Window to the Soul: Fiction Books with Collin Hansen

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Kendra Dahl
If you’ve listened to gospel bound for any amount of time, you know that Colin Hanson reads widely, but you may not realize that amid the deep and heady books he features on gospel bound, he also consumes a lot of fiction. So today we’re going to put gospel bounds host in the interviewee seat and ask him about some of his fiction favorites. I’m Kendra Dahl, and I work for the gospel coalition, and today I’ll be your guest host for gospel bound. Colin, thanks for turning your podcast over to me today,

Collin Hansen
I had a little trepidation. I’m not gonna lie. No, it really was not worried, worried at all. I love that the chats that we have, a lot of people don’t realize how much work you put into working behind the scenes on all the stuff that we do on multimedia, including gospel bound. So it’s fun for people to be able to hear from you, and as always, to talk about some books. Yes,

Kendra Dahl
let’s talk about books. I know a lot of people who read nonfiction widely, but most people I know consider fiction a little bit of a waste of time. So before we dig into some of your favorites and your favorite categories, I think we have to start by convincing people, why do you read fiction and why would you commend this habit to your listeners?

Collin Hansen
I I just don’t I don’t think I ever got the memo that fiction was a fate was a waste of time. I don’t think I was ever taught that way. Now we have to understand what kind of fiction we’re discussing here. I have family members who love to read romance novels, and some are better than others, obviously, in that genre. But there’s a lot of bad fiction out there, and there’s also not necessarily just bad fiction. There is just sort of mind numbing fiction. I think maybe a lot of people associate that with the latest pot boiler and chapters that are three pages long and a cliffhanger on every single one of those pages. I think simply put, when you have somebody who helps you to understand the window into the world, in the window into the soul that a good fiction writer can open for you and open for so many others, then fiction is anything but a waste of Time, but one of the primary ways that that God gives us to be able to to understand ourselves and to understand others, and to relate to other people, and to to learn how to love other people, to learn from other people’s experiences and and in some ways, I think probably that we’ll, we’ll get at in the course of This podcast, fiction, in some ways, can be truer than reality, because it it helps to open up our sense for what’s actually happening in the world beyond what we imagine just or that we can simply perceive through our senses. And so we often are, are especially so rational and sensory in the way that we perceive things, and we’re so disenchanted and disconnected with the broader kind of the unseen world, the unseen realm, compared to previous generations, that fiction can can open our minds to what is real.

Kendra Dahl
I love that. Yeah, well, you know, I think so often in writing, they talk about showing or telling, and it’s sort of like fiction is the showing, right? Instead of spelling it out for us, it’s inviting us in to experience it ourselves. Yeah,

Collin Hansen
you’re you’re changing as you’re imbibing a story, and you’re you’re feeling things that, if somebody simply teaches it to you and just says, this is the way you need to think, that it doesn’t seem to engage all of your your your mind, your body, your soul, your spirit. But, uh, but the the drama, the depictions of fiction can really do that in ways that they don’t You don’t necessarily understand, and we’ve heard from Lewis and others, the way that that stories and fiction can steal past those watchful dragons. It it can change our lives. It can empower our thinking, our feeling. Are believing in ways that that we couldn’t get or don’t often, at least get through straight didactic lecturing absolutely

Kendra Dahl
well, when I pitched this episode to you, you quickly just rattled off your favorite types of fiction. So you listed historical, Scandinavian, Russian and southern

Collin Hansen
just totally normal, totally normal.

Kendra Dahl
So let’s talk a little bit about each of those. And let’s start with the category I think is likely the most familiar to your listeners, which would be historical fiction. So are you drawn to a particular time period when you read historical fiction? And what makes a good historical fiction book?

Collin Hansen
I think, I think Kendra historical fiction is one of the areas where my my choices and my interests are probably the most popular and the most widely shared, because you see contemporary fiction like All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony door or a Gentleman in Moscow, by a more tolls, those are pretty popular works. I mean, these are best selling works. They’re works that have been adapted to film. Though I have to say, All the Light We Cannot See is one of the worst film adaptations I have ever seen in my life.

Kendra Dahl
That bad. Everybody hated it, but, oh, it was

Collin Hansen
worse than you think. It was worse than somebody could tell you about. But I’ll explain why I think it was worse. One of the reasons people don’t like fiction is because it takes a while to warm up. You’re having to enter a different world. You have to enter different personalities. It’s not like journalism, where you start with the most interesting thing, the inverted pyramid. And you work backward, it tends to be a slow burn, and sometimes the payoff is not until much later. That doesn’t translate as well into film, especially in a Netflix kind of series. And so you end up flattening the characters. And when you flatten the characters in an area of history that’s already flat in our understanding, which is World War Two. There are good guys, there are bad guys. More than kind of the primary moral lens through which we understand our world in the West still today, then it really makes for an extremely uncompelling, unsympathetic story that doesn’t seem to exist in in a three dimensional world. So anyway, just going back to historical fiction there, that’s a I mean, I think also about Kristen Hannah’s the nightingale. There’s just some, some pretty popular stuff out there that I find to be really interesting and thought provoking. It’s not typically the deepest kind of fiction that I that I read. But those experiences are, are really, are really beautiful. So I suppose, like a lot of people, I’m drawn to certain eras. And one of those eras would be, would be World War Two, primarily, just because there’s so much, so many more options on that when I go back and look, for example, another historical area that I study a lot, and we talk about here on gospel bound, is the Civil War. But a lot of the historical fiction about the Civil War is just bad. I mean, it’s, it’s pretty, pretty weak, which I didn’t mind as much when I was reading it when I was 10 years old. But it doesn’t quite translate the same way when you’re when you’re older. But yes, I was reading Civil War historical fiction, I guess, as a child.

Kendra Dahl
I don’t think any, any of us are surprised

Collin Hansen
to point that out, but yeah, some old Harold Coyle books and whatnot. But there’s always romance across the Mason Dixon. It’s pretty much the story of some war historical fiction in there, but yeah, so probably World War Two, just because there’s so much to work with. There’s just so much material to be able to play with in there. But there are a couple different ones that are on my list. World War One book, and I got this recommendation from Andy Crouch. And when it comes to fiction, it is really good to get recommendations from people, because it’s hard to just go out there and say, show up at your library and say, Hmm, give me some fiction here. You want to go with some people who you who’s reading your trust. And that’s one of the purposes of doing this podcast, of course, but Andy cratchi recommended a soldier of the Great War by Mark helprin. And that’s a book that I’ve recommended to others, and others have loved it as well. So you know. So the World War Two, World War one period are pretty, pretty interesting, but I will mention a couple others that are not as typical for me, and they’re probably two that I recommend the most in historical fiction. First is home going by Yad Yasi. Now this may not be as familiar to gospel bound readers, but this was a best selling book. Book. She earned a seven figure advance for this book coming out of the Iowa writers program. And, I mean, when you’re a young student in a master’s program and you’re earning seven figures, that’s not that’s not normal. She’s from Alabama, and that book is, I can’t recommend it to everybody, because it’s, it’s fairly brutal, but it’s an account of of slavery from Africa to the present day. And that would be a good example where Kendra you could, you could read 100 books on slavery in the slave trade, but none of them would help you truly to feel it the way that you would in this book. And the other thing about good fiction is that it defies easy kind of stereotypes or simplistic narratives. And so it’s a complicated book with complicated outcomes, and you combine that with an area that you personally connect with. She’s an Alabama writer, and her story intersects with Birmingham, where I live and where I teach and raising my family. So that’s another reason why that book stands out. But I should probably take a breath here, but we haven’t gotten to my favorites. Yeah,

