality to its horror. I’m sure the book was more unnerving to audiences who unlike us, don’t already know the basics about vampires, but many of the scenes are creepy. My favorite was the increasingly harrowing logs on the doomed ship sailing to London whose crew are picked off one by one by Count Dracula.
This is a great book for Christians because Dracula is a kind of anti-Christ who, unlike Christ who gives eternal life through his blood, takes the blood of others so he can live forever. Stoker was not Catholic but the characters in the novel appeal to Catholic practices like the sign of the cross, crucifixes, and the presence of the Eucharist to fight Dracula which they first considered mere superstition. The novel can be seen as a liberal Protestant defense of Catholicism as being the only faith to have an ancient, enduring quality to be able to stand against that which is truly dark and demonic.
#8 – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is another novel whose purpose isn’t to show the Christian faith through literature, but to artfully highlight the emptiness of life without the Gospel. The novel is set in the roaring 20’s on Long Island and is told from the perspective of Nick Carroway, a bond salesman who gets caught up with the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby.
The novel is much better than the recent film adaptation because Carroway’s full first-person description is compelling because it is dour, witty, and partially unreliable. The novel is also an excellent character study that shows how the things and people of this world can never truly satisfy us and so, when we chase after them, tragedy inevitably follows.
As you read the book you understand that the over-the-top Gatsby parties as portrayed in the film and have been popularized by modern day influencers are not a good thing. They are a shallow illusion and only serve as camouflage to disguise the emptiness of trusting in wealth and power to provide you happiness. As 1 Timothy 6:10 says, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
Finally, along with Brave New World, this is one of the briefer books on this list so it’s a good place to start if you want to dive into classic works.
#7 – The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein
I admit this is a little bit of cheating since I’m putting all three books of the LOTR trilogy together, but when combined they are about as long as some of the other epic novels on this list. And don’t think you can skip this one because you saw the films.
While the films have some advantages in that the battle scenes are more epic than the book’s description, many other secondary characters are radically truncated, have far different personalities, or get sent to the cutting room floor. And you miss out on Tolkien’s poetic descriptions which are not, as some people on the Internet joke, just 40 pages of describing trees. That’s something Victor Hugo, the author of Les Miserables, might do, but not Tolkien.
Watching the films is like eating a deluxe cheeseburger but reading the books is like eating a good steak where you can savor Tolkien’s descriptions of things like the Hobbit’s ballads. And this also resolves the rushed ending of Return of the King which had to be done for a film but robs us of the chance of seeing how Tolkien ties everything together in the end.
The trilogy represents a classic Christian allegory on the nature of good and evil and the corrupting effects of power on mere mortals. Unlike gritty anti-heroes so common today, the boundary lines between good and evil are clear even if some good people temporarily fall under the sway of evil through cowardice or ignorance and virtues like friendship and sacrifice are given their proper due but not in a cheesy way. And through accessible fantasy that isn’t bogged down by cynical themes, I’m looking at you Game of Thrones, the Christian reader is taken to, as Tolkien once put it, “joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
#6 – Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
I first read this book in high school and I hated it. But I gave it a chance again as an adult and now I see why it’s a classic. On a side note, I understand why classic books don’t always appeal to young people. When you are in high school or college, you don’t necessarily want to sit around reading about other people going on epic or romantic adventures. You want to be doing those things so you get through the book as just an English assignment and get through it as fast as you can.
But when you are older and life settles into a routine, it’s fun to read about epic adventures either as escapism or as fun nostalgia if it parallels the adventures you had when you were young. At the very least, you’re just older wiser and better able to appreciate the deeper message behind many of these stories.
And that’s true with Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte in 1847, in that now as an adult I can recognize it as a mature, gripping romance with a strong Christian theme. Jane is kind of a girl boss but not an insufferable one. The book describes her rise from being an orphan who could have remained a jaded awful person and how she embraces Christianity to become a person who can forgive all kinds of evil and heal all kinds of pain in those who hurt her. The novel even has some spooky elements to it that come out of nowhere so it’s an engaging read that beautifully portrays the depth of Christian love and inspires the reader to love others in the same way.
