Shaped by great books

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

It’s time now for a new occasional feature that’s built off of the same concept we publish each month in WORLD Magazine. It’s called Quest—conversations with thoughtful leaders about the books that shaped their thinking. 

Today, we begin with pastor, teacher, author, and the creator of our regular feature, Word Play: George Grant.

George, good morning.

GEORGE GRANT: Good morning.

MAST: George, before we dive into the books themselves, I want to ask: When did you first realize that books could shape a life?

GRANT: You know, I’ve been a reader for as long as I can remember. I lived in a pretty fractured, broken home, and books became sort of my refuge. 

So at first, books were more of an escape. While sort of the chaos was swirling around me, I would go off, find a book, and pour myself in. But it wasn’t long before I started to realize that all of that reading was helping me with school, and every time there was an assigned book to read, I’d already read it. And I started to realize, "okay, there is something here that is shaping me and shaping my world in a peculiar way." 

Long before I ever discovered Tolkien, Lewis, Sayers, Francis Schaeffer, Colin Thubron, Paul Johnson, all of my great literary heroes, I was already starting to soak in this richness, and I discovered worlds. 

I began to be discipled by the best minds with the greatest ideas, and I, quite frankly, loved it just for the joy of reading; but I could also see that it was changing who I was and what I thought about the world. 

MAST: Well, let’s get into your specific books. Let’s start with the first one on your list. Tell us what book you chose to talk about and what was going on in your life when you first read it.

GRANT: Well, the first thing I have to say is to narrow this down to just three books has been torture.

But I’m going to start with Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s The Soul Winner. I read it in 1971, and it was the day after I had made a profession of faith.

I’d gone to a stadium crusade and made a profession of faith. I had no Christian background at all. So on my way to swim practice...I went by this little Pentecostal bookstore and thought, you know, "I need to find out what it is that I’m supposed to believe now." 

That night before, I’d read the whole Gospel of John in a little pamphlet that I was given... So I walked into this bookstore, and being a broke high school student, I went straight to the sale table. And lo and behold, someone at this Pentecostal bookstore had made a terrible mistake and ordered a bunch of Banner of Truth books, and they were all on the sale table.

So I picked up Spurgeon’s The Soul Winner. I picked up Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor. And I picked up the Geneva Commentary on the Book of Judges, because I was interested in politics, and I thought, “Oh, Judges, here’s a book about Christian politics!” [laughs] I knew nothing!

But as I got into Spurgeon’s The Soul Winner, I was smitten by the comprehensiveness of the gospel. It was my introduction, long before I ever read Francis Shaeffer. 

There’s this one passage right in the second chapter that has stuck with me since Day One: “True conversion is in all men attended by a sense of sin, by a sorrow for sin, or a holy grief at having committed it, by a hatred of sin which proves that its dominion is ended, and by a practical turning from sin which shows that the life within the soul is operating upon the life without. True belief and true repentance become twins. No sinner looks to the Savior with a dry eye or a hard heart.”

That just sang right to my soul. 

MAST: Well I'm sure we could talk longer about that one, but time beckons, so let’s move on, painful as it may be, to Book Two.

I want to know—what second book did you choose, and how did this one—it sounds like you had a time of widening and deepening—how did this one do that for you?

GRANT: Yeah, the second book is — and this one was actually easy to pick. When I told my wife Karen that I had to pick three books, she guessed this one first. It’s G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. 

I read this about eight years after I was first converted, so eight years after I read Spurgeon’s The Soul Winner, and it was mind-boggling to me, for several reasons.

One is the writing is so incredibly beautiful and pungent. Chesterton is one of the most quotable people in the world. 

The thing that struck me most about this book, though, was: Here is a book confronting unbelief and paganism in modern culture and the dangers of losing our way in Christendom. 

So it’s an early book in the culture wars, and yet it is filled with gladness and joy. There’s none of this baptized-in-vinegar sort of stuff that you run into all the time with culture warriors. Instead, you have this sort of warrior poet that is full of gladness and joy. It’s funny at times, and one of the things that I learned from Chesterton is that it is possible to stand in the hardest fights that we have in our culture today with gospel hope and gospel joy. 

There are so many great quotations in this book, but the one that just hits me every time I read it is:

“Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.”

MAST: Well, Book Three. Tell us about that one. What does that add to this picture of you that we’re getting?

GRANT: Now, the book three was the hardest one to select, but it shouldn’t have been, because this is a book that I have been giving to graduating seniors at our classical Christian school every single year for the last 30 years. I scour the internet, I used to have to scour the world for antiquarian copies of Arthur Quiller-Couch’s The Oxford Book of English Verse.

I’ve often described this as a classical education between two pieces of cardboard. 

This is a survey, it’s an anthology that surveys the greatest poetry in the English language from the year 1226 all the way up to 1918. So you’ve got everything from Wordsworth and Keats and Coleridge, backwards to Milton, forwards to Hilaire Belloc, and G.K. Chesterton.

And it is a constant companion. And it is full of riches.

And so for me, this was a way to hone my English skills, to discover words that I’d never seen before and never thought about before, to begin to discover the cadence and the rhythm and the music of the English language. 

Reading poetry taught me how to read aloud. It changes the way I read Scripture. It changes the way I tell stories to my grandchildren. It changes the way I do “Word Play” on WORLD Radio.

So I find myself going back to those poems that I loved as a child:

“The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

And the highwayman came riding — riding — riding,

The highwayman came riding up to the old inn door.”

It was just stuff like that that just sticks with you and becomes a part of the way you think about the world. 

I needed poetry because I am someone who deals in nonfiction, someone who preaches, someone who teaches, and so I’m around a lot of prose and I’m around a lot of arguments and history. So poetry puts the song back in my heart.

MAST: Well, quickly, in looking back—and maybe we’ll get a little bit classical here and integrate—when you look at these three together, what patterns do you see?

GRANT: Well, I see, first of all, all three are deeply rooted in the rich traditions of Christendom. So Spurgeon, evangelism. Chesterton, apologetics. Q, the beauty of God’s created world and the great diversity of God’s people across all time. So there’s that.

The other thing is that all three are incredibly picturesque writers. 

And the fact that it is rooted in that great Christian notion of beauty, goodness, and truth bound together as a threefold cord—that, to me, is the perfect package.

MAST: George Grant, our resident World Radio wordsmith. 

George, this was a lot of fun and I’m eager to hear what our listeners thought of it.

GRANT: It has been my delight. I could, as you can probably tell, talk about books all day long.

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