Kendra Dahl
well, I think it’s a moment to comment on the challenge, I think, in historical fiction is not oversimplifying characters like you mentioned with the Netflix series. I’ve certainly read some books that they try to make it really clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And any book that draws you in to see that there was a lot of complexity and nuance with everything that was happening in different historical time periods. Well,

Collin Hansen
we’ll talk about that a little bit more when we get to world war two further on in here. But, and probably why I’m so interested in Russian literature, because Russian literature handles this better than anybody else. It’s, seems to be part of the the Russian national tradition. And it’s and it’s Christian heritage as well. Because the most famous person in 20th, 21st well, in the 20th century, to talk about that issue right there, was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who, of course, was immersed in that, in that Russian literature, Gulag Archipelago and and which is not not fiction, which is noteworthy in there, but he’s saying that, of course, the line between good and evil is not between people, but within every human heart. And so fiction that understands that Christian perspective on God’s world and God’s creation is much more compelling than what we see from kind of a broader social justice perspective that you often see today, which is the world is made up of the good people and the bad people with these group identities. And again, I think that’s why John C’s book is so so powerful, because she she defies, she defies that. Well,

Kendra Dahl
well, we left everybody on the edge of their seats. About your favorite? What is your favorite? Well,

Collin Hansen
so good news here, the film adaptation of this series is amazing, and it is award winning in its own right, with some of the best actors you’re going to find that’s the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel, who sadly died a few years back, but not before, before she completed this trilogy, thankfully. So I, you know, I did not grow up with a ton of British literature. I didn’t grow up studying a bunch of British history or anything like that. I didn’t have that, that family background and whatnot. So I wouldn’t say that costume dramas and period pieces or Jane Austen were, you know, they weren’t part of my growing up at all. So this is why it’s a little bit offbeat. But Hillary mantel is looking at the 16th century, Tudor England and the Henry the eighth’s reign, and then with the onset of the English reformation. And I heard a comment years ago from John Piper talking about Gilead and Marilyn Robinson. And he said, I don’t understand how she wrote so effectively about the inward life of a pastor talking there about John Ames. And what I can say about Hillary mantel is I don’t know how she I don’t know how she brought to life this character of of Thomas Cromwell, who I don’t think I ever would have really picked up much on him, despite his significance in that period, but as a character in her historical fiction, he is probably the most compelling, conflicted. I think I could have debates that would last days with people about just that character, and is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy? Is he doing what he has to do? And because it’s historical, we know what happened here. He rises from the lower class, which, of course, is shocking, becomes the primary right hand man to the Catholic Cardinal who’s running the country switches sides, becomes Henry the eighth’s right hand man, but never truly accepted by the full aristocracy, which is still wanting to revert to Catholicism. He seems to be a genuine Lutheran type Protestant, and ultimately, like everybody else, hates life, he’s beheaded. So you kind of know where it’s going in there. But

Kendra Dahl
the spoiler alert again, it’s historical fiction. It’s

Collin Hansen
like, yeah, the Nazis lost to the Reformation happened, but Cromwell did not get to, get to see its full full flowering under Elizabeth, so that. Now this is a good example where you would have to trust somebody to recommend the series to you, because the first book is very long and it is more literary in style. So if you’re used to reading contemporary fiction. This is going to, it’s going to require a little bit out of you. Not like reading the Russians, we’ll get to them. That’s going to require a little bit of you. And if you don’t know much about 16th century history, well, it’s going to be a learning curve in there. But, and this another series where I’ve had it recommended to me, and it just, it’s, it’s incredible. It’s just truly fine.

Kendra Dahl
It brings you along. So if you’re somebody who doesn’t have this expansive knowledge history, it’s taking you into it, or you feel like you needed some of that background knowledge to read it. Well, no,

Collin Hansen
I don’t think, and I did, you know, part of my European history major was focusing on that period as well, so I had a basic understanding of it, but not an in depth one of all the different characters. And I knew, like, okay, there’s Catherine and there’s Anne and but I didn’t remember all the ins and outs of of Henry’s reign. So it definitely brings you along. But the the main thing is, is simply, what would you do during these times? How would you survive? How How would you how would you adapt? How do you combine principle with with pragmatism? And I think I just relate to it in some ways, as under the pressures of leadership, and so I’m drawn to that very much. But I this is also an area where I say, Hey, you don’t have to read the books. Just go watch Mark Rylance, who is maybe my favorite actor, play Cromwell in the BBC series, which, oh, by the way, is coming to PBS next March.

Kendra Dahl
All right, so this is not a paid sponsorship. They

Collin Hansen
are giving us nothing just out of the goodness of our hearts.

Kendra Dahl
Well, another category you mentioned was Scandinavian fiction, which surprised me. I guess I don’t think of that as a common category that people would mention. So how did you come to discover it, and what are some of the key themes and features that Mark Scandinavian literature.

Collin Hansen
You’re the one Kendra who comes from the Scandinavian capital. I

Kendra Dahl
know I should know better,

Collin Hansen
but this could be the this could be in keeping with my question, which is, did you know anybody who was reading Scandinavian literature at all?

