I Believe in Books

Reading is a spiritual practice, whether or not the texts are sacred

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Welcome to Writer In The World, the Wednesday section of Aimee Liu’s MFA Lore. This curated collection of free essays on the writing life is written by acclaimed MFA faculty and alumni.

Aimee’s MFA Core essays on the craft and business of creative writing will drop each Saturday. And her free Metaphortography Writing Prompts post every other Monday.

As an MFA Lore subscriber you can join our community and elect to receive some or all of these sections each week.

I Believe in Books*

by jane wohl

My granddaughter, who is in year six at the primary school in her English village, participates in a Philosophy class in which the students, ten and eleven year-olds, engage in complex and difficult discussions. Recently her class was invited to hold their discussion on the stage in an auditorium filled with attendees at a Religious Education Conference held in a nearby town. (This being England and not the United States, there is no separation of church and state. Queen Elizabeth is, after all, called, among other things, “Defender of the Faith,” just as Henry the XIII was.)

These students decided on the question that they would be discussing: “Do people choose religion or does religion choose people?”

At the beginning of the discussion, the children introduced themselves and gave a small description of their own religious experiences. My granddaughter was the first to introduce herself. She gave her name and then she said, “I have my own religion.” She stopped there and did not elucidate further.

Later in the car on the way home, her father asked her what her religion was. She answered that she believed in books, and then she went on to say that sometimes she asked characters in books to help her if she had questions about something.

Aside from the fact that she is my granddaughter, and I might be prejudiced, I actually think that this is quite profound on a number of levels. First, when children read books that have characters who get themselves out of difficult situations, or solve interesting problems, they see examples of admirable behavior. I remember reading Little Women and thinking about a passage in which Jo asks her mother if she has ever been angry. Her mother answers that she is often angry but she has learned how to (and I am paraphrasing here) temper that anger, she has learned how to say nothing when what she has to say would be said in anger. This passage has stayed with me much of my adult life.

But we don’t need to read work as didactic as Little Women in order to learn something. Many children have learned to be resourceful by reading Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.

My granddaughter is also participating in a far larger community than she realizes, since the Abrahamic religions that predate Islam— that is Judaism and Christianity— have both been called “People of the Book.” Not only does this tell us that these religions have sacred texts, the Torah, the Bible, but also that participants in these religions understand that there is something important to be gained from reading, thinking about, and analyzing texts. Hermeneutics, or the analysis of text for meaning, was originally applied to sacred texts, the Bible in particular, and so what my granddaughter was saying about her religion being books connects her to a far older tradition.

When we think about the stories in the ancient texts, we think about what they teach us. What ideas can we take away from the story of Ruth, for example, or the story of the Good Samaritan?

My granddaughter’s response reminds me again, as if I needed reminding, that reading is critical, not only to developing analytical skill and understanding what stories have to teach us, but reading is critical to developing empathy. Several semesters ago, I taught three books as part of a second level writing course, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie, and Winter in the Blood by James Welch. I wanted to teach the two novels by Native American writers, but I wanted my students to have some background in Native American History before they read the novels, and therefore, I assigned the Dee Brown book.

At the end of the course, I asked students to describe what they had learned in the course of the semester. One student wrote that he had learned to think about his own opinions and to decide whether or not those opinions were based on fact or prejudice. I cannot think of a more important thing for a student to learn. While it is possible that this student would have learned that elsewhere, reading books that took him out of his own experience and showed him the experiences of other people, helped him become a more empathetic person.
So, I, too, believe in books.

---

jane wohl retired from Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program and from Sheridan College in 2015. Since then she has published her fourth collection of poems “Bound Feet” ( 2020). In 2025, she completed an MDiv degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and is now, once again, trying to answer the question of what to do with the rest of her life.

SAVE THE DATES!

This Saturday, March 28, at 9am PT

Take 5 Writing Workshop

This monthly workshop for Premium Subscribers allows us to take a close look at a different submission each month, tailoring feedback to the needs of each writer. To join, become a Premium Subscriber today!

---

Friday, April 3 at 11 am PT

Well Published: Author+Agent Jenna Satterthwaite

I’m pleased to invite you to my next Well Published, Live! with Jenna Satterthwaite . We’ll be chatting about her life and work as both author and agent! Please RSVP and tune in live using this link:

Well Published! is an occasional live/video feature of Aimee Liu’s MFA Lore, offering interviews with recently published authors and publishing professionals about the nitty gritty of getting… well published! Subscribe now to access the full archive of videos and other essential insights about creative writing and the writing life.

---

*Originally published in The Writer in the World, Oct 26, 2015.