What's The Most Important Book You Ever Read?

There's only so many chances you have to change your life

Yesterday, I started preparing my fall curriculum. I know what I’m doing for two of my classes, but the third is wide open—which is where you come in. I’d love if we lived in a world where people read eagerly, regularly, and thoughtfully. Instead I’d be lucky if we can even get through one book a year. Since I can’t go for breadth, I’ve decided to go for depth. I expect them to read outside of class, sure, but in class, we read together, sometimes just a paragraph, and we spend the full hour (middle schoolers) or ninety minutes (high schoolers) unpacking that passage.

What we lack in range, we replace with rigor. I’ll hold to that philosophy and encourage you to do so, too. Over a paragraph, you’d be surprised what comes up.

What ideas rise to mind? What thoughts, questions and criticisms emerge? We go slow in an age of quickness and haste. We meditate in a time of anxious urgency.

Based on what comes up, I offer the students supplemental readings, but we’ll keep coming back to the same book each week, over the year. Which is why the book I choose is so important. I’ll be teaching one class of middle school boys this fall, in which we’ll be reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I’ll be teaching at least one co-ed high school course, the AP Halaqa. If there’s enough interest, I’m going to add a course for college students, but here’s the thing: I don’t know what to assign them.

What would you assign them? What kind of work would challenge them, benefit them, improve them, tax them, intrigue them, and keep them coming back?

Or maybe put it this way: What’s the most important book you’d ever read… that young men and women of faith would benefit from reading in this time in their lives?

There’s your first thought—and then your second.

There’s a Logic to These Things

For the middle schoolers, The Autobiography of Malcolm X makes a lot of sense. Young teens on the verge of adulthood, about to become men, they should think deeply about courage, masculinity, rigor, conformity, inferiority complexes, race and religion, culture and calling, how to stand up, how to responsibly stand apart, all while receiving some immersion in the long history of Muslim America — and America, too. Of late, a lot of young folks are more and more disillusioned by our country, which is hardly specific to one faith community. Hint: Nothing works, lots of politicians stink, and life seems ever harder and tougher. Yet I can reject apathy without endorsing conformity; I can reject listlessness without preaching blindness.

Malcolm X, may God give him paradise, rose to his moment. He actually saw beyond it, too, which is rare, but that quality is what makes him so captivating, even now.

With the high schoolers, I’m reading (so far) the sixth lecture from ‘Allama Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. I want them to experience something of the history of the recent Muslim-majority world, putting the colonial, post-colonial and anti-colonial into conversation with their Western reality, so that they can understand that the harshness and pain of this moment — from Gaza to Turkestan, from Kashmir to Sudan — is (unfortunately) not an anomaly… but, of course, not to lead them to resignation and exhaustion. But instead to help them think not only more courageously, but more critically and creatively, to help them see that what they’re called to do is not as clear, simple, or natural as they might think.

I’d also like them to get used to a complex, sometimes incredibly challenging text, understand how to bring faith and the present into conversation, balancing history, ancestry, and contemporaneity in dynamic, responsible ways. And I want them to learn how to do that together, to see themselves as not just inheritors of a past (that’s middle school) but participants in a present—and maybe that’s where the college course goes next: What would it mean to contribute? And what could help you understand how to contribute?

What would you assign college students? What texts, ideas and concepts feel most necessary and most important? What thinkers and philosophers and leaders inspired, challenged, or motivated you at that age? Maybe even, looking back on your life, what do you wish you’d known? And let me know!

Next Up

Of course, I’m reading too—I just finished Jim Holt’s When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought. The fifty percent I understood? Brilliant! I’ve just started on

Christopher Hayes

’ study of the attention economy, which is even better than I expected (The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource). Non-fiction is great. But let me also give a shout-out to one particular teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School; when I asked her, last year, what her students were reading, she made a case for the importance of fiction—and pushed me to read Daniel Mason’s North Woods.

It’s the first work of fiction I’ve read in a long time and… well, put it this way: I’m so glad I did. I missed that feeling, when you stay up late, when you’re tired, you’re exhausted, but you just can’t put it down, because you have to know, and even as you rush to the end, you’re awed by the work that goes into the means to that end, the craft, the nuance, the beauty, the richness. So much so that I got started on a very different kind of fiction next. Instead of doom scrolling, I’m trying to read the gloomy, doom-y story of carnivorous-plant-apocalypse, Mira Grant’s Overgrowth, which left me uneasy (it’s sci-fi horror) but similarly compelled…

On the subject of sci-fi apocalypses, well, we’ve got one, too!

By the end of this week,

Bespoken Live

’s Joey Taylor and I will release our third episode of our new podcast, Avenue M, “Tyrants and Tyrannosaurs,” featuring the incredible dinosaurologist, fellow Midwesterner Steve Brusatte, who isn’t just an advisor to the Jurassic World films… but also wrote two incredible books, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs—a New York Times bestseller that I highly recommend!—and The Rise and Reign of Mammals, with a third book on birds coming very soon.

This was yet another great conversation, which started with the natural question—which dinosaur would a middle-aged man have most to fear from?—and went in some wonderfully unexpected directions. I can’t wait to share it with you. Of course, I could always assign the college students Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, which would be weird, but it might also provoke some pretty interesting conversations on the line between possibility and principle, on invention and iniquity, on asking what we are meant to contribute, what our responsibilities are… but, yeah, I guess what I’m saying is, I want your creative suggestions. Isn’t that the mark of my halaqas?

I want to give them something unusual and memorable. Even if it’s also formidable. We are made to do hard things, or at least, if you’re taking my classes, you should be so inclined.