Kendra Dahl
Nope, just you Colin. I

Collin Hansen
mean, you were surrounded by Norwegians, so there’d be somebody in there. We

Kendra Dahl
are so cold, we like a cozy mystery. And, you know, in the winter, that’s more my style,

Collin Hansen
cozy mystery, okay, um, well, out this is, this is a late edition. I definitely did not pay any attention to this when I was when I was growing up. And I think the reason I’m drawn to this is because Scandinavian literature tends to be immigrant literature, because so many of the Scandinavians left, and so what you have is the story of coming to the United States. And I think because I grew up a Scandinavian in South Dakota, but have moved to Alabama, in a very different culture that’s far away, I think in some ways I can feel, or I can relate to some of what they’re doing, and I can relate to things like, Well, do you raise your children to be from the old country, or do you raise them in the new country? And so my wife and I will have these interesting debates because our old. Son will not do a southern accent. And everywhere he goes, he says he’s always

Kendra Dahl
resisted that’s so fascinating. Well, very consciously holding on. And

Collin Hansen
his favorite place to visit is the farm in South Dakota. And he always says that he never needs a coat because he’s never cold, and he sweats too much because it’s too hot down here, and my wife just looks at me and she’s like, well, Colin, he he wants to be like you. He wants to be like he’s drawn to his dad and drawn to the things from his dad’s side in there. Now, my other two kids, they’re Southern accents like crazy. But so there’s something there. I think that’s probably why I relate to it. And so I didn’t, I just did not hear anything about this growing up. But there’s a book named giants in the earth by Oli Rollag. And I got so irrationally excited about this when I found out that the South Dakota Historical Society is re releasing the book, and the cover of it is a painting called the prairie is my garden by Harvey Dunn. It’s my mother’s favorite painting. For those of you who might not be familiar with South Dakota art, it’s in the vein of the much more famous painting, Christina’s World out of Maine by Andrew Wyeth, which you can see at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. But I then also the South Dakota. South Dakota orchestra is or symphony. I can’t remember which one is going to do an operatic dramatization of this book as well. So it’s the story of Norwegian settling in southeastern South Dakota. And last year I had visited the the fjord where my great grandmother had come from and where, and I had known her growing up with our family, and we were connected there. So be just being able to understand what they went through. And you just can’t comprehend how hard it was. You can’t comprehend. And I’ve told this story before, but my grandmother supposed to be my great grandmother’s daughter, obviously. So she comes from Norway. That’s my grandmother. Just died recently, my grandmother and my grandmother would say to me, you know, Colin, if the thermos, if I have to choose, I’ve got no more money left, and I have to either eat tuna fish out of the can for the rest of my life, or turn my thermostat down in the winter, I’ll just eat the tuna because I’m not doing I’m not touching my thermostat. We go back to her house where my great grandmother had lived, didn’t have plumbing until 719 70s. There was no insulation. South Dakota, no insulation. That’s that’s into the 30s and the 40s and the 50s. So it it the fiction connects me back to even my close family, like my grandmother or my great grandmother, just to understand some of what they went through. And surprisingly, a lot of people don’t remember their religious dimensions as to what was happening. So we have denominations like the Covenant Church. We have denominations like the Evangelical Free Church in America, we have the former John Piper’s denomination converge the Swedish Baptists. Those are all related to those are all related to revival movement that swept through the Scandinavian immigrants in the Upper Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis, and the books all deal with the themes of American revivalism crashing into Old World, state church, Lutheranism. And usually that crash is chaotic at best. It’s a crash. And so the religious themes are extremely deep, extremely deep in these, in this, in this literature, and so and I, and I come back, and I mentioned my grandmother and my great grandmother very deliberately in there, because usually the the protagonist of the book is the man. It’s the farmer. He’s usually the one who wants to leave. But the story is really about the woman. It’s about the wife and what she endured, leaving her family suffering in in isolation on the Great Plains was nothing short of of making you go insane. And so there’s usually a subtext of of just of insanity that comes through in there. And that may not sound, you know, compelling exactly to read, but it it once again, opens up something where, how could you read about that in a textbook, like I’m going to do a textbook on South Dakota. History. And there’s going to be some line that says, you know, sometimes the women would go crazy trying to keep a sod house clean. Okay, like, that’s probably that would be pretty hard, but to read about what it’s like to have five, 810, 12 kids under those conditions, in those circumstances, having left all of your family behind, but you left them behind just because you knew if you stayed home, they all starved to death. I mean that that’s powerful. So again, I’ll take a pause here, but I another book related to that theme is the immigrant series by Wilhelm mo Berg, which is published by the Minnesota Historical Society. It’s the Swedish story, especially related to the Minneapolis area of Minnesota.

Kendra Dahl
How did you find these that’s

Collin Hansen
well, they are pretty famous

Kendra Dahl
recommendations. Okay, so I’m just exposing my No, no,

Collin Hansen
no. I mean, they’re not famous, like, although you cannot see famous, I’m just saying these are works that are being published by the historical societies of these states, meaning that they’re a recognized part of the of the canon of literature that helps to explain the story of that place. And so, I mean, that probably is a good it’s probably just a good segue into, I I think I have to attribute this to our colleague, Ivan mesa. I don’t even remember where I found this. I mean, this, this is probably some sort of, maybe it was Ivan, or maybe it was just some catalog. I think maybe I can remember the place I was in my house when I saw the catalog, it was like, oh, there’s a Danish novel being translated for the first time from 110 years ago into English. Wow. Well, that probably grabbed my attention of like, okay, why would why would this be the case? And that book is a fortunate man by Henrik pontopitan. Now I mentioned there’s the segue there is because the Danish government has a list of books that they have determined represent their national identity, and so the book that represents their national identity. So this would be like we’re in school and we’re reading Mark Twain. Okay, so that’s, that’s what you’re gonna get. You’re gonna get Tom Sawyer Huckleberry fan. That’s, that’s what it means to be an American. This would be their equivalent in Denmark. So when I’ve taught in Copenhagen, people usually come up to me and say, hmm, I was interesting. I didn’t get that out of that book when I read it in school growing up. But a fortunate man is it’s what they list in Denmark as the book that explains their modern breakthrough. And by modern breakthrough, they mean how we went from being 19th century pious Christian Lutherans to being 20th century secular Danes and how the church went to be like, you know, 1% of the population in there, so and so. The book is itself, a long, Russian realist style novel, 1000 plus pages almost, that walks you through this reverse prodigal story is basically the prodigal son who never comes home to Christianity. And I lecture on this here at Beeson Divinity School in cultural apologetics, and I can’t get through a lecture without crying, because the story simultaneously helps my it’s if I sat down and I told the students, hey, guess what? I’m going to teach you a history of Western intellectual thought from the 16th century through the 20th they’d be like, What in the world? I mean, how? How can, first of all, nobody can do that. But second, that’s just going to be overwhelming instead, if I tell you, well, Henrik pontopadon already did that for you, starting with Montaigne in the 16th century and all the way through to Nietzsche in the 20/20 and also, if you ever wondered what it would be like if somebody wrote envisioning the 20th century without knowing what was going to happen, but they got it all wrong. So we read Dostoevsky because he got the 20th century right. He wrote about it before it happened, and he was right. We read pontopon Because he got it wrong, because he envisioned this secular utopia that turned out to be the complete opposite. And so you use fiction to be able to teach them, not only the who and the what of Freud and Nietzsche and Montaigne and Rousseau and on and on, but you do it in a way that they can digest. And you tell them, If you don’t, you know, if you don’t want to read the whole book, go and watch it on Netflix, because the Danes just released it about five years ago on Netflix. But don’t worry, but, but pay attention to the ending, because they completely reversed the ending, because pontopadon, his ending doesn’t work anymore because of the cultural change, so they turn the book into a romance instead of a dystopia, which is what it basically is. So I’ve had people read this book, and it’s basically run the gamut. I’ve had one one of our colleagues said this is the second greatest book I’ve ever read. Another one of our colleagues read this with her husband out loud in bed over the course of days and weeks and months. Then got to the end, and I think they threw the book against the wall and said, Colin, why did you do this stuff? I was waiting for a payoff, and it was the opposite. I was like, No, that is the payoff. It’s a I don’t think they don’t think they appreciated it, but Well,

