Lenten Reading

A literary reading list

Breviary France, ca. 1511 Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.8. fol. 209v

I like to choose a book to read for Lent that will focus my mind on the season. And yet I also tend to think outside the box and read literature more than devotional works. Here’s a quick list I started to share on a social media post and decided to repost here.

Most of these are books I have read during Lents in the past two decades since I started the practice of focused Lenten reading. A few are books I’ve read at some other time that I think would be good Lenten reads.

I’ve added some notes to some of the books because they were already written elsewhere. But in the interest of actually having this list published now and not sometime months from now, I’m going to leave off trying to add a note for every book on the list and am going to just hit publish, while telling the perfectionist voice in my head to go take a hike. I might add more books and more notes at some point in the future. Maybe.

This year I’ve got some poetry books in my bedside pile, but mostly I’m hoping to focus on Sigrid Undset’s four-part novel The Master of Hestviken (aka Olav Olav Audunssøn), which Saint Edith Stein used to give copies of to her students and friends.

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Poetry

The Word in the Wilderness by Malcolm Guite. A poem a day with reflections from an Anglican priest.

David’s Crown by Malcolm Guite. Poems inspired by the Psalms.

The Stream and the Sapphire, poems by Denise Levertov, a Catholic poet. I read this book for Advent, but it would be a good Lenten read as well.

The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s magnum opus, a meditation on time and midlife and prayer and regret and hope.

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Fiction

Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas. A widow who cleans the parish rectory but is detached from community, finds herself drawn into helping people despite her reluctance to get involved. She muses on her past. Really beautiful depiction of grace in an ordinary life.

In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden. A late vocation to religious life enters a Benedictine monastery in England. A beautiful depiction of life in the monastery.

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy by Rumer Godden

Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. A beautiful story of sin and redemption set in medieval Norway.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. A story set in Mexico at a time when the Catholic Church was outlawed. An alcoholic priest tries to run away, but finds himself serving the poor despite his personal sins and failures. This is a story about how God’s grace works through imperfections and weakness.

The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. Historical novel set in 17th century Italy. A young peasant couple wants to get married but a local nobleman intimidates the priest into refusing to marry them. They run away from this lecherous nobleman who wants to ravish the young woman, have a long separation. There is a famine, a war, and a plague. Eventually they are reunited. There’s a miracle conversion, a holy bishop, and a beautiful meditation on sin and redemption and the sacrament of matrimony.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I first read this during the Lent right after I’d had my fourth child. I was so thrilled to finally make it all the way through this book that I had not finished—had barely even started—in college. However, my postpartum brain was so foggy, that I had almost no memory of the story when I came to read it a second time years later. It’s a murder mystery and family drama and a contemplation of good and evil and a wrestling with God. I highly recommend the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation as being extremely readable and much more accessible than the Constance Garnett, which was what I was assigned in college.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I did not understand this novel the first couple times I read it, but it has grown on me over the years and I love it.

Viper’s Tangle by François Mauriac.

Silence by Shasuko Endo.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

Come Rack Come Rope by Robert Hugh Benson

The King’s Achievement by Robert Hugh Benson

By What Authority by Robert Hugh Benson

The Dean’s Watch by Elizabeth Goudge

Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge

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Nonfiction

Friendship with Christ by Robert Hugh Benson

Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection by Pope Benedict XVI

Imitation of Christ

Letters of St Francis de Sales

Art and Faith

Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle

Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura

Art and Faith by Makoto Fujimura

Silence and Beauty by Makoto Fujimura

Biographies and Memoirs

I don’t usually love memoirs and biographies as a general rule, but all of these were most excellent and have stayed with me and formed me.

He Leadeth Me and With God in Russia by Walter Ciszek, SJ

The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai

A Song for Nagasaki by Paul Glynn, SJ

The Smile of a Ragpicker by Paul Glynn, SJ

Charles de Foucauld by Jean-Jacques Antier

Soul of Saint Elizabeth Seton: A Spiritual Portrait

Thomas Aquinas, Spiritual Master Robert Barron

Are you reading anything for Lent?