Ten Books That Changed Me

There are books that you don’t merely enjoy, but that change you. Perhaps you know the experience: there is a sense of shaking within you as you read, and a nervous energy afterward that keeps you up at night. It isn’t merely that you are moved or amused by the book, but that the book reorients the whole world as you watch, as if you were a translunar being watching the revolution of the Earth.

There are many candidates for this title in my life, but here I have selected just ten. I have excluded the Bible, the Book above all books, for the obvious reason that otherwise this list would start with Genesis and end with 2 Samuel, and the list would be altogether too theological for some of my readers. (But read the Bible. It’s very good, as literature as well as true theology.)

1.      Legend by David Gemmell

I must confess that, whilst I adored Middle Earth and Narnia as a child, this is surely the first great moral influence upon me, and one I have often reread since. It was a strange discovery, upon my most recent rereading a couple of years ago, that my deepest moral instincts are articulated in this pulp fantasy novel. The intuitions, surely, come from the divine gift of conscience, but the way I would explain them come from Gemmell.

There is a fortress, with a too-small garrison; beyond, a barbarian horde off the Steppes, sure to win. The novel is simple in form – it is the tale of the siege. The style is at points weak and prone to banality. Yet it is utterly compelling – tales of heroism and villainry, a lesson in human sympathy, an exploration of faith, with an ensemble cast of richly-coloured characters of every type. Gemmell wrote that if he hadn’t been a Christian, he would have surely written amoral violence fiction, like many of the Western pulp authors; instead, he writes moral sagas fit – for their heart rather than their form – to compare with Tolkien and Lewis.

Above all, in this – Gemmell’s first book – there is Druss the Legend, old axeman, the greatest warrior alive. He is a white-bearded widower here, waiting for Death to take him in his bed. The defence of the doomed fortress provides one last opportunity to meet the Old Enemy on his terms. And what was Druss’ Iron Code, which every little boy should learn?

“Never violate a woman, nor harm a child. Do not lie, cheat or steal. These things are for lesser men. Protect the weak against the evil strong. And never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into the pursuit of evil. Never back away from an enemy. Either fight or surrender. It is not enough to say I will not be evil. Evil must be fought wherever it is found.”

2.      Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

This is neither the cleverest or the funniest of Pratchett’s Discworld novels, but it was my first. I vividly remember the Christmas I received it from my Uncle and Aunt. I was around 10. We were at Grandma and Grandpa’s. I was sat in one of the red armchairs that now sit in my living room. I was squirreled away reading my present, and I remember howling at the jokes. I remember being lifted into a serious imaginative world, which was nonetheless replete with good jokes. It was philosophy with a smile – a philosophy I never fully bought, and definitely now don’t, but one which coupled withering wit with a humane attitude.

In Hogfather, the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus has disappeared. DEATH (yes, tall bony chap with a scythe, nice if you get to know him) takes on the role, to avoid metaphysical catastrophe. Meanwhile, a gang of criminals led by the sociopathic Assassin Mr Teatime (pronounced Te-ah-tim-eh) seeks to knock off the Tooth Fairy. A crash course on metaphysics, human psychology, and good gags. I had never known anything could be this funny before, except perhaps Mr Bean.

3.      The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

I was an ill teenager, taught at home, with a little bit of money and a local independent bookshop (long gone now, of course). Of course I bought Marx! And Plato, and Freud, and a whole small cache of Wordsworth Poetry Library volumes – what a wonderful series that was, complete works in small type for £2.99 or £3.99 each. Available in an actual shop in Welwyn Garden City! Surely a halcyon age.

There’s a saying about Communism before you’re 20 and after you’re 20, but I don’t think I was ever a real Communist. I have never not been a monarchist, or emotionally bound to knights in shining armour and agrarianism and romance. Yet Marx and Engels gave me something, as a 14 year old, to grasp and care about; if this were merely a sentimental novel, a great deal of mischief would be prevented and much good accomplished. It has heroes and villains, an insightful overview of history, and soaring rhetoric.

Every man must have a cause, and every half-grown man with a heart cannot fail to rise and seek their sword when they hear of the woe of the oppressed proletarian, who has nothing to lose but their chains. In a depth of irony, the great healthy, romantic impulse of chivalry is enlisted in the service of what emerges finally as an inhumane and barbaric ideology – but when you’re 14, this book served its purpose. It gave me a battle to fight.

