If I’ve learned anything, it’s that good books don’t shy away from the ugly stuff of life. Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis), Beloved (Toni Morrison), The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver), and The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) — four of my favorite works of literature ever — delve into the layers and layers of evil that make up the fabric of life. Excess and emptiness, cynicism and the consuming nature of love, exploitation and trauma and hatred. Somewhere amid all this, not to mention the murder, the rape, and the torture, I think it must be common for any Christian to arrive at a point where they wonder, “Is it okay for me to read this?” or the old guilty-conscience standby, “Am I doing something wrong?” or perhaps more philosophically, “What is the point of reading this?”

I think we’ve all been given at least one answer, and it goes something like this: DON’T READ BAD BOOKS. And citing Philippians 4:8 sounds good until, like one clever commentator, you point out that Poe is quite excellent at writing about things both impure and unlovely. And it’s easy to tell people not to do something, but it’s hard to draw a definitive line in the sand where the bad books begin and the really excellent honest books that also happen (always?) to be written by people who are not Christians end. Or, at least, we assume they aren’t Christians — couldn’t possibly be, right? — because they refuse to surgically remove all the ugliness from life and paint in hopeful tones of thinly-cloaked prosperity gospel, tidy endings, happily ever afters, and, of course, a conversion to Christianity. 

Don’t read bad books? I disagree. Read good “bad” books. Read good books, read bad books, or bad “good” books if you really must. And, if you can bear it, don’t hide from the ugly things. Because I truly believe that the colors of beauty are sharper and deeper after we’ve become intimately acquainted with each shade of pain and evil this old, sad world will inevitably drag before our eyes. Because I believe that every book presents us with a terrible problem — the agony of loneliness, the cruelty of power, the isolation of a broken mind — and inherent in these great problems are ultimate solutions, according to the author. “Love is the answer.” “Truth is the answer.” “Redemption is the answer.” And all of them are right, even if they don’t know it, because they are all pointing to Jesus. 

God is in the bad books, the difficult books, the ugly sin-filled books. He’s in the love story of Paul D and Sethe, He’s the missing piece in Jay Gatsby’s Herculean effort to turn back time, in the gentleness of the Fox and the relentless pursuit of Orual and Psyche’s longing for home, and He is in every step towards healing that the ex-missionary Price sisters take away from a God made in the image of their abusive father. I think it’s scary, for us Christians, to read — to confront, to wrestle, to fall in love — with books so messy and painful because there is a sort of wild heresy in admitting that even though we have Jesus, we don’t have all the answers and sometimes. Maybe, there is truth — brilliant and beautiful — in books full of doubt and blasphemy.