The Joy of Reading

by Marites Bundoc

The road more travelled

“I can do all this through Him who gives me strength.”

                                                           – Philippians 4:13, NIV

I thank God for the summer semester that has successfully ended this week. It has been challenging, what with all those papers we had to write and submit every week.

At Liberty University (Lynchburg, Virginia), we follow an eight-week course per semester (at the graduate and post-graduate level) done completely online. My latest course was called “Advance Literary Theory and Criticism,” in which we studied various theories (biographical, historicist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, postcolonialist, feminist, new historicist, etc.) through which to read and analyze a text, in this case, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. 

It was both fun and exhausting! However, it deepened my insights and widened my worldview, including my Christian perspectives about ideas, people, and the world. LU is a Christian school, so we are always encouraged to incorporate the Biblical worldview into our posts. I loved it! Our professor said that Christian themes are everywhere, if we just look closely through the texts we read. He is right: now, everything I read offers a Christian perspective. For example, Narnia, the beloved children’s book by C. S. Lewis, is definitely Christian, with the lion Aslan as a metaphorical symbol for Jesus, who offered his life to save mankind; Aslan died to save Narnia. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien is also Christian; Frodo Baggins goes on a quest to save the Middle Earth by returning the “ring” to where it belongs, that is to say, to redeem the Hobbit world, which is also a metaphor for humankind. Frodo likewise symbolizes Jesus.

This summer, I’m reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, an African novel about a tribe leader who falls from his community’s grace and how he plans to restore himself to his people’s favor. What are you reading during these hot summer days? I would love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and let’s learn from each other. Happy reading, folks!