4.      Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

I have read the Quartets several times, and in many ways think they have had their greatest impact on me only in the latter readings, but those first endeavours – only quarter-understanding, half-pretentious – nonetheless wrought real changes in the soul. Here was philosophy in music, transposing unspeakable truths into parables. Music sometimes bypasses the sceptical and easily-confused forebrain and introduces itself to the wiser intuitions, and that is how I first could comprehend without fully understanding gems such as:

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

I first loved “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker” most – indeed, I almost want to quote a whole passage of the latter, for the delightful poignancy it causes in me, but let this suffice:

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie

If you do not come too close – the whole trick of real magic, let alone the fake stuff (at least until we meet the Deepest Magic in Heaven itself).

However, with time, I have inevitably turned more and more to Eliot’s true masterpiece (and he is a poet of many masterpieces worthy of the name) – “Little Gidding”. It is this poem in which he most fully expands the good news of the God who saved him from the Wasteland – Jesus “the ruined billionaire” and “wounded surgeon”, and this the stern Gospel offer:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
     Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
     To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Here, also, his most articulate summary of the great conservative concern for place:

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

Eliot changed me then and changes me now at every read, transporting me and rebuking me and heartening me. In that sense this book is plainly vastly more powerful than the three preceding. The Quartets are the greatest poet of the 20^th century transmuting into sparse words the whole of human experience, and grounding it in the only ground capable of bearing it to fruit, the Ground of All Being.

5.      Planet Narnia by Michael Ward

This may seem like a strange entry. Indeed, I read the whole Narniad multiple times before this book, and the Space Trilogy too. I read The Discarded Image, the key non-fiction work of Lewis’ involved, 2 and a half years prior to this. For all I love this book, I love the novels more, and feel always welcomed to an armchair by Lewis in his non-fiction.

However, this book was the decoder for so much else in the canon that it must represent that canon here. This book is the greatest achievement in literary studies of the second half of the 20^th century and the 21^st century so far combined. Ward discovered – undeniably, to the universal if reluctant assent of Lewis scholars – that Lewis had modelled the Narniad upon the seven medieval planets, and sought to inculcate both the whole medieval worldview and specific virtues and ideas through that planetary themeing. Ward didn’t accomplish this via a chance discovery of a tell-all letter, from which he extrapolated – he harrowed it out via a singular work of genius. Like Archimedes, the eureka moment even happened in a bath!

Read the book for more on that; now back to me! The Discarded Image had convinced me of the beauty and emotional power of medieval cosmology, but it was Planet Narnia that discovered to me that Lewis had been doing his work in me all along, precisely in the secret way he intended. I had long dwelt under the ordered heavens of my forebears, notwithstanding my intellectual assent to the Romantic sky. Much like Legend’s effect on my morals, I discovered I had imbibed a whole understanding of the world from Lewis which I had only half-recognised. This book, then, gave me an emotional cosmology. It brought into view the beautiful and satisfying conception that I had theretofore only been glimpsed in snatches.

6.      Out of the Ashes by Anthony Esolen

I read, and enjoyed, The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher before this, and that is the more famous book of this type, but this has had the deeper impact upon me. Esolen has two qualities that sometimes lack in Dreher: he is a marvellous stylist, and he is hopeful.

Dreher and Esolen both prophesy vigorously against the decline and fall of our civilisation, and they both prescribe Christian rebuilding of the ruins. What Esolen brings is excoriating polemic, beautiful and destroying, that exposes our cancers and begins to irradiate them before our eyes – and he brings the cheerful diagnosis that with time and will, all can be well, because it has been before. Fortuna will turn.

Esolen has enabled me, along with others (perhaps most notably The Puritan Hope by Iain Murray), to frame my view of the world realistically but hopefully. I put no trust in princes, and know that the only true peace for me will come in my End (which is, after all, my Beginning!) – but I know that the small apples Chesterton mentioned are still growing, and there is meaning to our action, and the battle goes not to the strong, but to the faithful.

7.      The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk

This is not the Kirk book I would recommend to an absolute beginner – that is Politics of Prudence – but this is his masterwork, undoubtedly. (He is the rare individual who in a sense peaked early – he served for 40 more years after this was published – but never really wilted or withered; he maintained real quality throughout.) It is an intellectual history of conservatism from Burke to Eliot, and more than a mere record at that – a true history, that is, a retelling and framing of the whole. This book is sometimes called the handbook of the modern conservative movement in America, but if they had really listened, they would have been in much better condition than they are.

Kirk gives us heroes – Burke and Brownson and even that wonderful snob Saintsbury – and flawed but noble middlers like Henry Adams. He gives us a general sense of the canons and concepts of conservatism as handed down to us by the Great Tradition – those values which tend to the preservation and cultivations of the Permanent Things. And he gives us himself, a walking library and liberal arts course all in one. He gave me and gives me then, a tradition, a home, and a Cause far greater than Marx ever did. He is the proof of his favourite line by Eliot: “the communication // Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

8.      The Doctrine of Repentance by Thomas Watson

I hope my readers will forgive the intrusion of a Christian devotional book, and one from that most despised and derided tradition within the Church, Puritanism. I can only say that it is here because it, or something very like it, must be. It is a cliché but true that Mere Christianity changed me intellectually a decade ago, but it was only a coordinate cause of the pursuant spiritual changes, separated as they were by some months; those were God direct or delusion, depending on your view.

