Walking a Literary Labryinth

Description

Nancy Malone’s thoughtful and poignant novel asks us to consider how our identity and our capacity to connect to others is shaped by the literature we read.

Who of us doesn’t have a list of books that changed our life? Reflecting on her own reading life, Nancy Malone examines the influence of reading in how we define ourselves. Throughout, she likens the experience of reading to walking a labyrinth, itself a metaphor for our spiritual journey through life. The paths within the labyrinth are not straight, but winding, and in the end, it is not the small circle in the center that defines the self, but the whole grand design of the labyrinth—every experience, every person we meet, and every book we read—that makes us who we are.

Malone draws from diverse sources, both spiritual and secular—Virginia Woolf, Saint Augustine, E. E. Cummings, Paul Tillich, Nadine Gordimer, George Herbert, Sue Grafton, Henry James, George Eliot, James Joyce, Patrick O’Brien, E. M. Forster, Franz Kafka, Elie Wiesel, Margaret Atwood, and Tom Wolfe, to name a few. Her thoughtful and beautifully articulated examination of influential books takes in a broad range of subjects, including childhood reading; books as sacred objects; reading and social responsibility; “dangerous” reading, which challenges us to examine our prejudices and beliefs; poetry; and erotic literature. And Malone has compiled a recommended reading list to inspire readers to seek out the unfamiliar or return to old favorites.

In Walking a Literary Labyrinth, Malone invites all us readers, of every religious tradition, or none, to consider the influence of reading in our own lives—how and why particular books stay with us, how they shape us, and how they enlarge our humanity.Walking a Literary LabyrinthPrologue

First Steps to Interiority
Reflection. Take And Eat: The Act of Reading

“Take And Read”
A Turning Point
Reflection. Sacramentality: The Book and the World

“Not by Bread Alone”
Spiritual Reading in a Literary Desert
Reflection. Pilgrams and Monks: Reading and Praying

The Circle Widens
Theology as Spiritual Reading?
Reflection. Pleasure: Wasting Time for the Sake of God

Recovering The Self
Stories: Fact and Fiction
Reflection. The Grammar of The Spirit

Alone at the Center?
Intimacy in Reading and Prayer
Reflection. Poetry: A Deeper Intimacy

Our Bodies, Our Selves
The Erotic in Spirituality and in Literature

A Literary Contemplatio ad Amorem
Imagination: Faith, Hope, and Love

Epilogue
“Give Beauty Back”: An Apologia

Recommended Reading
Fiction
Short Pieces That Have Made Me Laugh
Nonfiction
Biography and Autobiography
Spiritual Reading and Theology
For the Theologically Minded

Index

Nancy M. Malone, O.S.U., is an Ursuline nun with a degree in theology from Harvard Divinity School. She was an editor at Religion and Intellectual Life and a coeditor of Cross Currents.US

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