Kendra Dahl
I think I need to remind our listeners that I will put all of these titles in the show notes for those of us who are listening and making our very trying to keep up with our list on good reads of what to read now, well,

Collin Hansen
let me, let me give a couple that are easier. Should we do that? Okay, let’s get a couple that are easier in here. This is Tim one of Tim Keller’s favorites. It’s a short story. People may be familiar with it because it’s the end of his book prodigal God. And is the short story Babbitt’s feast by Karen Blixen. I actually did not read this until I was working on my book on Tim Keller. And I thought, but this is one of the only pieces of art along these lines that he features so prominently. And I thought, wow, it’s also Danish, so that’ll be interesting to me. Also an amazing film adaptation won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and when it came out in the 1980s so a lot of people will know it through that either through Keller or through that history, but what stood out to me again the personal connection. This would have been where my Danish family came from, that same part of the country of utland, in Denmark on the western coast. So it was a window into that world for me. But people can, they can just enjoy Babbitt’s feast, either as a short story or as the film, and they don’t have to realize that it is a very thinly fictionalized version of Soren Kierkegaard existentialist philosophy.

Kendra Dahl
So they can go deeper, if they tell them that until after that

Collin Hansen
afterwards. So say, Well, do you notice how the three different figures in here represent the three different alternatives in Kierkegaard existential philosophy? But yeah, you don’t have to get into that to be able to to appreciate that in there. And then this is another long one, but it’s a more popular one. I did recommend this to one of our colleagues, and she was excited to start reading this, this trilogy, Kristen lavernes, daughter by Sigrid unset but she one didn’t realize it was a trilogy. Two didn’t realize it was all going to come in one volume. So I think I did get an angry text from her on that one, but it’s more popular you’ve probably, you know, many people probably will know somebody who has read it. And once again, rare to get a female protagonist in pre reformation world. And that’s, I mean, I’m interesting, and I’m mentioning a number of different volumes, including Babbitt’s feast. Were female. Where females are the lead I mentioned earlier, again as a as a man and as somebody in ministry, novels are often one of the more helpful places for me to understand, just just to to be encountering female characters and just learning and observing from them. So that’s something, that’s something

Kendra Dahl
I’ve been thinking as you have been talking about these books. It seems like the characters have such power to build empathy as you’re reading that you’re you’re putting yourself in the situation of these immigrants. But I hadn’t thought about that as a man reading a book with a female protagonist. What power that has

Collin Hansen
that kind of the whole genre, the whole genre is to take you not just looking at what somebody does, but why they do it. So now what’s interesting there is, of course, it’s speculative, but it’s fiction. So you can, you can make that to be speculative. You get to be speculative, but you can’t do that very well with nonfiction. It’s hard to be able to say, hey, here’s what Napoleon was thinking Waterloo. Well, I guess because we may have a memoir, we can have this testimony or something like that. But what you can do with fiction is you can really dig in there and explore psychology that now it may be a. Not it may be fiction, but it may be even more real to life when it’s in the hands of a skilled novelist. And some people will know that one of my favorite historical writers is Shelby Foote. But the reason as a civil war historian, he was so good because he wasn’t a historian, he was a novelist, and now he could get speculative, and that’s one of the things that people criticize him for. But I’m convinced Kendra, and we know that on gospel bound, we do a lot of history as well. I’m convinced that people don’t like history, not only because, as I’ve said about Alan gelzo and others, they don’t have good teachers, but because, to us, it’s it’s all just fait accompli. It just happened. And we sense that history had to happen that way, but the real drama of history is contingency. What if it didn’t happen that way? And so what Shelby Foote does is he takes you. He just think about the the the way somebody would look in historical fiction, you are the omniscient observer. You’re God like, I mean, in history, you’re God like, you see everything of how the outcome. And this guy had this dumb move, and this woman made that mistake over here, and you’re judging it. But in fiction, you’re looking through the eyes of the character on the world. So Shelby Foote inverts the whole historical genre by putting you in the eyes of that general or that politician. And you don’t and you sense drama, I don’t know how this is gonna go. And then your understanding just starts to explode, because you’ve, you’ve, you’ve pulled back the veneer of omniscience, and now, all of a sudden, you can relate to them being that position, and you can feel what they felt. It’s what fiction does for you that that history often doesn’t absolutely

Kendra Dahl
but now, now I need a quick interlude where I say, Colin, when do you do all this reading? Do do you listen? Do you sleep? Do we need an intervention? Sleep?

Collin Hansen
I do sleep? Have an actual family? Well, I think maybe Kendra is just over years, right? So if you just are reading, and you keep reading over the years, then generally the books pile up. So I also think that we often get stuck reading because we have a book that we don’t like, and it just kind of discourages us from reading because we’re like, oh, I have to read this book. The thing about novels is that you have to go into it knowing that the payoff is going to come later, so you just have to get into it, usually saying, I mean, this is exactly what will happen. People will watch this interview, they’ll listen to it, they’ll go back, they’ll pick up one of these books, and they will want to throw it against the wall and be like, Colin, what were

Kendra Dahl
you thinking? Said there was a payoff,

Collin Hansen
payoff. And where is it? I’m a busy person. I’ve got a lot going on, but I think that the real reading that is powerful us is not the reading that tells us what we already know or what we want to hear, but the reading that stretches us. That’s the kind of reading that can change our life. And most of us can remember a time when reading did that for us when we were younger. Well, that learning process doesn’t have to stop when we’ve got all the kids and we’ve got all the responsibilities, but it does take some discipline to say it’s worth it for me to do this instead of that Netflix series or instead of that football game or something like that. You do have to make, you have to make choices there, but if you make those choices over the course of time, it does, does start to add up. I don’t regard myself to be especially fast reader, but I will say, the more you read, the faster you read. So that does, that does help.

Kendra Dahl
Or you can just do like me and listen to audio books on double speed.

Collin Hansen
Do you actually do double speed?

Kendra Dahl
I well, I usually start at about one and a half, so I get used to the narrator, and I gradually ramp up. And by the time I’m like, in the thick of the climax of the book, I’m on like, 2.25

Collin Hansen
what? What speed Do you listen to me?

Kendra Dahl
I won’t answer that. I

Collin Hansen
about two southern Colin, I have to go to two and a half speed. Southern people do talk just to sound Californian. Well, wait where we come from. People don’t talk at all. People don’t talk at all. They’re just

Kendra Dahl
silent, quiet, quiet in the Midwest, quiet,

Collin Hansen
quiet, dignified people, yeah, absolutely.

