Global Wandering

There have been few novels in my life that after finishing them I could say they changed me. Changed the way I looked at a subject, a place or a people. Given me a perspective I never would have had had I not read the book. Great characters are more effective teachers than any lecture, essay or non-fiction narrative will ever be. Great characters don’t preach. They teach by example, by living. This is the ultimate irony. How can fictional characters live? Yet they do. Slowly as you read a well written novel, the characters invade your consciousness. They become real. Unforgettable.

The only characters more alive than the ones you read in a good book are the ones you write in your own stories. Those characters are your children.

I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. This book is just beautiful. It is powerful. I read The Fate of Africa earlier this year. In that book, I learned the sad history of modern Africa, but in the Poisonwood Bible I lived Africa, breathed it in and was changed.

Orleanna Price, one of the novel’s characters, said, “Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.”