The 7 best books I read before I turned 25

Krish Kandiah has mandated 11 books every Christian should read before they turn 25, and Andy Goodliff responded with an alternative list. I will give you my own list. How can I resist?

Instead of legislating for the rest of Christendom though, I'll just tell you the most formative books I ever read as a handsome and hopeful youngster. I assume we're only interested here in theological-type reading, so I won't mention other formative literary experiences like reading Dr Seuss and Phantom comics and sci-fi novels and the articles in Playboy magazine.

1. The Psalms. Technically I didn't read this book but I sang it a lot in the church where I grew up, even before I learned to read. It was the best thing about charismatic/Pentecostal singing back in the 70s and 80s: most of the songs were direct quotations from the Psalms (often from the KJV). I never read the Psalms for the first time: even my first reading was already a re-reading of the things I'd heard and sung in church.

2. The Book of Proverbs. I went to a religious primary school where I was subjected to a regime of edifying and disciplinary verses from this book. I often read the book of Proverbs too, and hated it. Then, later in life, I loved it. (But by then it was too late: the book is addressed to the young, i.e. to those who cannot hear it.)

3. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress. We had a dramatised musical version of this called Enchanted Journey and I used to listen to it over and over on the old record player at home. My father taught me how to use the turntable and how to turn the record, which is how I got to nourish my young spirit on 1980s Bob Dylan and The Pilgrim's Progress. Later in primary school, the drama group did a production of Pilgrim's Progress. I was too young to get a part but I went to all the rehearsals and, I suppose out of sympathy, they let me be the Sound Effects Technician. What I still love about the book is the plain speech, the realistic dialogue, the journey narrative, and the lifelike novelistic characters. I think it was C. S. Lewis who said that other writers try to create people and end up with types, while Bunyan tried to create types and ended up with real people. In my opinion it is one of the most perfect books ever written in English; there's not a single thing you could change without diminishing it.

4. George Herbert, The Temple. I read and learned many of these poems during my early high school days. My mother was writing a PhD thesis on The Temple and she was always sharing some little morsel from Mr Herbert. I loved the poems because my mother loved them, and because of the plain style. Later I loved them because I discovered that they were true. The Temple is still the most precise and honest account I've ever come across about what the Christian life is really like (not what it's meant to be like: the problem with nearly all other books on this topic).

5. John Milton, Paradise Lost. Another 17th-century writer: you can see that it was a good century for me. After I finished high school I was given a Penguin paperback of Paradise Lost with a Blake illustration on the cover. I was told solemnly, "It's like an acid trip." I had been on some of those but they always left me feeling burnt out and disillusioned with the human race. Milton, who was himself burnt out and disillusioned, enlarged my vision of the human spirit and of the way history bears within itself the secret of divine providence. I liked the book so much I later wrote a PhD thesis about it. It's not my favourite book anymore, not like it used to be. The rhetoric is too high and holy. Really, Paradise Lost was written for angels, not mortals. Perhaps in the next world it will have the readers it deserves. As for me, I have gravitated back towards the plainer speech of Herbert and Bunyan, as well as other plain-style masters like Shakespeare and Hemingway and Julian of Norwich.

6. Augustine, Confessions. A few years after reading Milton for the first time, I read Augustine's Confessions. It produced a sudden change in me, more than than anything else I have ever read. Most books take years or decades to do their magic work upon the soul, but this one seemed to burn right through me and to change my view of everything. I left the Pentecostal church where I had grown up. I might easily have become Roman Catholic if anybody had suggested it to me at the time, of if it had occurred to me that Augustine was a Catholic. I thought of becoming a monk. I started reading theology, devouring thick books as if my life depended on it. I decided to go to university. I didn't really understand it at the time, but I had begun to dwell in the life of the mind (still today the only place I really feel at home).

7. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. This was one of the things I read after Augustine had made me hungry for books and learning. I had never even heard of Calvin, he came to me innocent and free of his own reputation. I chose the Institutes for one reason only: it was the biggest book on the shelf at the Christian bookstore, and I wanted as much knowledge as I could get my hands on. (It was the same thing that would later lead me to read Karl Barth, again an author whose name I had never heard.) I suppose because of all the 17th-century Protestant books I'd read, I found Calvin easy to understand. I could see where he was coming from. What impressed me most about the Institutes was its atmosphere. Calvin seemed to be forever poised in a kind of nervous tension between love and awe. With one hand he is grasped by majesty, with the other he is held by mercy. Calvin meant a lot to me: he was a help to me. He seemed to have an intuition for where the real problems lie. He had a knack for asking my questions before I had been able to put them into words myself. And although he didn't always claim to know the answers, he had a way of searching out the scriptures, opening up lines of inquiry, putting things into perspective and seeing everything in relation to the loving majesty of God.

