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Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading

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Walking A Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading by Nancy Malone

Our journey through life can be enlightened with pleasurable nuggets worth recording. Recording the remembrance of a literary life was done ever so eloquently in the name of Walking A Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading as told by Nancy Malone, an Ursuline Nun with a voracious reading habit. This memoir is appealing and quite interesting as it delves into a wide range of books giving us an inside view of a woman who not only shares her passion for books but conveys a definitive analogy for self awareness in literacy. The bibliophile that I am drew me to this book, and I'm glad that I did! It spoke of the need to continue to keep books at the forefront of my existence...one that harkens me to not forget why having a list of books at the ready to reinforce how important the reading life is. The fact that the author draws from diverse and far-reaching sources to compile this narrative gives it a flavor that is unmistakable. The spirituality and secular ambiance of the author's peripheral vision should give readers viable reasons to believe that the substance therein is both qualitative and quantitative.

Walking A Literary Labyrinth is a structured book. Follow the author as she examines the role that reading plays in giving meaning to the worthiness within ourselves as it pertain to those books that makes a difference in your life. In allowing the title to breath life into what is written, she likens the experience of reading to walking a maze of symmetrical meanderings where each book is a metaphor for life's experiences. In other words, you ARE what you read. Know too, that the paths within this maze, or labyrinth as the author puts it are not straight that leads invariably to a small circle in the center that is definitive of the self. This `self-awareness' through reading, the author opines is what makes us who we are. As I read the book I truly was amazed at how Ms Malone extended me the welcome to examine and consider how the influence of reading selected books can have staying power to shape our thoughts, and mold us to enlarge the humanistic value of knowledge. As indicated elsewhere in this review, the author's insightful and articulation of influential books covers a broad range of subjects, including her childhood readings; books that are iconoclastic in nature, bordering on religious objectivity; reading and social responsibility; "immoral" reading (that challenges us to examine our predilection for erotic literature, and the joys of poetry.

The book is arranged in eight beautiful chapters, each with a reflective analysis relative to the topic being discussed. The Prologue and The Epilogues are congruous to all that has been conveyed and gives the reader extra-added substance with a well endowed recommended reading list. The aforementioned she sections off by giving books that have shaped her life in some manner, i.e., Short Pieces That Have Made Me Laugh; Biography and Autobiography; Spiritual Reading and Theology; Fiction; Nonfiction, et al. The book includes a bibliography to inspire readers to seek out the unfamiliar or return to old favorites. In Walking a Literary Labyrinth, Malone invites readers of all religious and secular traditions to consider the influence of reading in their own lives, and let it be the barometer to measure the worth you gain from books. This is an excellent read!

WALKING A LITERARY LABYRINTH is a book I stumbled upon accidentally, but it is one that seems tailor-made for people like me who love to read and wish to incorporate their reading into their spiritual lives. The author, Nancy Malone is Roman Catholic nun and a member of the Ursuline order. In the book we meet the author as a child and as the book progresses we learn about her progress in religious life. We also discover how reading has touched her life. She shares the wisdom she has acquired along the way, and offers some reflections to help reading buffs see ways in which literature can help us understand our world and grow closer to God. The literature that inspires her spiritually is vast. Sources include classic writings of Christianity, classic and popular pieces of literature, biographies, and a variety of non-fiction. Since she is a Roman Catholic nun, her insights are very Catholic, stemming form her faith tradition, but are catholic in the universal sense of the word. The literature that nourishes her spirituality leads her to God and helps her to find God in new ways. She invites readers to do likewise.

Sometimes I hear some people whop read books on spirituality complain that the book is the same information, just a different author. Nancy Malone's book is fresh and offers its readers a new way of drawing closer to God and seeing God in a new way.

"She must be quite a character," my husband commented and that is probably true, but while Nancy Malone's gentle reflection on the act of reading is personal, she does not dominate the pages. Here is a voice carefully paying attention to how and why we read and what happens to us when we do. It is not abstract, but tangible; her story is that of Catholics coming of age in the last 50 years. I find myself saying, "Ah, yes, this is how reading illumines my life." She advocates reading for the sheer pleasure of it, and that's what reading Walking a Literary Labyrinth has been.

