Five Books to Read in Quarantine (and One You Shouldn’t)

Personally, I prefer to read something that fits my “mood.” Sometimes. I do read for escape, but often, I want to connect to what I’m reading in a relevant or personal way. With that in mind, the following books are not escapist. They explore various aspects of isolation, silence, and dread. Though there is one book I think hits a little too close to home…

Educated by Tara Westover
Westover’s memoir of being raised without a proper education by doomsday preppers in a pseudo-cultish Mormon church may not be the first thing you think when looking for a good quarantine read, but speaking as someone who was also raised by preppers, no one better gets the dread of the end of the world than kids of preppers. We grow up thinking the end of the world is around the corner, and sometimes, there’s a sense of relief when disaster comes. You can finally stop being vigilant for it. At the same time, no disaster truly is the end of the world. You keep living. I recommend this book since the narrative is full of hope and overcoming, and we could all use someone to root for right now.

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The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman
In this historical novel, Tom Sherbourne keeps a lighthouse on an island alone until he meets and marries Isabel. The two try to conceive, but they suffer two miscarriages. One day, a baby washes on shore in a boat, like an answer to Isabel’s prayers. She convinces Tom not to alert the authorities, and they raise the child for a few years. Eventually, they have to face decisions about their daughter’s true parentage when they return to the mainland. While I’m stuck at home for fourteen days, I still have access to a slew of apps to reconnect with the world and loved ones. I even had a friend drop of groceries for us yesterday. Stedman’s novel give us a look at true isolation, cut off from the world and support, and what we may be willing to do in our grief.

Silence by Shusaku Endo
I would recommend this book out of the current climate as well. Endo’s historically accurate depiction of Jesuit priests in Japan during a time of great persecution to Christians addresses questions of theodicy (a theology about or defense of God in the face of suffering/evil) and faithfulness. Right now is a true test of faith for many. It’s easy to trust God and believe in His love when all is well, but right now, jobs are in question, food is in question, and even lives. We have to wrestle with all of this, and I think Endo sets the way for us.

The Chosen by Chaim Potok
I’ve reread this classic so many times, and it always strikes me anew. Silence and isolation are major themes, and the use of both in building empathy. My idea of friendship has been largely shaped by the main characters Reuven and Daniel and the intentionality in which they pursue each other. They’re from different Jewish sects, and they have to navigate various tensions placed on them both. It’s heart-warming, humanizing, and oddly riveting.

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To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck
I love Steinbeck as much as a Mumford, so I’m also recommending this shorter one as a gateway to some of his longer novels. The need for community and a connection to the land, common themes for this author, drive this story. Joseph Wayne travels to California to start a homestead and invite the rest of his brothers out. On his journey to the West, he hears about the “dry years” that can plague farmers out there, but he doesn’t believe those years will return. Once there, he finds a rock on his land that he believes is the sacred source of life in that region. As he invites his family and marries a local teacher, he struggles to maintain the source of life. Again, there’s a dread in this book that resonates but also a tenacity of life.

Severance by Ling Ma
When Googling this book just now to grab an image of the cover, I found multiple articles suggesting this book for quarantine read lists and quite a few hailing it as prophetic. As an example, the headline for an article in Vulture is, “Severance Predicted the Slow-Burn Pandemic of Our Pandemic.” Others agree. In Ma’s novel, a flu begins in a Chinese factory and slowly spreads throughout the world. Candace Chen works for a company that employs the factory to print Bibles, so she is alerted first to the growing problem. Slowly, things shut down as the flu turns those infected into psuedo-zombies who are cognitively impaired and mindlessly perform patterns on repeat. Since COVID-19 first came to Kentucky, scenes of Candace Chen in an empty New York City began playing on repeat (much like Frozen 2 in most homes right now). Though the zombies are never hostile or malicious, the “slow-burn” of a capitalist society collapsing and everyone becoming isolated truly filled me with horror. I finished that book disturbed. I cannot imagine why anyone would put it on a quarantine read list now. It’s relevant, yes, but too relevant. I may like books that express my current mood, but this one would exacerbate anxiety and fear to an unhelpful degree. I recommend waiting to read this book until our current pandemic has passed (but then I totally recommend giving it a read!).

