The Bookshelf: Unputdownable

In my last Bookshelf, I wrote about books that I have found difficult—in notable cases, impossible—to finish. It seems fitting that I should turn now to those books that I have found so compelling that I could not put them down until I’d finished. 

“Unputdownable” is not a characterization that would describe most novels I read. Finishing a work of fiction is something I nearly always do, but I am not generally a very fast reader, preferring to savor novels by the chapter—and usually at the very end of the day, when the choice “read or sleep” presses in upon me. Literature is like fine wine—the better it is, the more slowly one should enjoy it. And at any given time, I am usually actively reading three or four books each day, at different times and locations for different purposes.

Hence the unputdownable novel has some quality of urgency, some arresting of one’s attention, some spur to know how things turn out—now! When in the grip of the unputdownable, one ignores other things—other books, other people, events in the news, daily tasks one should be seeing to, even meals and sleep in some cases.

When I was younger, fiction in the “spy thriller” genre sometimes grabbed me this way. Bestselling authors in this vein often succeed by employing a lean, fast-moving prose style in short, punchy books: painting scenes with rapid brush strokes, propelling the (often violent) action forward, and keeping the reader on edge with suspense. Jack Higgins’s Sean Dillon novels did this well, but one remembered nothing at all about them once the book was done. Pure brain candy. Tom Clancy’s early, weightier books could keep me turning pages compulsively too; I once missed a plane at O’Hare airport because I was so absorbed in one of Clancy’s novels that I didn’t hear the repeated announcements that my flight was boarding. And one weekend, at a gathering of extended family at my grandmother’s house when I was in my early twenties, I rudely ignored cousins, aunts, and uncles, and barely slept, so that I could finish Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park.

I could name other novels of various genres that seized my attention and wouldn’t let go—Richard Stark’s The Hunter, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, A. S. Byatt’s Possession—and their common quality is that urgent curiosity they impart: what will happen next? how will this end? For just this reason, even the best of them belong to a class of fiction I cannot imagine rereading. All of that urgency-to-know is strictly a one-time experience. The best were by no means guilty pleasures, nothing cheap or pulpy about them, but “an experience” was what they amounted to. Been there, read that.

Yet when I turn to consider the nonfiction or scholarly unputdownables I’ve encountered, my experience has been altogether different. Here the urgency-to-know being satisfied is of quite another kind. The books one can hardly bring oneself to close before the last page are revelatory, and the experience is one of immense gratitude for a new discovery, or a new way of viewing something important, or a new and deeper understanding of the subject at hand. C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which I devoured in one great gulp just as I was coming back to the faith in which I’d been brought up, was like this.

And one can easily return to these books as well, for the substantial nourishment one got from them the first time is a renewable resource. I remember, in graduate school one summer, reading Harry V. Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided in two or three afternoons, fully absorbed in its philosophical examination of the Lincoln–Douglas debates as I sat in the shade by a placid lagoon. It has repaid rereading as well, and is as fresh for me today as it was more than forty years ago.

I am sure I will one day reread Peter Harrison’s The Territories of Science and Religion (about which I wrote on a previous occasion), but perhaps after I read his other books that I eagerly bought afterward, as well as his latest. For I had a singular experience in reading Territories. I was far from home, at a conference at a five-star seaside resort (the lush accommodations on someone else’s budget), and I had brought Harrison’s book with me. My conference duties over, I dug into the book at poolside and quickly lost track of time and my surroundings. When a young friend of mine approached, I closed the book on one finger as we caught up with each other, but I could not resist diverting our small talk into telling my friend about the book and its fascinating argument. After a little while he got the idea that I wanted to get back to it!

I had a different experience with another unputdownable book. I read David Stove’s Darwinian Fairytales entirely at my desk, having come across it late in the last century in some manner that I forget now, when it was unavailable in the US except online in a PDF of its original Australian edition. So I read it in several extended sittings at my computer. (It was republished in 2006 by Encounter Books.) Stove, a brilliant philosopher of science, employed razor-sharp logic and a savage wit to the thesis that Darwinian evolution can explain much, if anything, about the present condition of the human race. As he said in his preface:

My object is to show that Darwinism is not true: not true, at any rate, of our species. If it is true, or near enough true, of sponges, snakes, flies, or whatever, I do not mind that. What I do mind is, its being supposed to be true of man.

Though he had an unfortunate blind spot where religion was concerned—being rather a knee-jerk atheist—Stove did me the inestimable service of saving me from ever taking Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, or their “sociobiology” seriously. Whenever I encounter a statement like “as evolutionary psychology explains,” I laugh heartily and think of Stove.

I like to think that Stove’s atheism would not have withstood the sound philosophic sense that Ralph McInerny made of natural theology in his Gifford Lectures of 1999–2000, titled Characters in Search of Their Author. Indeed, in his opening pages McInerny characterizes a philosopher like Stove very well, as “a thoroughly secularized fellow, most likely someone who in the mists of memory believed but has long since put away the things of a child, thanks to philosophy.” On whether natural theology—the examination of God’s existence and attributes by “use of our natural powers unaided by any supernatural revelation”—is a branch of philosophy, they certainly disagreed, but McInerny and Stove had in common the ability to write with sparkling clarity. McInerny, too, keeps his reader moving through his argument, turning the pages eagerly and quietly saying “yes, of course!” over and over.

Stove and McInerny swim, each in his own way, against the conventional currents of contemporary thought. So, as well, do Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, authors of Why We Are Restless. Bookstores are crowded with volumes on “what’s wrong with us these days?” But the Storeys, whose subtitle is On the Modern Quest for Contentment, examine our discontents with the seemingly unlikely help of four French thinkers: Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. The result, as Adam Thomas said in briefly reviewing the book here, is the thesis that “our practical reason, though capable of much, is not trained to perfect the kind of beings we in fact are,” and that we need to think of liberal education as (in the Storeys’ words) “an education in the art of choosing.” I would add that this beautifully written book is compelling reading, and that my only wish upon finishing it was that it might continue.

I will end where I began, with an unputdownable spy thriller—but this time a true one, and a long one with masses of detail and copious endnotes. It is Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case by Allen Weinstein, which permanently settled for all but the most ideologically unhinged readers the justice of the verdict that Alger Hiss, a cultured figure in America’s elite establishment—law clerk to Oliver Wendell Holmes, high State Department official—had been a Communist Party spy for Stalin’s Soviet Union. Weinstein had begun the project believing that Hiss had been falsely accused by Whittaker Chambers, the rumpled former Communist and writer for Time magazine. But after prising thousands of pages of documents out of the government with freedom-of-information lawsuits, Weinstein came to the opposite conclusion and buried Hiss’s reputation under wholly deserved ignominy. (Chambers was long dead when Weinstein’s book was published, but Hiss was still alive and claiming he’d been framed.) Best of all for readers, even in the absence of suspense about its conclusions, Weinstein’s tale is so absorbingly told that the book is difficult to close before the end.

Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes. What I find unputdownable, others will not, and vice versa. But just as a thrilling novel can keep us turning the pages, our interest rising all the while, so a work of history, philosophy, science, or politics can startle us with revelations of the truth that make us keep reading just as urgently.

Image by yossarian6 and licensed via Adobe Stock.