I love reading, so when one of my friends started a book club, I was super excited to join! We meet once a month to talk about the book we read that month. Since I don’t want to forget about the book before we talk about it, I usually try to time my reading so that I finish around the time that we will have our meeting.
Talking about books is so fun because books often help me to think about life differently. Books are great to spark conversation, and I love talking about books with my friends. I like having interesting conversations, and I think conversations about books are almost always interesting. (Maybe that’s why I love my Shakespeare class so much—we’re basically just talking about literature together!)
One of the struggles of book club is when people don’t read the book. My friend is very kind and welcoming to people who haven’t read the book, but having people who haven’t read the book does change the direction of our conversation. At one book club, we had a slightly larger group (sometimes we just have 3-4), and only 2 of us had read the book. We tried to talk about it, but most of the people didn’t have any concept of what we were talking about, and the conversation strayed pretty far from topic. I enjoyed meeting those friends, but I especially love the book club when more people have read the book!
Usually, we meet for lunch or dinner and chat about anything while we eat. After we eat, we pull out the books and sometimes the leader has a summary and a list of questions for us to consider. We don’t usually follow the questions strictly, but it’s nice to have a jumping off point if we hit a lull in the conversation.
If you are Christians looking for some book club books, I will share our list and some of my thoughts about these books. We’ve read some really interesting ones! Or if you just like reading, feel free to check out some of these books!
1. The Jesus I Never Knew. By Philip Yancey. My favorite part of this book was when Yancey talked about the most awful event in human history—Jesus dying on the cross. If God could use that horrible event for good, then what can He do with the mess of my life? Figuratively, we live on Saturday (the day after Jesus died but before our eternal hope of heaven is realized). But we know that Sunday is coming. We know the end of the story. We can keep pressing forward in the waiting, knowing that God has so much more in store for us, and that future is more wonderful than we can imagine. God loves me, and He is walking with me through the hard times.
2. You Are What You Love. James K. A. Smith. Reading this book for book club was actually the second time that I read it, and I enjoyed it more the second time. I don’t know that I would recommend it since it’s a little bit dense, but it has some really interesting things to discuss. I especially liked thinking about what my life would be like if I got the thing that I most wanted. Would I realize that it wouldn’t actually be all I hoped and dreamed? I also enjoyed thinking about how my habits shape my loves. What’s the first thing that I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night? How do these things shape who I am and what I think about? How do these things show what I’m pursuing?
3. The Return of the Prodigal Son. Henri J. M. Nouwen. This book was one of the favorites from our book club, and we had a larger group. Since the book was about a painting, Matias had a copy of the painting, and he brought it to our book club and set it up on the table so we could refer to it while we were talking. Nouwen used the painting to illustrate things about the story, and it was beautiful to think about. The painting was one by Rembrandt with that same title.
The part of this book that stuck out the most to me was how similar I am to the older son in the story of the prodigal son. Maybe I haven’t run away to squander my family’s wealth, but I have struggled with annoyance and resentment when people don’t thank me or give me the recognition that I feel like I deserve. I have struggled with frustration when I try to do everything right, and no one seems to know or care. But if I am doing everything right for myself, then that is just as wrong. I want to make sure that I am offering every part of my life to the God who deserves these sacrifices.
4. Life Together: The classic exploration of Christian community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This book was a bit dense, but I really enjoyed how much Bonhoeffer emphasized loving and caring for our brothers and sisters in Christ. Many of us are not always easy to love, and it was a good reminder to love others even when they are unlovable (I am also often unlovable, but God still loves me!). Rather than complaining about people, I need to thank God for them. I am blessed with many incredible people in my life!
5. On the Incarnation. Saint Athanasius. This book was small but also felt a little bit dense to me. But I love thinking about how God came down to earth and took the form of a man so that He could save us. I like this book because it made me think about something incredible that I have grown accustomed to as someone who grew up in a Christian home.
6. The Liturgy of the Ordinary. Tish Harrison Warren. I actually recommended this book, and I really enjoyed reading it again. I like Warren’s practical perspective on the little things in our lives and how they reflect what we believe. For example, she talked about how waiting in traffic teaches us a lot about waiting in general. Waiting in traffic is something that’s out of our control; all we can do is sit there and wait. Or worry and wait. Or get frustrated and wait. Or pray and wait. Or give thanks and wait. I hate waiting. I may have mentioned that before. I don’t usually have to wait in traffic since I usually take the subway, but I have had to spend a lot of time waiting for buses or trains. That short period of waiting is a reminder of how little control I have in my life.
I also hate waiting for bigger things. I don’t mind waiting for something fun that I know will happen—in fact, I kind of enjoy that. But I don’t like waiting when I don’t know if the thing that I want will ever happen. There are some things that we don’t know if they will ever come. How I wait in the small things, like being stuck in traffic, reflects the struggles of my heart when I’m waiting for bigger things. In those moments, do I choose to give thanks and praise God for being good even in the waiting? Or do I choose to worry and fret and honk my horn in annoyance, not because it does anything positive (in fact, it probably contributes to an overall negative environment), but because I want to express my irritation to everyone around me? I want to pay attention to how I wait.
7. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Leo Tolstoy. This book was pretty sad, and it came at an interesting time. The morning of our book club, I found out that my grandma was put in hospice, and she passed away the next week. Another friend had a miscarriage. Another friend lost her aunt. Around the time that my grandma passed away, a student wrote in her homework assignment about giving advice to her future struggling self, that her dad had passed away two weeks ago.
That’s a lot of death in a short period of time. Talking about death is not usually a highlight for most of us, but it was interesting to talk about Ivan Ilyich’s death (don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler—it’s in the title), especially since he didn’t have a happy death. His death was slow and painful, and he was surrounded by people who didn’t really care whether he lived or died. One of his struggles was also about whether or not he had lived a good life while he was alive. I won’t tell you what he decided, but we had some interesting discussions about his thoughts.
I am really thankful for our book club and the chance to talk about interesting books with interesting people. We’re reading Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis next, and I’m looking forward to having more good conversations about that!
Let me know in the comments if you have any other recommendations for our book club! We usually focus on theological books or fictional books with a Christian theme, but I read lots of other books as well!