Kendra Dahl
I don’t know. I’m from a pretty loud for a bunch of family of North Dakotans. That’s true. Okay. Well, I took us. I took us away from our categories of fiction that we’re talking through. So you told us a little bit about your. Love for historical fiction, Scandinavia fiction. Now you’re gonna really have to sell me on Russian lit. Why does that make the list?

Collin Hansen
Well, I mean, at one level, I think most of us know that Russians are considered the masters of the fiction genre. Russians effectively, if they didn’t invent it, they certainly popularized it in the 19th century, realist fiction in particular, and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and so some combination of war and peace and The Brothers Karamazov are widely regarded to be the two greatest novels of all time. But all of that is simply secondary to the fact that I had a tremendous blessing, and the internet is a thing I didn’t have in the same way growing up to be able to do this. So you can, people can do this on their own now, but I had probably the greatest Russian literature professor, certainly in the United States, if not anywhere, teaching me, and I had the recommendation of friends to take his class at Northwestern so, so Saul Morrison taught me Russian literature. I don’t unders. I don’t think I would have understood half of it without him. And still, there are certain pieces from Dostoevsky in particular that I don’t get into because they’re pretty daunting, and I don’t have Sol Morrison to teach me through them, but the Russians are are the masters, because of two different things, and I’ve alluded to one. One is that dostoevsky’s fiction is more philosophical and theological, so he’s using his characters and stories as vehicles a little bit closer to what I said about Henrik pontopitan, so he’s using them as vehicles to be able to explain his perspectives. And I think one way that you would describe Dostoyevsky’s perspective as well as Saul Morrison’s perspective, he’s still active, writes for first things and a number of places like that. I’ve interviewed him twice on gospel bound so people can go back and hear from him, they’d be anti revolutionary in his in his well Dostoevsky was, and then Morrison would be as well. And by revolutionary, I mean people who this propensity in the 19th and 20th centuries, as Christianity declined, this propensity to search for a utopia apart from Christianity. So it’s got all of the eschatology of Christianity, the progress of history, but without any of the tempering of our inward impulses and sin. So that’s what I’m saying about Solzhenitsyn. Earlier, he was very much in that Dostoevsky stream. So Dostoevsky was able to say through The Brothers Karamazov in particular, and also Crime and Punishment. So you’re looking at two of the top, probably three novels of all time.

Kendra Dahl
I’ve heard of them that little worried that, you know, Scandinavia, unless you lost me, but I’ve heard of the Russian ones. Yeah. Well,

Collin Hansen
I don’t think many people are putting the Scandinavians at the top of all fiction, but I’ve got the more personal connection there, but definitely the Russians are so Crime and Punishment effectively anticipates the strong man of the 20th century, Stalin Hitler, the Ubermensch of Nietzsche. So that book is simply, we’ve never seen anything like that, to be able to say, hey, guess what? All this revolutionary talk that academics are engaging in right now is going to lead to the worst century you could ever even begin to fathom. That’s that’s Dostoevsky. That’s your that’s your payoff, right there. And you realize, Well, if he’s right about that, he may still be right about some of the same ways we continue to do that today. So that’s WSC Tolstoy is famous for. That’s one thing Tolstoy is famous for his sense that as all of the world may be engaged in the most dramatic events, life still comes down to the person, the family, the community, the more, as my professor would say, the more prosaic in life. So he’s the genius of embedding, of helping us to see that if we lived through dramatic times we’d be young people worried about, does she like me? Are we going to have enough to eat? How’s my mom’s health doing? Am I going to be able to prove myself under fire? That’s what you’d be thinking. You wouldn’t be thinking about all these dramatic slogans and all these huge revolutionary ideas. You’d be thinking about the more prosaic. So he juxtaposes the big and the dramatic with the mundane. He does that in war and peace, very famously with Napoleon’s invasion and everything. And then he does it also, though a little less famously in in a. Karenina, but in Anna, Karenina, my professor was one of the leading interpreters, once again, another film adaptation, but from Morrison’s perspective, and I’m just following him here, gets it completely backward. So this is exactly what I’m warning about with with a fortunate man as well. It’s not interpreted to be Anna krenna is the hero. It needs to be interpreted that she is the villain of the whole thing, because she’s bought into a romantic ideal that. So it’s anti romanticism perspective. It’s a big, major movement, of course, and in the 19th century and then beyond. But I mean, he’ll say something like, Hey, we all know that reading Anna, Karenina, that she’s the protagonist of the book, therefore Tolstoy is trying to commend her kind of romantic life and all these sort of things. And Tolstoy says, or excuse me, Morrison trying to channel Tolstoy here, says, But if Anna thought that she was the center of the world, which is exactly the problem with romanticism, imagining ourselves, you know, the center of the world, wouldn’t her name be on the book? When her name? When wouldn’t the book be named after her? Tulsa was making the exact opposite point. You know, she everything she does leads to destruction. And I’ll point out one thing for my professor. I’m going to write about this later, but he says the only two, it’s very dramatic statement, the only two authentic conversions ever recounted, Christian conversions ever recounted in literature are both by Tolstoy, one in anti credit, war and war and peace. But as he says, but that’s why it’s not true. He’s not a Christian, he says, because it’s too good. Jesus is too good to be true. These conversions are too good to be true to love, not because of what you get back, but just for the sake of love, for the sake of your Savior. It’s too much. Nobody can handle this. Nobody can ever hold to that standard. It’s too good to be true. So what I’m working on now is that the hardest objections of Christianity are actually that it’s too good to be true. Wow. It’s not that it’s false. Is that okay? But that’s too good. So anyway, that’s a brief look at Russian literature. Well,

Kendra Dahl
well, I was a little scarred reading crime and punishment in high school, but maybe you’ve both waited me to give it another shot.

