Truth or Fiction? Part 1

My most recent fiction reading; despite great reviews on Amazon.com, I was not enamored of itI became a fan of Christian fiction very early. I grew up as a missionary kid on an island off the coast of Malaysia. There was just one little Christian bookstore on the island, conveniently located near our church. I loved it when my mother took me to visit that little room crammed with shelves and books. I still remember the life-changing discovery sometime around 1970: I found on those shelves a few dusty paperbacks that fictionalized Bible stories, and from then on I avidly read every one I could get my hands on.

It didn't take me long to make the leap from avid reader to aspiring writer. I soon imagined myself a future author of re-imagined Bible stories, adding details and characters and explaining motives. I wanted to create these delicious plots and inspiring dialogue!

I was about 10 years old as I planned for my first Biblical novel to be on the story of Esther. I remember getting started in my little lined-paper exercise book with the gold-colored spiral binding, writing carefully as I set up the scene and recorded the dialogue and got the story going. I probably had five or six pages completed when I stopped to read the biblical story straight from the Bible, just to make sure I was getting my facts right.

It was a shocking experience. Instead of the "beauty pageant" I had imagined Esther being a part of, I realized that she actually auditioned in a different way, spending a night with the king and impressing him so much that he set the crown on her head. I knew I was too young to describe such a scene, let alone imagine it. And so ended my first and last effort at writing a biblical novel. Sigh.

I remained enchanted, however, by Christian fiction. I read Christy by Catherine Marshall several times, gripped by her description of the Appalachian people and Christy's struggles as she lived and worked among them. Marshall's descriptions were so vivid that, when I finally got to visit the Appalachian valleys a few years ago, it was exactly as I had imagined it from halfway around the world, reading a book.

And there were other excellent books that showed up in the little one-room bookstore. I read "Two From Galilee" by Marjorie Holmes, and the Janette Oke books. Later on (after I came to the United States), I bought every Bodie Thoene book I could find, "seeing" her setting of Israel from my memories of visiting there with my family when I was eighteen. I was disappointed when her husband's name started showing up on the book covers with Bodie's. The writing seemed to get more technical and dry with that shift, the descriptions of wars becoming much more detailed when I was more interested in plot and relationship.

I branched out from Christian fiction somewhere along the way. I went through a "bodice-ripper romance novels" phase as a teenager. During the year I lived in Finland as a young adult, I got hooked on Nevil Shute books, which tended to focus on aviation and Australia. And during my teacher training I developed a great love for children's literature and all the wonderful stories to be read there, particularly in the Newbery Award-winning books.

I could lose myself in fiction. I loved the stories. I loved the bits of romance. I loved the settings. I loved the dilemmas and solutions. I learned a great deal from reading of these imaginary people dealing with -- well, mostly -- real-life situations.

Sharing a condo in California with my brother for a while after we'd both gone to graduate school, I remember comparing reading preferences with him. My brother enjoyed non-fiction books far more than I did. If he could read something about philosophy or religion, he was happy. He probably read every book by C.S. Lewis, particularly relishing those that dealt with philosophy and apologetics.

But my brother was not solely into the heady stuff of the Thinker. His "guilty pleasure," if it could be called that, was any English novel by P.G. Wodehouse. He continues--last I knew--to reread the murder mysteries by Dorothy Sayer, another Christian novelist who doesn't happen to write Christian fiction (in terms of the genre). He and I shared a passing affection, also, for novels about the Church of England written by Susan Howatch, the British author, after her conversion: Glittering Images, Glamorous Powers, Absolute Truths, and others.

So, with all these years of reading good (and sometimes not-so-good) fiction, it was rather a shock when my reading habits took a sharp turn.

[to be continued]