Today KAREN is sharing with us her love of words and books….

I was that somewhat annoying kid in school who loved the days teachers would hand us new books to read. I never skipped a page and always read ahead. I remember my joy finding out senior year I could be a part of the Great Books seminar because we finally had eight out of 700 some kids sign up for the class. I used to keep a list of all the classics kids should read and cross off each one I finished, and when our teachers handed us our summer reading assignments, I had to mask my excitement so I didn’t look too uncool.

For as much as I love design, style, and clothing, I love something else a little bit more. Powerful, true, ageless words in a book—those words that travel straight to your soul and stay there forever. They become a part of you. So here are my top three reads whose words have fashioned me in more ways than I can relay.

Jane Eyre

Growing up, my older sister was my main source of book recommendations. She knew what I would like and handed me this one summer. She knows me well. It’s long. The beginning is slow. But the last 50 pages of this book make the entire thing gold to me. How Jane could love a helpless, bald, blind crippled man blew my teenage paradigm of love.  And when she remarked, “I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh,” Charlotte Bronte made Genesis 2 tangible to me. I realized, I was taken from the rib of one guy, any less of a love looked paltry to me. Little did I know at that moment it would be Kyle William McGrady. Today, engraved in my wedding ring is Genesis 2:23.

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A Severe Mercy

Davy and Sheldon meet, have a storybook romance filled with sunset rides on the Blue Ridge Parkway, canoe floats under the moon, and long walks on the dirt roads of the Virginian countryside. They marry and long to have a lasting love unlike the many couples splitting apart or divorcing around them. As they search for that solution, Sheldon decides to write to a favorite author of his—C.S. Lewis, who in turn replies and the two begin a life-long brotherhood. This is a true story, and Sheldon and Davy have the most beautiful love story I have encountered. There is a certain kinship lovers of this book have, and if you have read it you know the importance of “the grey goose”, “a cup of water in the night”, and “the Shining Barrier.” I first read this when I was single, and it impacted me so deeply I knew the man I married would have to love this book as much as I or else we would not fully understand one another. This book has lasting effects on my marriage, for Kyle still brings me a cup of water in the night, and we omit from our lives all that leads to the marital distance Mr. Vanauken terms “a creeping separateness.”

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Orthodoxy

I couldn’t have made it through grad school and all its postmodernity without G.K. Chesterton. Don’t let the title of Orthodoxy turn you away. Chesterton wrote the book because he didn’t like people saying, “Believe in yourself,” for men like Napoleon and the Caesars had great belief in themselves and came to brutal ends. Naturally people would ask him “Well then, what should we believe in?” and because of that question he wrote this book. A few of my favorite quotes will give you a feel for his fortitude and his rhetoric, both of which you will enjoy as you read his work.

• “A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door.”

• “Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.”

• “It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”

• “But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theater in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”

G.K. Chesterton, how I could hug you! You speak to the mind and to the heart.

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I’d love to hear your thoughts and if you have any favorites of your own.

What books have you read that will never leave your soul?

– Karen