Suggested reading lists for book clubs
Rory Shiner and Greg Clarke / 30th June 2004 /
Rory Shiner's top fives
Top 5 Christian books
- Letters Along the Way by John Woodbridge and Don Carson
- Islam in Our Backyard by Tony Payne
- The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
- Knowing God by J.I. Packer
- The True and Living God by Kim Hawtrey
Top 5 fiction books (great literature that raises Christian issues)
- Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
- Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
- The Outsider by Albert Camus
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Top 5 books about books (Christian and otherwise)
- An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis
- Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor
- The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing by Leyland Ryken
- Poetics by Aristotle
- The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth
Greg Clarke's Five to Try
Greg Clarke, who heads up the Centre for Apologetic Scholarship and Education (CASE) at UNSW, and is a chronic bibliophile, has also provided us with a ‘Top 5’ for reading groups.
Greg writes:
For a ‘happening’ reading group, I think you need books that divide people, books that cause reactions, in order to make discussion work. People need to be able to talk about the books, not just read them. The books below are books that cause division, reaction and debate!
1. Anything by Charles Dickens
They are fantastic reads, the characters are so vivid as to encourage discussion of their virtues and flaws, and the stories urge one to reflect on big questions of justice, death, love, families, truth, etc.
2. Why I am not a Christian by Bertrand Russell
Guaranteed to make 75% of people much happier that they are believers, rather than in the pickle Russell gets himself in!
3. The Narnia Series by C S Lewis
CMS Missionary Cathy Smith uses this to read with a group of Japanese women in Japan. They find the English accessible, they love the English characters and scenes, and they learn about Christian ideas at the same time. She has found it very successful—people keep coming back. It's bound to work outside Japan, too!
NB: See the next issue of The Briefing (#311) for an article by Cathy on how she does this.
4. You just don't understand! by Deborah Tannen
A really good book on how men and women communicate differently. Sure to get a discussion going (even if the men and women don't understand what each other is saying). Slightly easier alternatives are: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (John Gray) and The Five Love Languages (Gary Chapman)
5. Books about ‘who we are’
Non-Australian readers can make substitutions—or find out who Australians are by reading these.
- A Short History of Australia by Manning Clark
- Down Under by Bill Bryson
- The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
For an impressive, left-of-centre approach to using literature in discussion of Christian ideas, check out Reading is Believing, by David Cunningham (Brazos Press, 2002). It examines the Apostles' Creed, line by line, and compares and contrasts the doctrines therein with literature and films.
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