Hail Poetry! Thou Heaven-born maid.

I don't know if it is a level of taste on my part or the part of Christian writers, but I have yet to find a well-written Christian book.  Note: not a book written by an author who is Christian, like Annie Dillard or Anne Lamott, but a book that would be placed in the "Spirituality" section of Barnes & Noble.  I have tried books with titles like, Making it Count!,  Set-Apart Femininity, Just How Married do you want to be?, Let Your Life Speak, Vintage Jesus, and countless Bible studies.  And don't even get me started on Redeeming Love. 

Now maybe it is just my hard heart, but there is one thing that all of these books have in common (besides Jesus).  They suck.  They are absolutely poorly written, have no merit as literature, and confuse the minds of Christians into thinking that watching Survivor is having the Devil take hold of your soul.  You should be spending that time praying.  (See Set-Apart Femininity, chapter 4). 

Never read this book.

I have been told by Christian books that my future marriage should somehow literally model Ephesians 5, in which the husband is the "head" and the wife is the "body."  I still haven't figured that one out, but Nathan and I have a good laugh over it every once and a while.  "But Nathan, I'm the neck!  That means I'm supposed to show you the best direction to look..."

Christian books have told me that going to the mall is equivalent to letting Hollywood be an idol for you, in which you go to worship by submitting yourself to the soft-core porn images in the shop windows.  I thought I was just going to the mall to buy shoes.

A couple summers ago while working at the library, I asked one of my friends which they found more beneficial: time spent memorizing poetry, or time spent memorizing Scripture.  Having a feel for her sense of Christianity, I already knew the answer.
"You're going to run into hundreds of people every day at this school that can quote entire books of the Bible to you.  How many of them have memorized Prufrock?"

Not that I necessarily agree with her entirely, but this conversation did get me thinking about how much more I have benefited spiritually from Milton, Hurston, Collins, and Oliver than whats-their-names-Christian-authors.  Beautiful writings have impacted me far more than any Christian self-help book ever has.

Read this book instead.

Thomas Becknell once stated on one of my papers for American Literature, "You are so good at recognizing God in literature."  This isn't saying that everyone can look at a short story by Hawthorne and see some sort of spiritual significance in it.  But.

I feel like, if your heart is in the right place, you start to recognize God through everything.  Literature is just one of them.  Faith enhances the beauty you originally found in your passion.  Literature for me.  Physics for Nathan.  Art for my friend Sarah.

You don't need some preachy stay-at-home mother/author to slap a long denim skirt across your face through their "inspirational novel" to get you to learn about femininity.  I would rather read For the Time Being.  And, my God, if you are a Christian and haven't read The Lord of the Rings through the lens of the struggle of the Christian walk, shame on you!

There was one last experience that put me over the edge in my decision to stray away from Christian books.  One time during a Joey Horstman class, the man himself went on a rant about bad books.  "I hate it when I tell someone I'm an English professor.  Then they say, they say, 'Oh, I have this great book you should read, about Da Vinci...It's by this Dan Brown guy.'  And so you feel a little guilty and decide to give it a shot.  And halfway through the piece of crap you start to get angry.  Because there are so many good books in the world and you're wasting your life reading garbage.  It's then you realize that, you're going to die soon, and you still haven't read Dracula." 

It was about 1/3 of the way through Set-Apart Femininity that I realized that I have still never finished Pride and Prejudice.