Collin Hansen
I mean, High School is a hard time to read Crime and Punishment. I mean, what kind of, what kind of help did you get in understanding Nietzschean philosophy and from,

Kendra Dahl
I mean, Spark Notes. I don’t know what high school is, just survival. Yes, I read it. I’m going to try to convince you I read it with a couple but

Collin Hansen
do you think Kendra, that the reason I love this stuff is because I wasn’t forced to read

Kendra Dahl
it in high school? No, I think you’re a little bit of a mystery,

Collin Hansen
fair enough, but I look say what you want about the South Dakota educational system, but it apparently paid off in this case, because I was not scarred by having to read any of

Kendra Dahl
this. No, I think, I mean, I really appreciate hearing your perspective on these, because I think if you’re looking at a book of just, I want to get lost in a good story. You know, some of these are not going to necessarily be the, I

Collin Hansen
mean, yeah, Anna Karenina would be like, oh, let’s have a women’s Bible study, you know, women’s book study. Let’s look at Anna Karenina. Okay,

Kendra Dahl
I don’t think that would fly in my book club, but it’s not true. They’d be totally for it, but you do need some help, yes, but I think once you start to engage with other thinkers as they’re, you know, evaluating the characters or what sort of social or cultural commentary is taking place, you know, embedded within the narrative. Then, then a book comes to life in a different way. And I don’t know that we, you know, you can only dip your toes into that in high school. But hearing you talk about these books, it does make it. It’s far more intriguing to think, how would this cultivate empathy and understanding and the complexity of the human nature and those kinds of things? Well,

Collin Hansen
let me give you, I didn’t even, haven’t even mentioned yet my favorite Russian novel, and that’s life and fate, by Vasily Grossman. Now this was a fellow elder of mine at my church, he’s a lawyer, and there’s a cool thing that they do at his law firm, they meet, and it’s a book club once a month, and it’s been going for decades and decades and decades, and at 1.1 of the lawyers said, Hey, we should have a discussion about what the best books This club has ever read. Are, and so they did. And, you know, I don’t. Guy raises his hand and says, Well, we all, I mean, there’s no debate. We all know what number one is. What’s life and fate? By Vasily Grossman, Kendra, I had never heard of this before. My friend swears by it. He shares it with me, and I’m reading and I’m thinking, Wait a minute. So you mean to tell me that in the 20th century, in Stalingrad, you know, like the biggest, worst battle of all time, there was this incredible journalist turned novelist named Vasily Grossman, who was more or less commissioned by the Russian people to capture in the government, to capture the essence of their Great Patriotic War, their defeat of Hitler and Nazism, but to do it in a uniquely Russian way through a realist novel, because that’s the way Russians understand their history. So it isn’t going to sit there and write in textbook. He’s going to write a novel about it. But wait, there’s more. He is a true communist who came to understand things very differently through the war. To be able to say, wait a minute, this is supposed to be the fascist on the right and the communists on the left. And there were polar opposites, and those are the evil people. But you know what I saw? It’s kind of like a horseshoe. They kind of look like mirror images of each other. We look at that now and we think, Well, of course, that’s that’s how we see things. Kendra, that was not how people saw things at the time. They were the mortal enemies left and right, the political opposites of each other. So Vasily, Grossman just explodes our understanding of this through this novel, and then, once again, only translated into English in the last 1015, years, was the prequel of that book called Stalingrad, which the Russian the communists, the Soviets had censored, and so we didn’t have it until recently. And I won’t get into too much more detail with this, but Grossman was Jewish. His mother was killed in the most infamous massacre of Jews in Ukraine. And so you put all of this together, and it became really the backdrop of for my book that’s coming out next year on why God allows evil and my engagement with the Holocaust. So a lot of that just came from a friend who recommended that book that I never heard of before. Sat down and was just my life was changed through that process. So that’s how it often works. Just that that timely recommendation from a friend.

Kendra Dahl
Well, to give a few more timely recommendations for our friends here listening to gospel bound, let’s go to your last category that you listed southern fiction. So let’s start with one that maybe we’ve all actually read, and read it To Kill a Mockingbird. You said that this book shapes modern southern identity and our national understanding of race relations. Tell me more what you mean by that. Oh,

Collin Hansen
boy. All right, so here’s where I get to be the spoil sport. Now I also did not read this book when I was when I was growing up, and I don’t think I would have cared one bit about the state of Alabama when I was growing up. So it just, little did he know? Yeah, little, little did he know? And I just, I wouldn’t have had a category where I grew up for understanding race relations at all. I mean, it’s just an American history. It’s just not, not the place where, where I came from. So, so when I read it later, I mean, there’s a reason this book is, I don’t know, what would you say Kendra, is it probably like the number one book that’s read by high school students in America. I

Kendra Dahl
mean, you know, I don’t know what the modern lists are. I think I know my high school daughter has read it, and I can’t remember if it was for class, but I think that it’s, it’s a household name, right?

Collin Hansen
Yes, household at minimum in there. So, but here’s again, this is what I’m getting at with when you have good teachers who can help you with this, they’ll take something that’s really good. I mean, To Kill a Mockingbird is an amazing book, but when you have a good teacher, they can take it to different levels. And so that book went from being a really interesting book to me to being paradigmatic of my understanding of all sorts of different things related to American race relations, Southern identity, stuff that you just mentioned right there. And that was a different book, non fiction, in this case, Atticus Finch, the biography by a professor named Joseph Crispino is at Emory University. Now Crispino was acting on academic developments, namely the discovery after Harper Lee’s death and subsequent publication of her book ghosts at a watchman. Now you do? You remember when that. Came out Kendra,

Kendra Dahl
I do, I know there was some controversy around it, and I think I avoided it because, you know, some of the different things I had read so well, the whole idea of reading, the

Collin Hansen
whole it is but only because of what I’m going to explain here. Okay, so the reason there was so much controversy because, of course, Harper Lee was a, was a near recluse. I mean, she lived here in Alabama, divided time between here in Manhattan, but she lived here in Alabama, but she didn’t publish subsequent books. And there are, there’s a, there’s a book by Casey Sep that talks about her friendship with Truman Capote and how she was working on a true crime book about Alexander city, Alabama. It just never came to fruition. So it’s not like she stopped working. But look, she had all the money in the world because of To Kill a Mockingbird and and once you write that as your debut novel, you’re basically done. I mean, you can’t top it. So, so similar dynamic happened with Go Set a Watchman of Wait a minute. Well, it’s kind of not fair. I mean, she’s she was treated the novel was widely panned because it wasn’t nearly as good. But Crispino helps us to see that that book Go Set a Watchman was the original version of Tequila Mockingbird. It was the message she actually wanted to communicate, and it was widely rejected by her literary friends and agent in New York as being a completely untenable defense of the status of race relations in Alabama, including her dad, who is, of course, the Atticus Finch Exemplar. When I learned this, it completely changed my paradigm, because then I realized a literary invention or not invention because it wasn’t created by her, but it was used most effectively and most famously by her. And that is that when your novel is all about perspective, so the perspective of her writing as an indignant 20 something, Alabamian, upset about New Yorkers judging her and her family that wasn’t going to fly, that was not going to be a seller, but writing as a 10 year old or whatever, I can’t remember what Age scout is exactly, but writing as a child, see, now, all of a sudden, the world goes from shades to gray to black and white. And your dad goes from being a morally and, you know, ambiguous figure, which is all of us at some level, to being a hero. No, he’s all good, or he’s all bad. In this case, of course, Atticus Finch is probably the most, is the greatest hero that we have in American literature. But that’s only because he’s identified as perspective of his child, of his daughter. So she’s not a faithful narrator of the book. She’s giving you her perspective on what she’s seeing. And when you understand that convention in literature, it opens up a lot of other stuff. Let’s talk about another one of the most famous novels or series, certainly in American history. Little House on the Prairie practically invents children’s fiction. Close connections to South Dakota, where I grew up, near where I grew up. Well, now all of a sudden, you look back, and you look at that, and you realize, all right, the whole point is that it’s written from a child’s perspective. So when I read through those books, and I’m thinking, wow, PA, he’s such a great guy, but Ma, she just seems like a worry war, like, What’s her problem? You go back as an adult and a parent, you realize, what was pa doing?