Absolute Surrender by Andrew Murray

by Tori

Begun 3/15/2019, Finished 3/17/2019
127 pages

Andrew Murray was a prolific author and missionary, born in 1828. In the 19th Century, he helped establish a few parachurch organizations in South Africa’s Dutch Reformed churches. His biography is full of energy and zeal, both of which pour into “Absolute Surrender,” written in 1895.

This book reads like a sermon you’d hear recited by a minister in a Jane Austen novel. The language is rich with 18th Century phrases like “verily” and using “want” to mean lacking rather than desiring. The content, however, is enriching and still appropriate. In the short nine chapters, the title is repeated forty-five times. Much like R C Sproul’s “The Holiness of God,” this work feels like a meditation on every angle of one thing, and Murray’s thing is the Christian’s complete surrender to God.

To an American millennial like me, the concept of surrendering myself chafes. A lot of my self-worth comes from carefully cultivating my self-concept. Now, the surrendering God asks of us doesn’t throw our uniqueness out the window, but it replaces our selfish (or self-oriented) will and desires with God’s will and God’s character.

Murray doesn’t make that distinction. He was born in South Africa and spent his life teaching and preaching there. When he tells readers to empty themselves like a cup poured out, he doesn’t pause to say, “Don’t worry. You’ll still be you.” Instead, he dives into the image and paints a thorough picture of our perfect nothingness, ready to be filled with God:

Oh, become nothing in deep reality, and, as a worker, study only one thing—to become poorer and lower and more helpless, that Christ may work all in you.

He also spends some chapters describing how we are filled and with what we are filled. A theme of love is developed in the second chapter and worked through the rest of the book. Love is God’s will for us and what He purposes by our surrendering and His filling us up:

I will not learn it until I realize that “God is love,” and to claim and receive it as an indwelling power for self-sacrifice. I will not love until I begin to see that my glory, my blessedness, is to be like God and like Christ, in giving up everything in myself for my fellow-men.

I did struggle to maintain focus often in this book. I don’t know if it’s a product of my personality or the time period, but I struggle with prose that stays largely in the concept’s abstract without coming down to the concrete. For example, in Sproul’s book which I mentioned, he frequently gives examples from his own life or ties an idea to a relevant example. Murray stays in the abstract, for the most part, developing the idea in the thought realm rather than in specific scenarios.

Still, it was an enjoyable book, a healthy reminder of our true purpose as Christians. The directive to surrender all is also a comfort. If Jesus is the vine and we the branch, then the responsibility for fruit is not on us. Our only task is to submit fully to the vine and let Him produce works through our submission.

On GoodReads, I gave this book three stars because it’s not my preferred style of writing, but I would still recommend it, especially if you struggle like I do with self-interest.

The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home by Russell Moore

by Tori

300 pages
Begun 2/07/2019, Finished 3/07/2019

In my post about the graphic novels Boxers & Saints, I said I often judge how good a book is by how much I worry about the characters. I think a good measure for nonfiction is how much the argument or information haunt me afterward, shaping my thinking and challenging my worldview. By that measure, The Storm-Tossed Family gets five stars from me and a prolonged shelf-life in my conscious thinking.

I’ve been a fan of Russell Moore for a while, and when this book came out last year, I quickly added it to my to-read pile. The topic was particularly apt for me as my family’s been going through a hard time, and I also co-founded a new family when I got married last May.

Yet a point Moore makes is that the topic of family is apt to all of us. We all start in a family, even if it’s broken, and we all live in one, even if they’re far apart. For the Christian church, especially, family is a tricky matter. In many Christian circles I’ve been a part of, family is put on a pedestal with some assumptions: we’re entitled to a good family, and so long as we’re in church, we’ll have a perfect one.

First, Moore challenges these false assumptions: “To make it through, we must recognize why family is important to us, and why family can never be ultimate to us. We must see the family clearly, but we must see beyond it. The only safe harbor for a storm-tossed family is a nail-scarred home.”