#5 – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
When you start reading classic works it’s funny to realize many of these authors were friends who knew each other and formed a kind of literary super friends. One example would be the Inklings at Oxford University which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolken. When it comes to southern writers Harper Lee was friends with Flannery O Connor and both wrote in a tradition called Southern Gothic. We already saw that Dracula pioneered generic gothic literature with its focus on fear and dread associated with castles and ancient evil, southern gothic focuses on the fear and dread associated with the American south, especially in the period after the civil war and during the great depression. The decaying medieval castle is replaced with eh decaying southern plantation, each hiding their own dark secrets.
This isn’t a jab at my Southern friends, far from it. In fact, the impact of slavery and the aftermath of the civil war produced a deep sense of pathos that made it not a coincidence that many of the most famous authors in American history were southerners.
Flanery O Connor’s works are classics that Christians should read, but history made Harper Lee the more famous figure and To Kill a Mockingbird has consistently ranked at the top of great American novels, in spite of O Connors criticism that it’s basically a children’s book. On another bit of trivia, Harper Lee was friends with Truman Capote, the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and one of my favorites In Col Blood, which basically started the true crime genre.
But To Kill a Mockingbird’s simplicity doesn’t take away from its perennial story about a good man, Atticus Finch standing up against racial injustice which becomes even more tragic when we see it through, not Finch’s world-weary eyes but through the eyes of his elementary age daughter Scout who has yet to really understand the unfairness and evil that exists in the world. This becomes apparent in the final acts of the book involving the blatantly racist and unjust trial of Tom Robinson who Finch represents and clearly proves to be innocent even though his heroic defense doesn’t end up saving the day. The book becomes an iconic witness to the virtue of doing the right thing no matter what evils befall you and not losing faith in humanity in the process.
And, I’d also add I haven’t lost faith in you dear viewer being able to subscribe to our channel and supporting us for as little as $5 a month at trenthornpodcast.com to help us to provide quality content like this.
Finally, unlike the remaining books on this list, this one is a good place to start on if you have megabibliophobia, or a fear of reading really long books.
#4 – Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
Like Lord of the Rings, this is a trilogy of novels written in the early 1920’s. The novel takes place in 14th century Catholic Norway and is so rich in detail that Undset was awarded with the Nobel Prize in literature in 1928. The novel follows Kristin, the daughter of lavrans, who is an honorable nobleman. The novel is a cautionary tale about why you shouldn’t get involved with bad boys no matter how much spark they seem to have, which in this case is Kristin’s liaison with the dashing bad boy Erlend.
Things go from bad to worse but the novel beautifully and epically portrays how even grave sinners can find peace with God and redemption from their sins. The novel takes on an interesting layer of interpretation when you look at it through the lens of Undset’s own conversion to Catholicism which took place in 1924 after she wrote the series. Undset’s essay reflecting on her conversion, Beyond Human Limitations, says, “Only a supernatural intervention can save us from ourselves. The Christian Church teaches that Christ was himself this intervention.”
She also says the scandal of bad Catholics throughout the ages is, in her words, “the dark reverse side of the luminous doctrine of the communion of the Saints.” Her -pre-conversion novels frequently explored the devotion to Norwegian saints like St. Olav Haraldsson, the eternal king of Norway and in her conversion story she writes this:
The homage paid to the saints, fostered by the Church from the beginning, really seems to answer an ineradicable need of our nature. We must worship heroes! In lieu of better, we have made heroes of match kings and gangsters, sportsmen and artists, film stars and dictators.”
If Undset were writing today Undset would no doubt include social media influencers and viral celebrities. She continues:
We must set someone on a pedestal so that we may admire something of ourselves in him. In the saints is realized the object God had in creating us – to quote the words of the Offertory: “who didst wonderfully create and dignify the human race, and hast still more wonderfully reformed it.” Only in the saints can we find an outlet for our hero worship, without at the same time worshipping of our own nature which it is cowardly or degrading to worship.
Now, Protestants may say that Christ should be the object of our hero worship and he does represent the full glory of human nature. But Christ is a divine person for whom sin is metaphysically impossible. The saints, in contrast are sinners, a fact we sometimes forget when we contrast saints and sinners as two separate categories instead of recognizing the former is a subset of the latter.
The saints also remind us, as Augustine eloquently does in his Confessions, that being a heroic and beloved child of God isn’t about leading a perfect life. It’s about choosing to make a decision to fully love and follow God in the present no matter what you’ve done in the past, a decision exemplified many times over in the characters and drama of Kristin Lavransdatter.