Kendra Dahl
He was dating mom. Mom knew what was coming. She was the sensible

Collin Hansen
one, yeah, but Kendra, let’s bring this full circle. What was I saying about the Scandinavian literature on the prairie, the man always wants to go. He’s always looking to explore his new places. The mother is the one who’s having to pay the price so many different ways for it, but which And now, what we also understand from Laura Ingalls Wilder is that her daughter was the one who was pushing a lot of this at because Laura wrote these things as as an adult. I mean, far, far later. So, and I’m not, I’m not trying to allege anything nefarious there. I’m just saying that the key to understand that series is to understand that it’s a child’s perspective on things. Now let’s bring it all around here to a true contemporary classic, which is blurring the line between memoir and fiction, and that’s a guest that we’ve had here on gospel bound Daniel Neris book, everything sad is untrue. People may remember that I interviewed him, and I said, Daniel, did you did you pull a Harper Lee on this book? Did you go back and rewrite. Write something from a child’s perspective. And he said, Yep, I was planning to write on the experience of immigration and Iran, but I was getting way out of my depth and losing interest with readers writing about it from an adult perspective. So I re envisioned it as a child’s perspective. And once again, who’s the protagonist is his mother. Now I’m not trying to allege something negative there. You know, she’s not the positive situation. She’s a true, amazing Christian heroine in that book. Part of what makes it what makes it work so well. But you realize, once again, the literary conventions that are allowed to be able to, in some ways, trick the reader, or to just help us, once again, to see through different eyes, and to be able to see the eyes through a child. So that’s that’s just kind of a long like look on what’s really happening behind To Kill a Mockingbird. The book, in and of itself, is great, and the moral clarity of it is profound and admirable. But as somebody who lives in Alabama, in some ways, it’s unbelievable, because that kind of stuff really didn’t happen very often, meaning that a white lawyer would stand up to defend the accused in this town. I mean, we had an exact same situation play out here in Birmingham 1963 and the few people who did speak out basically had to leave, which, oh, by the way, that movie came out at that exact time, and it was based with an actress from Birmingham playing scout. So interesting backstory there in 1963 but let’s, let’s give people a couple other things here that they can they can actually dive into, um, I’ve shared this elsewhere, and people have loved this recommendation, but it’s true southern fiction, Alan Levi’s, Theo of gold, and self published, but very popular. And I’ve not had, I mean, it’s, it’s one of those emotional reads you get to the end and, and you’re probably crying and, and it’s, it’s truly, it’s very incontrovertibly Christian. So this is one that any book club could read. You could recommend to anybody, but a true kind of modern classic in in southern, Southern literature. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention here, Wendell Berry, once again, recommendations from a lot of friends, especially when I was living in the wheaton area. And Jaber Crow and Hannah Coulter are sort of like the Anna Karenina and Warren Piece of of Barry’s literature there, but I prefer the memory of old Jack, really. Yeah,

Kendra Dahl
that’s the that’s the one I’ve read. Everyone has recommended Wendell Berry and I read memory of old Jack and but I enjoyed it. I don’t think he’s not my favorite style of writer. It’s a little it’s a little bit slow for me, but the people in my book club who were big fans of him didn’t enjoy the memory of old Jack as much so well. So once

Collin Hansen
again, I think a lot of it depends on what your perception of fiction is coming in. Also, I do think there are regional dimensions of this. If Wendell Berry wrote fast paced pot boiler fiction that would defeat his entire reason for existence, the whole point of his fiction is the prosaic. It’s what I was saying about Tolstoy earlier. It’s to show the dignity of the poor, the dignity of the people that you wouldn’t care about at all. And I think I’m sensing a theme here that I didn’t realize was going to be a theme. But when I read Hannah Coulter, my thought was, that’s my grandmother

Kendra Dahl
with with Jack like, you know, these feel like the people we know from small town, North Dakota, yeah, yeah.

Collin Hansen
So I would say one reason, I would recommend Wendell Berry to anybody, but I would say I clearly have a special attachment to him, having grown up on a farm. But it’s not so much having grown up on a farm, it’s being part of a multi generational, small community. Yes, and I translate that into a vision for localism, more broadly, but also in the church. He has no ecclesial vision at all, but that’s how I use it in there, so that’s where I get that. But Hannah is such a good example of of just the kind of people who make your community work. If your community works, it’s because of people like her. And I was thinking then about my grandmother, but, but I. Would say my wife loves Wendell Berry, but she is not a fan of Marilyn Robinson. So I did

Kendra Dahl
struggle through Gilead, but it was so beautiful. That’s one of those books that you’re and I felt this with Wendell Berry, too. It’s a book you’re glad you read, but it was a little, you know, you kind of

Collin Hansen
it’s Midwestern, it’s sparse. So once again, it’s like saying boy Grant Wood should have used a lot more color in American Gothic. Kind of defeated the purpose.

Kendra Dahl
I don’t think you understand.

Collin Hansen
It’s like boy Grant Wood could have used a little bit of Jackson Pollock in his painting. It’s just that’s, that’s the genre right there. It’s trying to communicate something, not only in what it says, but in how it says it. That’s part of the genius of fiction there as well. But you know, there’s a few others that I would would have mentioned in here. I’m not the biggest Flannery O’Connor fan. It’s not because I dislike it. I just haven’t read a ton from her. But now what I have is a memorable to say the least, in there, Faulkner. I’ve not read all of Faulkner, but, but just it’s interesting that the South in the United States produces so much great fiction, and I think there’s often a tragic dimension to great fiction, which extends to why those immigrant novels are so good, why Russians are so good at novels, and why southerners are so good at novels. One of the things that Shelby Foote famously said in Ken Burns Civil War series was people often say America has never lost a war. I wonder, have you ever visited the south? The whole point is that the South has a tragic history, and that tragic sense of things seems to translate into understanding the depths of the of a human soul so good and bad, which is very much the theme that you see in southern literature from all the people I’m mentioning there, but two that I would add on more contemporary, Robert Penn Warren, people may be familiar with all the king’s men, and then also Pat Conroy, bringing it up to, I hesitate to recommend Conroy, because, oh boy, it’s some of the most brutal kind of like Cormac McCarthy. Same thing, different ways. It is vivid. It’s sort of like when I recommend Conroy and Prince of Tides. In particular, when I recommend that, somebody will say, Colin. I absolutely hate you for recommending that, because you did not warn me properly. Here’s your warning. But oh my gosh, I don’t think I’ll ever get over that novel. So that just it was, it was, it was like that. So that’s Conroy, but that’s, um, there’s southern fiction for you. Well, you’ve

Kendra Dahl
listed so many books, I think I’m a little overwhelmed about where to start. Kendrick, we need a lightning round. We need to circle back, and for all the people who are looking for that perfect gift, they are still here, yes, who have tracked with us this whole time. Let’s go through each of the categories I want you to you have to pick one book, one book from each category for someone who wants to, you know, jump into that. So what’s one book you’d recommend for historical fiction.

