Sherry Chandler

Oh I do hate lists. My brain turns to jelly everytime I’m asked to make one.

But the temptation is sometimes great. Here’s a question from the cassandra pages that I invite you to consider:

If you were recommending, say, five to ten books you most felt would “explain America” to a foreign person who had never been here in person, what would they be? In other words, when the shoe is on the other foot, what fits - or is this, as I suspect, an impossible request?

This question was prompted by an earlier meditation on Naguib Mahfouz:

One thing my reading has shown me is how important it is to read widely within a particular context, keeping an open mind and an awareness of how much one doesn’t know. (Could an accurate picture of America be formed by reading three novels, even great ones? Ten? Which ones would we recommend?) My current reading of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, set in contemporary Turkey, has certainly been informed by some of what I learned about Ottoman and post-Ottoman culture from Mahfouz. And with their help, I’m well past the point of seeing that part of the world in black-and-white.

So, if you were going to recommend books to help some one like say the women of Tehran understand what it means to be an American, where would you start?

Responders at the cassandra pages have made some predictable choices: Whitman, Twain, Thoreau. And some not-so-predictable: On the Road, Ai’s Cruelty/Killing Floor, Shelby Foote’s The Civil War.

“American” is a big concept, and technically should take in Canada and Mexico at least. What’s more, I suspect each person’s America is unique. I would have no idea where to begin. But I know a few books I’ve read that have defined me to myself as an American.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Emily Dickinson
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
e e cummings
Eudora Welty, Thirteen Stories
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

And all this, if nothing else, shows me where my literary prejudices lie.

Though in all honesty, I’d probably also need to add some more popular stuff, like Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner (for the Perry Mason good-guy ethic), Zane Grey. Or perhaps better than Grey, Owen Wister’s The Virginian. (”Smile when you call me that.”) I wasn’t too big into Nancy Drew, though. But I love Ray Bradbury.

Any thoughts?

Link found by way of Heraclitean Fire, who has his own ideas about books that might define the U.K.

More from Bill McKibben’s The Christian Paradox:

I’m an environmental writer mostly. I’ve never progressed further in the church hierarchy than Sunday school teacher at my backwoods Methodist church. But I’ve spent most of my Sunday mornings in a pew. I grew up in church youth groups and stayed active most of my adult life—started homeless shelters in church basements, served soup at the church food pantry, climbed to the top of the rickety ladder to put the star on the church Christmas tree. My work has been, at times, influenced by all that—I’ve written extensively about the Book of Job, which is to me the first great piece of nature writing in the Western tradition, and about the overlaps between Christianity and environmentalism. In fact, I imagine I’m one of a fairly small number of writers who have had cover stories in both the Christian Century, the magazine of liberal mainline Protestantism, and Christianity Today, which Billy Graham founded, not to mention articles in Sojourners, the magazine of the progressive evangelical community co-founded by Jim Wallis.

Indeed, it was my work with religious environmentalists that first got me thinking along the lines of this essay. We were trying to get politicians to understand why the Bible actually mandated protecting the world around us (Noah: the first Green), work that I think is true and vital. But one day it occurred to me that the parts of the world where people actually had cut dramatically back on their carbon emissions, actually did live voluntarily in smaller homes and take public transit, were the same countries where people were giving aid to the poor and making sure everyone had health care—countries like Norway and Sweden, where religion was relatively unimportant. How could that be? For Christians there should be something at least a little scary in the notion that, absent the magical answers of religion, people might just get around to solving their problems and strengthening their communities in more straightforward ways.

But for me, in any event, the European success is less interesting than the American failure. Because we’re not going to be like them. Maybe we’d be better off if we abandoned religion for secular rationality, but we’re not going to; for the foreseeable future this will be a “Christian” nation. The question is, what kind of Christian nation?