#3 – The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
This is probably the most philosophically dense novel on the list but it’s well worth it. The novel is set in mid-19th century Russia and follows the trials of three, and possibly four brothers who wrestle with the evils that befall them because of their despicable father. Each responds in a different way and becomes an allegory for different ways a person might respond to the problem evil or a believer might respond to doubts about God’s goodness. The novels’ most famous scene is the haunting story within a story called the grand inquisitor that imagines a medieval inquisitor accusing Christ of being the ultimate obstacle to human happiness rather than the guarantee of human happiness of flourishing. The Grand Inquisitor also serves as an important reflection of why Russia, which had previously a stronghold of religious fervor, began to drift into atheism and then state mandated materialism and communism.
Oh, and when reading this novel and other works of Russian literature, it’s helpful to have a cheat sheet with character names on it since Russian authors tend to refer to people by more than one name. But if you have the patience to work through the complex characters and themes, you’ll be greatly rewarded with what many of have called one of the greatest works of literature in history.
#2 – Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
I worry that this one has become the Napoleon Dynamite of Catholic books. For those who don’t know or don’t remember, Napoleon Dynamite was a quirky coming of age comedy that came out in 2004, right when I started college. At the time, people told me it was literally the funniest thing they had ever seen in their entire life. I saw the movie and didn’t have the mind-blowing experience I was promised. In fact, if I hadn’t heard all the hype about the movie I probably would have thought it was funnier.
Brideshead Revisited is similar because many Catholics say it is the greatest Catholic novel of all time and they make these grand promises about what will happen if you read it. Be sure to have Kleenex ready!
And that’s unfortunate because Brideshead is a “slow burn” of a book. The first time you start reading it you’ll probably ask yourself how these messed up dysfunctional people could represent the greatest Catholic novel of all time. But what makes the book so good is its realistic depiction of how God’s grace works in our lives, often at a very slow pace. So you have to keep that in mind when you read it.
The novel’s subtitle is The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, who acts as the narrator recalling his interactions over the course of decades with the wealthy English Catholics who live in Brideshead Castle. The characters are memorable but some parts might seem a bit dry but are just describing very British ways of living and relating to one another. However, as I said, it’s a powerful depiction of how God works in our lives. The novel alludes to this passage from G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries:
Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. “Yes,” he said, “I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”
So, to avoid hyping the book up to much, Brideshead is a memorable depiction of how God’s grace works like Fr. Brown’s invisible fishing line, it sometimes lets us go off to wander in sin but it’s always ready to bring us back to him in an instant. That’s why we should always reach out in faith to those we think are far from God no matter how hopeless they seem.
#1 – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
When the author William Faulkner was asked to name the three greatest novels of all time he said , Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina. Written by Leo Tolstoy in 1864, it is indeed one of the greatest novels if not the greatest novel on the subject of marriage. The book follows several interconnected families, most notably the relationships of Anna and Vronski and Kitty and Levin. If you are married with children, you’ll relate to the novels often humorous depictions of early infatuation and how it contrasts with the reality of the hardships of marriage and you’ll be torn by how it depicts tragedy affecting marriage and why only marriages with a solid foundation can weather these storms.
The novel is set in Imperial Russia in the late 19th century, which is before the communist revolution, but you see the seeds of socialism, materialism, and atheism being planted for that radical change, especially in how the educated elites mock the idea of faith and traditional family units. It does have some lengthy digressions into things like peasant agricultural techniques but keep on reading because it’s worth it.
While Dostoevsky was the better Christian, Tolstoy was the better Russian author and his depiction of some scenes, especially one character’s unaliving, still makes my heart nervously pound.
I don’t want to give away too much so that you can go into the book with fresh eyes, so all I will say is that these characters show us both what true love and marriage looks like as well as how people’s sinful desires create a mockery of marriage. One of the characters also showcases one of the best and most believable literary journeys from irreligion to Faith that I’ve ever read in contrast to many times when Christians portray conversion in the cheesiest most unrealistic way possible.
So that’s my top ten classic novels every Christian should read. Was there a novel I should have included? Was there one I did include that didn’t deserve to be on this list? Let me know in the comments below and thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a very blessed day.