WALKING A LITERARY LABYRINTH is a book I stumbled upon accidentally, but it is one that seems tailor-made for people like me who love to read and wish to incorporate their reading into their spiritual lives. The author, Nancy Malone is Roman Catholic nun and a member of the Ursuline order. In the book we meet the author as a child and as the book progresses we learn about her progress in religious life. We also discover how reading has touched her life. She shares the wisdom she has acquired along the way, and offers some reflections to help reading buffs see ways in which literature can help us understand our world and grow closer to God. The literature that inspires her spiritually is vast. Sources include classic writings of Christianity, classic and popular pieces of literature, biographies, and a variety of non-fiction. Since she is a Roman Catholic nun, her insights are very Catholic, stemming form her faith tradition, but are catholic in the universal sense of the word. The literature that nourishes her spirituality leads her to God and helps her to find God in new ways. She invites readers to do likewise.

Sometimes I hear some people whop read books on spirituality complain that the book is the same information, just a different author. Nancy Malone's book is fresh and offers its readers a new way of drawing closer to God and seeing God in a new way.

My New Years resolution for 2005 was to read more in a disciplined fashion. I did read more in a sytematic, disciplined way. But by the end of 2005, I was beginning to wonder if I was reading intelligently. I was also consigning myself to the possiblity that I just might not be able to read every book ever written and might have to learn how to better select what books I should read.

Thus my resolution for 2006 is to keep the quantity up, while improving the quality. With that in mind, Malone's Walking a Literary Labyrinth was my first title to read for 2006. I wanted to read about the act of reading.

Did Malone's work help me? Yes, because it allowed me to reflect on just what role I wanted books, and reading them, to have in my life. As she wrote about the books that were important to her and why, I was able to reflect on what books were important to me. More significantly, I was able to think about what books I could read that in later years I could say, "Reading that book really make a difference in my life."

As a result of reading Malone's books, I haved refined my 2006 reading resolution to: Read books that will really make a difference to me. In the past, I tended too much to read things simpy because they were deemed important. In other words, I read to have read. Now I'm focusing on, read to enjoy and grow! Malone's books was a good step in this direction.

This is a finely wrought, pilgrimage-like memoir of a book by Nancy M. Malone called Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading. She's a capaciously well-read Ursuline nun of keen empathy and insight who had a mid-life problem with alcoholism and develops a kind of 'lectio divina" approach via "slow, attentive, repetitive reading" of key passages to a whole range of interesting works, sacred and secular, Augustine to Gadamer and Atwood et al. At the core of it is the conversion experience of recuperated interiority to a "God who dwells with you, as you." Funny take on Harvard Divinity School in the late 60s...and probing Bridgeport and Bronx details. A splendid, keenly focused book, worthy of the close appreciation (reading, meditating, praying, loving) that it advocates and enacts.

Walking a Literary Labyrinth is a life-changing book for some readers, a "yes I recognize that feeling" for other readers and a "talk about stating the obvious" for others. As a Vatican II Catholic who grew up in a reading family, I had trouble relating to many sections of the book. However, I did appreciate the "rightness" of her observations regarding the sacramental aspect of secular reading - and the importance of taking care what one feeds yourself through your reading. If you feel guilty "wasting" your time reading I'd recommend this book as the appropriate antidote to guilt.

Nancy Malone is an Ursuline nun who lives, apparently alone, on City Island in the Bronx. She includes in this reflection on reading as a spiritual experience biographical information that desribes her circuitous route as first a college student to the convent and various locales thereafter, but never details exactly how she ended up in her current situation. Not a big deal but it still leaves the reader hanging a bit since she seems to carved out for herself a perfect environment where she can live in relative seclusion, without the demands of living in a community, and all the time in the world to read.

The book itself uses the labyrinth as a metaphor for the spiritual experience provided by reading, as a reader moves closer to and away from a metaphorical center that represents, among other things, the true self. Books guide the reader along this path particularly when they reveal to the reader more of themselves than they know, or accurately express emotions that a reader feels but for the first time sees manifest on the written page. Malone herself provides this experience in her work: I felt myself thinking as I read "yes, that expresses exactly the feeling that I have when I'm reading." It is this enlargement of self-knowledge, and therefore knowledge about dealing with the rest of the world, including God, nature and other people, that can make reading a spiritual experience.

As with all books of this genre (books about books), the author provides a list of books that she recommends, some of which I've seen recommended in other similar books, some that are new to me. She does committ one venial sin in this regard as she highly recommends a book that she has not read!