Five Soul-Stirring Books

One of the most enjoyable parts of posting on Soul Shelter every week is the opportunity it presents to share the books and voices that mean the most to me. In that vein, today I recommend five books certain to stir and fortify the soul of any reader.

1. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis (1952)

Greek writer Kazantzakis’ classic novel recounts an unlikely friendship. Zorba is a sensualist and libertine who finds his every joy in earthly pleasures, and his friend “The Boss” is an intellectual, monkish type inclined to seek spiritual fulfillment through renunciation and detachment. Their colorful adventures on the island of Crete are an ongoing dialogue between body and soul, spirit and flesh, earth and stars. An unforgettable book.

I looked at Zorba in the light of the moon and admired the jauntiness and simplicity with which he adapted himself to the world around him, the way his body and soul formed one harmonious whole, and all things — women, bread, water, meat, sleep — blended happily with his flesh and became Zorba. I had never seen such a friendly accord between a man and the universe.

2. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck (1961)

Steinbeck is an immensely powerful writer celebrated primarily for The Grapes of Wrath, a fine book in some ways, but not his best by any stretch of the imagination. The Winter of Our Discontent, one of Steinbeck’s last novels, is often overlooked, although a year after its publication the author won the Nobel Prize in literature. Of the numerous Steinbeck titles I’ve read, this one rises to the top whenever I think of his work. It’s a gripping story about a hardworking grocery clerk who comes perilously close to (in the words of the first edition jacket flap) “tak[ing] a holiday from his own scrupulous standards…trad[ing], temporarily, as he thinks, ‘a habit of conduct’ for ‘a cushion of security.’” The novel explores “some of our shoddy [American] attitudes toward honesty and success … the loss of integrity in our world — the decline in our standards of personal, business, and political morality.” Given the current breakdowns on Wall Street, these themes resound with uncanny relevance today, but Steinbeck’s dénouement here is affecting and redemptive. Here’s the author’s own brief preface to the novel:

Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.

He meant America of 1961, but his words could just as well apply to America of 2008.

3. Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (1987)

Another somewhat overlooked novel by a celebrated author, Crossing to Safety is a beautifully intimate story about friendship, family life, ambition, and the ways our well-laid plans go sometimes aright and sometimes awry. Stegner explores the fifty-year friendship between two couples, the Morgans and the Langs, whose lives run parallel at points and at other points sharply diverge. Studded with deep, witty reflections on the most important matters in life — faithful friendship, work/life balance, sacrifice, aspiration, strength and loyalty in times of hardship — it’s one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read. Here’s the narrator, Larry Morgan, recalling his early days of overachievement:

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn an man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else — pathway to the stars, maybe.

4. Emperor of the Air, Stories by Ethan Canin (1988)

Ethan Canin published this riveting short story collection, his debut, at age 28 while simultaneously maintaining a medical school career. Twenty years later, Emperor of the Air endures as a contemporary classic. The jacket flap aptly remarks that Canin’s stories explore “the beauty and mystery in everyday existence: that rare knowledge, denied or pursued, that illuminates the soul … the startling moments when life opens up and presents itself to us.” That’s about as accurate a description of the book as I can imagine. Here’s a little sampling, one of many beautiful moments that permeate the book. It’s from the title story, whose narrator is an aging high school science teacher.

What would be left of the earth in a century? I didn’t think I was a sentimental man, and I don’t weep at plays or movies, but certain moments have always been peculiarly moving for me, and the mention of a century was one. There have been others. Standing out of the way on a fall evening, as couples and families converge on the concert hall from the radiating footpaths, has always filed me with a longing, though I don’t know for what. I have taught the life of the simple hydra that is drawn, for no reasons it could ever understand, toward the bright surface of the water, and the spectacle of a thousand human beings organizing themselves into a single room to hear the quartets of Beethoven is as moving to me as birth or death. I feel the same way during the passage of an automobile across a cantilever span above the Mississippi, mother of rivers. These moments overwhelm me…

5. Meditations from a Moveable Chair by Andre Dubus (1998)

On a July night in 1986 the writer Andre Dubus saw two cars stalled on I-93 north of Boston and stopped to see if he could help. While standing at the roadside he was struck by a car and lost one leg and the use of the other. A former Marine and long-distance runner, Dubus was a Zorba-like personality who’d always nurtured a powerful relationship with his own physical self. After that fateful night, he found himself confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Meditations from a Moveable Chair collects 25 Dubus essays, long and short, on the subject of the human soul, and the ways in which Dubus “finally, found joy in the sacramental magic of even the most quotidian tasks.” A devout — but by no means orthodox -- Catholic, Dubus writes very openly about matters of faith. Here’s a bit from his essay, “Sacraments”:

Between isolation and harmony, there is not always a vast distance. Sometimes it is a distance that can be traversed in a moment, by choosing to focus on the essence of what is occurring, rather than on its exterior: its difficulty or beauty, its demands or joy, peace or grief, passion or humor. This is not a matter of courage or discipline or will; it is a receptive condition.

Read well, be well.  

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