This book, however, was the first “devotional” book by a Puritan that I read, and that a little over a year ago. The warm, direct, “melting” style, the highly intelligent pastoral casuistry, and the moral seriousness of its focus on self-reflection all deeply impressed me. I can trace a very serious change in my walk of holiness since reading this, and others like it. For that alone, it is a milestone.

But I ought to mention two or three other changes it wrought. It upset an instinctive subintellectual prejudice – I knew the Puritans were not chiefly mad bigots and, well, puritans, but I did not know that in the bowel. This book changed that – Watson and Sibbes and Burroughs and Baxter and Perkins and the rest loved their people, and that love is undeniable when you engage with their actual words. Whenever a book teaches you just sympathy for others, it is worthwhile.

The book has also altered both my communicative style, particularly in preaching – where John Owen is master of the technical clauses and Bunyan is a great exhorter, Watson is master of the simile, of painting the truth of the world – and, in conjunction with that, my pastoral concerns when caring for brethren in the church. What is the right balance between cheap grace and costly legalism? The pastoral casuistry of the Puritans provides the answer for me.

9.      Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke

To my shame, I finished this after Kirk. I had started the read-through beforehand, and had read long sections before, but I found Kirk easier. (He knows how to end a sentence, for one.) But Burke is the Master, and the new conservatism that derides him as a trimming Whig compromiser libels him and mutilates itself. Burke held a consistent view of politics and the constitution, both reasonable and mystical, his whole career – developed but never revolutionised. The Reflections are surely his classic of sustained argument. The Letters on a Regicide Peace are higher in polemic, the Speech on Conciliation with America more practical, the Tracts on the Popery Laws more calmly philosophic – but the Reflections, in their enormous scope and set of interconnected arguments, offer the nearest Burke ever does to a system.

So this provoked intellectual change, yes – but it also acted, for me, like an emetic and antibiotic all in one, purging old intellectual disease and strengthening my natural systems of thought all at once. There is such good sense and noble sentiment in this book that it hard to read five pages without needing to sit back to digest. The style is sometimes lengthy, but rarely actually difficult – it is a useful disciplinary tool for the lazy reader in that way. You will even find that the most ridiculed parts – such as his adoring praise of Marie Antoinette – are manful and concrete expressions of deep, true instincts.

This is also where, importantly for me, Burke best sums up his views of the English Constitution – of the “ancient rights and liberties” inherited by subjects of the Crown, not invented or caught in mid-air, of the careful mixture of parts and powers in the constitution, of the contract it forms between the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born. Though we cannot muster up old armies and refight the defeats of the past, Burke’s transtemporal commonwealth reminds us of Eliot, again: “There are no Lost Causes, because there are no Gained Causes”. If England’s constitution lives in us, it has life yet.

10.  The Need for Roots by Simone Weil

This is the most recent book to jangle me and shake me. I cannot guarantee now that it will stand the test of time – though I think so. But including it here is an important reminder that the power of books is of illimited potential in the reader’s life – just keep reading and you will be struck again by divine lightning, and again hear the music of the spheres move around you in your reading chair.

There is much to draw from Weil – a “genius akin to that of the saints”, thus the ubiquitous Eliot – even including her wildly ambitious economic and social plans, which at first seem impracticable but lodge themselves in the mind. Her time has not yet come, but may soon; she was a post-liberal in policy before post-liberals existed.

Yet for me it is the very first paragraph that told me that here was a philosopher for the ages. It set me on a better axis; the sun shone clearer as a result. It was as if she were the optician giving me a better prescription to see the matters under discussion – or like the glasses, sharp in their clarity:

The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.

Obligations are antecedent to rights, not just because they are social necessities and divinely ordained, but because they create rights. Rights can only exist as a result of obligations fulfilled by others – a redemption of the social contract! This was not only an intellectual jigsaw piece in the puzzle for me, but a one-paragraph re-envisioning of social relations, and that cannot help but change a man.

Here is a joy of the intellectual life, secured by the Grail quest for wisdom and discipline in setting yourself to your books, as impractical as they may seem to the average politician or corporate mogul: you will discover new books to change you all your reading life. You will find many friends in the shelves, each a walker with you to the strait gate, an august body of counsellors. Each of us ought to be able to list the books that have changed us; it is the civilising medicine given us by our ancestry.