signsoflifebooks.com

What are your favorite novels and movies? If you had to limit your picks to 5 of each, which would you choose? World Magazine asked this of several of their senior staff plus Christian leaders around the country. We find in the resulting lists lots of books that we love, and lots of books that we’ve grown to love since being motivated by the lists to read them. Here are three examples.

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, appears on several peoples’ lists. This is the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning story of an old rural Iowa pastor writing for his young son his “begats”, or the story of his forebears. There’s so much we’d like our children to know, so much that we must tell them, even though we fear that many lessons are only learned by experience and not from second-hand parental wisdom. Robinson tells those stories with skill and tenderness.

We weren’t familiar with the works of Walker Percy, but his Thanatos Syndrome made it onto several lists. Since then we’ve enjoyed his Second Coming, a delightfully crafted story that follows the path of a young woman moving from schizophrenia to sanity; and a rich and powerful middle-aged man who is going insane. Their paths cross somewhere in the middle as she helps him find love and God.

Cormac McCarthy is admired by several of the people surveyed, so we decided to give him a try. All the Pretty Horses is a coming of age story about 16-year-old cowboy John Grady Cole who leaves his post-WWII Texas home to discover life breaking wild horses on a hacienda in Mexico. McCarthy won the National Book Award for his exuberant if Faulknerian prose and for the stark dignity of his characters.

It’s a fascinating list, and we’ve only scratched the surface of the books. Under the film favorites you’ll find hilareous juxtapositions such as one person who loves both The Princess Bride and Hotel Rwanda, and another whose favorites include both Sense and Sensibility as well as Black Hawk Down.