15 Books in 15 Minutes

how many times can a man answer "Muriel Spark"

NOTE: I’m a month late, but

Bill Coberly

and I published our Year in Reading: 2023 podcast. It’s the first time we got to record in person, and we had a blast. Check it out!

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I came across a simple game among lit bloggers recently: “Name the fifteen books that have most influenced your thinking, that you have found yourself referring to most often in reflection, speech, and writing.”

This is a horrible, terrible exercise akin to torture. But it does produce results different from your “favorite reads.” Mostly. I made myself attempt the above without reference to lists, of which I keep many. My brain is desiccated playdough these days. Any outside force and it crumbles. “Name…FIFTEEN… books? Ah. A book. I definitely know what the word ‘book’ means. I am… booking it.”

Anyway. I added a few rules as I wrote the answers. I tried to pick books that mattered to my whole life and not just to my life as a writer. I tried to be honest when a book suggested itself as to its ongoing influence. Moby-Dick probably should have been on this list,¹ but I’m not sure what it would displace. I also told myself, in no uncertain terms, that I wouldn’t sift through the results like some Kabbalist scrying arcane insights from my inner life. More on that after the break. For now, here are the results.

1. The Gospel of John

2. The Major Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins

3. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

4. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West

5. A Secular Age, Charles Taylor

6. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton

7. The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius

8. Godric, Frederick Buechner

9. Ulysses, James Joyce

10. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

11. The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis

12. The Book of Common Prayer

13. The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe

14. For the Time Being, Annie Dillard

15. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Denis Johnson

Not a lot of surprises, to be honest. One sub-rule was that I had to choose a single selection from the Bible and not simply the entire collection of scripture. The Gospel of John, especially the first and fifteenth chapters, was my immediate instinct. One day I’m sure I’ll even read it again. Hopkins is the definitive “I became a different reader/thinker after encountering his work” entry. Not only the poems, but the way he wrestles with technique, faithfulness, despair, and even his take on haecceity, which he calls “inscape.”

More than one entry appears because of a single idea or section, such as Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. The end of chapter four, “The Ethics of Elfland,” is a landmark passage for me. Similarly, The Consolation of Philosophy gives one of the only convincing responses to the problem of evil I’ve ever read—not that it explains away the issue. The problem of evil is intractable, in my opinion. But Boethius discerns a hint of justice in our world when one considers the issue of moral (person on person) evil, a hint which possibly augurs a greater and spiritual justice as yet unexperienced.

As we head down the list, things get shakier. Godric by Frederick Buechner is a little like Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, novels which are still among my favorite to read and which also changed me as a writer. I could have included, possibly, The Sound and the Fury and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, as well. Instead, I went with Ulysses, which creates conflict and narrative at the level of the sentence, as in how he writes his sentences scene to scene, in a way that enters your blood if you’re not careful. And I wasn’t.

I won’t belabor the rest, except to say that C.S. Lewis had to be fit in somewhere. He shaped too much of my inner life as both a child and an emerging adult. There were a few of his books I could have included,² but not only is The Silver Chair the purest adventure novel in The Chronicles of Narnia, it also features Puddleglum. I’d do anything for Puddleglum.

Maybe the list will change ten years from now. I hope so, honestly. The more interesting question, not to be answered, is how it might change if the challenge was, “Five Books in Five Minutes.” Possibly I’d sweat blood. Almost certainly, Denis Johnson would rocket up the list.

I love you all.

1. Other notable snubs: Tolkien, Plato, Augustine, Penelope Fitzgerald, ur mom.

2. One of those books is The Discarded Image, which helped me internalize the power of The Consolation of Philosophy. Lewis the medievalist is probably the Lewis I will keep reading most in adulthood.