On experiencing time travel while reading the morning paper

 Ordinarily I am a slave to the alarm clock. But even slaves deserve a holiday, and it is my custom on Sunday mornings to sleep in. When Nature has gently roused me from the world of dreams, I pull up the blinds and lie in bed a while longer with the sunlight pouring in through the window. It is the one day of the week when the sun is up before me and the birds are already awake and singing, sweeter by far than the mechanical chirp chirp chirp of an alarm clock in the dark. When I have enjoyed all this for a while, the sun and the birds and the bare branches of the maple tree against the sky, then I stumble out of bed and down to the kitchen and return with coffee and the weekend paper. Now comes the most important part of my Sunday ritual. I prop myself up with cushions – now I can see straight out over the rooftops and the powerlines and the distant trees and the very wide blue sky – and there, as comfortable as any king, I drink the hot black coffee and read the paper, looking up from time to time to bestow appreciate glances on the world outside my window.

But today something unnerving happened. I suffered a bout of time travel and I want to tell you about it.

I was in that dreamy state when you have just opened the paper and the first sips of coffee have just started to permeate the mind. I was not so much reading as letting my eyes slide passively from one news column to the next. I couldn’t say what it was about, I suppose the usual stuff, taxes and interest rates and people killing each other in far away places, when all at once my attention was seized by a particular phrase. It shocked me into a heightened state of awareness. Here are the words that had this electrifying effect on me: “earlier this month, on 6 July.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I remind you that we are now in the month of June. But the paper said “earlier this month, on 6 July.” How could any date in July be “earlier” when July is still a month away?

The words on the page disturbed me deeply. My skin prickled. Something very cold spread outwards from the pit of my stomach. I felt the bony fingers of the uncanny tightening their grip on my mind. I thought: I am in the wrong month; I have gone to sleep in the middle of June and woken up in the middle of July; I must have travelled through time; I have lost the month of June, it is gone forever. I thought: How could this happen? What could it mean? What will become of me now?

It took only a second for this unseemly chain of reasoning to develop. Then in the very next second the simple, reassuring truth dawned on me: It is a typo in the newspaper: a simple mistake: they said July when they meant to say June.

What a relief! Instantly the dread of time travel evaporated. I was back on the solid ground of Reality. I could almost have kissed Reality, I was so happy to see her again!

It is hard to understand how my imagination could concoct such a fanciful interpretation of a few words in the newspaper. Even harder to understand when you consider that newspaper typos are not a rare occurrence. In fact, I never read the morning paper without noticing ten or twenty small mistakes, a combination of typos and grammatical errors. I do not obsess about such things. I do not go out of my way to detect errors. I do not write letters to the editor filled with reproaches for misplaced apostrophes. I just happen to notice them, that’s all.

So you can see what baffles me. I have come to expect a certain level of error on any page of the newspaper. Why then did my imagination seize upon the most fantastical, most unlikely, most other-worldly interpretation of the mistaken word “July”? Why did I rush headlong to the conclusion that the paper was presenting me with evidence of time travel? It is too strange, I cannot explain it.

But the next part of my story is even stranger. I hesitate to speak of it at all. The contemplation of what comes next disturbs me. Again I feel a cold dread in the pit of my stomach. After I have written this confession I will have to take a walk, clear my head, try to forget the whole thing.

Here, then, is what happened. Explain it to me if you can.

Consoled as I was by the realisation that it had only been a typo after all, a simple misunderstanding, that there had been no time travel, that the paper had merely said “July” when it meant to say “June” – consoled by all this, and smiling a little at my own foolishness, I glanced back at the page. It said: “earlier this month, on 6 June.”

June?

I cleaned my glasses and looked again. I scrutinised the words with the utmost care. There it was, as plain as day. “Earlier this month, on 6 June.” There had been no typo at all, no mistake, nothing of the kind. There was no mention of July anywhere on the page. All my speculations about time travel had been based on – nothing! I had not misinterpreted a typo in the paper. I had created one. It was a projection of my own imagination. I saw a word that wasn’t really there and then supplied its fanciful interpretation.

I cannot say what any of this means, I cannot guess. Is this what madness is like, to fabricate interpretations around symbols that are not really there? Is this what it is like to be one of those ideological critics who project imagined grievances on to everything they read and then spin webs of meaning out of those projections? Is that what reading is always like for some people, a cold self-referential Gnosticism that sees July (and runs away with it) where the page says only June? Or should I learn a simpler moral lesson from my experience, not to have that last slice of pizza before bed on Saturday night?

Whatever it all means, I can only say that the mind is full of surprises. It is fearfully and wonderfully made. We tell ourselves that it will do our bidding. But it is the mind that bids and we who must reply.