During the pandemic I read a lot of fiction. My favorite novels have some element of spirituality. Some quality that makes me think, or rethink, about the divine, the spirit of the heart, a power greater than all of us.
“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.”
I begin with Shantaram because it is my favorite book of all time. Period. Really not a close call. I think of it often when my life is challenging. I look for the meaning that Lin/baba searched for and found in the slums of Bombay. The story is about convicted Australian bank robber and heroin addict escapes from Pentridge Prison and flees to India. It’s about love and beauty and poverty and wealth and the meaning of life.
Bewilderment by Richard Powers. My journey to this book started by listening to Richard Powers on the Ezra Klein podcast while running. I had not read his famous book the Overstory about trees, but I was taken with how he had radically changed his own life and the way he talked about nature and spirituality. And also, the basic premise of Bewilderment which goes to the power of fatherhood and also the way in which those of us who suffer from “abnormal” mental conditions perhaps see a truer picture of the world than those in the mainstream. It’s a heart-breakingly beautiful tale.
Two of my favorite books I think of together because they are both works of historical fiction (based on exhaustive research of the facts as much as possible) about the heroic resistance during World War Two.
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah is the story of two sisters in a quiet village in France. The younger rebellious 18-year-old sister joins the resistant outright risking her life again and again to save others. Her older sister Vianne must stay with her daughter while a Nazi officer moves in quite literally forcing her to live with the enemy. I listened to the book while running and honestly was heart-broken when it was over. It was so beautiful and moving.
Beneath the Scarlet Sky by Mark T. Sullivan is based on the true story of Pino Lella from Milan, Italy’s attempt to guide Jews to safety over the alps and then work for the resistance from inside the Nazi organization as a German soldier tasked with driving for Hitler’s left-hand man in Italy. Equally beautiful and moving.
Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois. Honroee Fanonne Jeffers is a poet by profession having published five collections of poems before writing this epic novel. Ailey Pearl Garfield is a present-day African American struggling to find her own identity and, in so doing, uncovers her family’s deep and shocking history. She must somehow learn to “embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story, and the song, of America itself.” It is a novel but also a poem that travels from Africa to today.
Siddhartha, the 1922 novel by Hermann Hesse, involves the search for enlightenment of the protagonist during the Buddha’s time. In some way’s it’s the story of Buddha told as a novel. I listened to it while running and found it enormously soothing and inspiring. Siddhartha makes all the mistakes we all make in life to try to find happiness, meaning, and enlightenment. His journey is long with much heartache and failure. But he ultimately finds his way home to the simple truth underlying all our human projections. It is lyrically written, simple and beautiful.
Ruth Ozeki also appeared on the Ezra Klein show. Ruth Ozeki is a Zen Buddhist priest. As Ezra says her Book of From and Emptiness, “is about Benny, a teenager who starts hearing objects speak to him right after his father’s death, and it’s about his mother, Annabelle, who can’t let go of anything she owns, and can’t seem to help her son or herself. And then it’s about so much more than that: mental illnesses and materialism and consumerism and creative inspiration and information overload and the power of stories.” This is another book, like Bewilderment, where the mentally “ill” child is really the only one who can see the truth. It gave me a whole different world view. It made me consider closely my attachment to the material. And it ultimately warmed my heart.
Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogwa (translated from Japanese) is an enchanting tale about a brilliant mathematician who has lost his short-term memory. He must pin notes to himself where he is. His caretaker and her 10-year-old son learn to love the Professor despite his handicap. The mathematician can still remember the distant past and has the intellect to solve complex problems. But in the end, all he, and we, have is the present.
The Song of Achilles based loosely on the Trojan War and the Iliad, Madeline Miller (an academic expert and professor on Latin and Ancient Greece) makes Greece in the age of Heroes fully relatable to modern times. It’s a story about fear, love, war, friendship and fate. An epic tale that touches the immortal among us.
…
Tom Matlack | Father, Husband, Sober Seeker of Spiritual Enlightenment
During the pandemic I read a lot of fiction. In general, my favorite novels have some element of spirituality. Some quality that makes me think, or rethink, about the divine, the spirit of the heart, a power greater than all of us. Here are a few of the ones I loved the best. Hope you will too.
hashtag#Fiction hashtag#Books hashtag#Spirit hashtag#Infinite hashtag#God hashtag#novels hashtag#writing
—
This post was previously published on LINKEDIN.COM.
***
You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.