The idea of seeing “beyond” family is a simple one to repeat. It’s in the title of this book. To see beyond family is to see God’s purpose for family. Moore starts with a new assumption: “All of us are failures at family.” The cross itself says as much to us. There is no need for the cross where there is no sin or brokenness. And yet, it’s by the cross that Jesus saves us, and it’s the cross that we proclaim to cling to.

So, what does it mean to view the family through the lens of the cross? Well, that’s what he spends the rest of the book unpacking. He spends a few chapters first discussing the family a bit broadly before he then analyzes the various dynamics within a family: marriages, divorces, births, parenting, extended family members, and those who are aging.

Family teaches us that we need Christ because of our failures and others’ failures to us, but it also shows a beautiful portrait of our relationship with God, both through marriage and through parent-child relationships. Moore unpacks God’s design in both of these areas, detailing the stresses and also the blessings.

Every chapter was convicting in different ways. As a newly wed, I was, of course, particularly interested in the two chapters on marriage. Reading them were instructive for my marriage and also stirred me to my husband. Moore’s views of marriage are higher than mine, not because he has a higher standard of perfection but because he shares a clearer picture of what God wants to teach us through the tension of marriage.

In one section on marriage, he described a husband staying his wife through dementia, when she’s forgotten her spouses name, as a moral imperative. Even dementia, to him, is not grounds for divorce. I’ve decided Logan is never allowed to divorce me without Russell Moore’s strict permission.

An unexpected yet pleasant element of this book is how often I laughed out loud. I deeply enjoy humor, but I very rarely laugh while reading. Yet for this one, I frequently paused to laugh and reread a section to my husband.

This book is relevant to everyone in the church, even to the single members. God is doing something intentional through family, and His designs for us are for our good. However, Moore makes an important distinction, “Family is not the gospel. If you think family is the source of ultimate meaning in your life, then you will expect your family to make you happy, to live up to your expectations.” Jackie Hill Perry makes a similar point that the gospel is also not about heterosexuality, a mistake we make when preaching to the homosexual community. We often mistake God’s symbols and designs for God’s goals. Marriage and family are meant to point us back to Him; they are not the goal of the gospel.

Over the month I read it, I shared quite a few quotes from this book with my sister, Caroline. She noted eventually, “Sounds like he’s just describing how to be a healthy family.” I would say she’s probably right. This book isn’t full of any new ideas exactly. It’s a much-needed redirection in a culture often mixed-up on family be either idolizing or demeaning it. The path Moore wants to redirect readers to is the cross:

Your family might bring you pain. What of it? To love is to suffer. But you have learned that suffering is not a sign of God’s absence but his presence. You learned that at the Place of the Skull. You learned that when you first heard the words calling out to you, from somewhere on an ancient Galilean shore, “Take up your cross and follow me.” Do not be afraid. Your family will lead you where you never expected to go. But this is no reason for fear. The path before you is the way of the cross.
The way of the cross leads Home.

The Journey Begins-2019

By Logan

It’s a new year. In the past year, we’ve gotten married, started new habits and routines, and started our lives. One of the surprising elements of marriage was that we found ourselves reading more than we had before. A lot of date nights turned into time for reading together. Not as often as we might have liked, but often enough.

We’ve both always loved reading. Tori did her bachelor’s in English, and I used to be infamous for wandering the hallway of Hazel Green elementary school with my nose in a book. Tori has kept up her reading, because she’s a brilliant person, but I haven’t finished many since high school. Seminary kick-started my reading, but only enough to give me the taste for reading back. And Tori, ever one to think about how she can change or improve on everything, wasn’t satisfied with her reading, either.

So we resolved that we would read 52 books this year to average one per week. We know it’s going to be hard at times, but we’re eager to make the effort to discipline ourselves this way. We want to keep on top of our bible readings and other projects, too, but we’re excited to go on this journey together, and if you end up reading our reviews, we hope you’ll take some of our recommendations and play around with our reading list while we go at it.

Expect posts from one of us every week, usually each of us every other week. Part of why we started the blog was for accountability, after all.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. -Thomas Carlyle