Collin Hansen
I’m going to say Wolf Hall on that one, but I’m going to give the out just watch Mark Rylance on the series.

Kendra Dahl
We have a rule in our house that you can’t watch the movie if you haven’t read the book. But then sometimes things like this come along and I make exceptions, breakthrough. Well, actually, you’re telling us three books, so you already failed at our Well,

Collin Hansen
I am, I am only referring to the first one in this case of Wolf Hall, but, but you’re right. It is the name of the whole trilogy as well. So I, I’m gonna say Wolf Hall, but I just, I love Mark Rylance and the and the crew in that one, in that I’ll give

Kendra Dahl
a pass. What about Scandinavian?

Collin Hansen
Oh, man, I guess I could. I will give two options. I’ll give babette’s feast. Once again, you can watch it. It won an Oscar. It deserves it. So you can watch it, or read the short story. There’s your option. But other than that, Oh, I do hope more people read a fortunate man. I think it’s worth I think it’s worth the effort. And I do think it’s important to understand, going into it, that as Christians, we’re conditioned by the you catastrophe of JRR Tolkien, which is the Christian story, just when all hope seems lost, everything gets better. And just to give a little bit of a heads up on a fortunate man, there’s a moment when you think it’s all going to get better, and it doesn’t, and that’s part of what just throws us off. But I think one of the what fiction can help us to do is that as Americans, we think everything has to have. Happy ending that is an American cultural expectation, and we struggle then with the unreconcilable, the lament. That’s what my book on the Holocaust is trying to deal with there so having a book that has a non American sensibility that connects back toward more of of that tragic sense that I keep talking about there, that life does not always end happy, happily ever after, is, I think, an important perspective. And I think that’s what a fortunate man provides us,

Kendra Dahl
okay, and I’m sure a lighter option in Russian literature, obviously,

Collin Hansen
we’ll speak with I do realize, going through this that I do need to offer some options in here so I remember. I’ll go with my, my dad’s version in here. He read one life in the day of Ivan Denisovich back in college. I think it was the only Russian literature he had. So that is a good short story for people to be able to read, but I hope that people will be stirred to give BROTHERS KARAMAZOV a read and do go into it, keep a name list handy and find a guide from Morrison or others that’ll just help you to understand what’s happening, so that when you get to the Grand Inquisitor scene, when you get to rebellion, you can truly understand those quotes that you see floating around, and understand the parable that he’s trying to tell you of Without God, anything is possible that’s nice as a phrase. It’s nice as something that we can look at in through history. Brother scare mossev is a treatment of what happens when people live consistent with that value. And they did that, and he depicted that long before the Nazis and the Soviets came along to prove him right. So yeah, you can go with one life. That’ll be a shorter story for you, which will also prove it’s a nice little tight point to be made there about the prosaic nature of life. But you know, you can also challenge yourself with brothers game, all

Kendra Dahl
right? And then your favorite recommendation for southern fiction, okay, I’ll

Collin Hansen
let everybody off the hook here. Yeah, just go read Theo of gold and read Allen’s book.

Kendra Dahl
And do you recommend that in multiple one?

Collin Hansen
Well, it’s just that’s the it’s not quite cotton candy, because it is also really, you know, nourishing to you. So I don’t know it’s like a good, you know, Cliff bar or something like that. I’m not sure, something that’s both goes down well, but also does your body and soul a lot of good. It’s just just real, moving story and set in modern day Columbus, Columbus, Georgia, not by name, but that’s, that’s what he’s writing about in there. So Theo of golden, okay,

Kendra Dahl
well, we will share this list with our listeners so you don’t have to frantically write it all down, but Colin, this has been so much fun and exactly what I hoped for to broaden our horizons as we think about all of the richness that can be found from reading fiction books. But I’m going to give you back your show here. How do you want to close us out on this conversation on fiction? Oh, man,

Collin Hansen
well, I would love recommendations from any other people send them in to us fiction that you’ve read. We’d love to be able to see that as well. I mean, I’m always adding to this list one of the recent books that I read, The Good Hope by William henison, talking about the Pharaoh islands. It’s just a story about a pastor who’s fighting against a corrupt regime. I mean, that’s just interesting stuff recommended by some friends with TGC Nordic in there. But yeah, so I’m always up for a new recommendation and hopefully giving some people some stuff to do there. I think just overall. Kendra, if you know Christians who are reading fiction, it’s still a fairly limited list. It’s CS Lewis, it’s Jr Tolkien, it’s JK Rowling. It’s, you know, maybe Wendell Berry from this list, maybe a little bit of Cormac McCarthy, something like that. Just the world of fiction is much bigger, and it’s much bigger than contemporary fiction as well The New York Times bestseller list, not that that’s wrong, if you find some good stuff there, but there are just some real classics out there, which I just think of as gold for us to discover. And there’s just nothing like that experience, that emotional experience, that comes over you when you’re hitting that climax in a novel, or you’re putting it down and you’re just thinking, I can’t be the same person anymore after reading this, or I didn’t want that story to end, which, oh, by the way, is basically the point of Babbitt’s feast. In case you didn’t know of of what would it be like if there were a feast that never ended? Of course, that’s the Christian story right there. So, so I, I. There’s amazing what those stories can do. And I just want to end on a on a challenge. If there’s anything that I would hope would happen from from people picking up these books and listening to this podcast, is that we wouldn’t just be able to read these classics, but people would start to write them. I think that’s what Alan Levi does there with Theo of gold, and I’m grateful for him with that. But I guess, what would it be? What What would if we what if we did that? What if we could contribute that way? And look at, look at the interview I did with Daniel Neri, where he tells the story of how, of how widespread this book has been appreciated, but the themes are so overwhelmingly and explicitly and beautifully Christian. And I’m not talking in a Aslan sense. I’m talking in a like Jesus Christ is dead and resurrected, says, died for your sins, kind of straightforward sense and and just to encourage people to say there are people who are doing this well now, people who share our theological beliefs. And what if we had more of it? That would be a truly beautiful outcome.

Kendra Dahl
So when can we expect your novel?

Collin Hansen
Oh, goodness, I don’t think I have those skills. Maybe, maybe one day I’ll put my my hand to that, but I don’t have those skills. But anyway, Kendra, the start is good reading.

Kendra Dahl
Yes!

Collin Hansen
that’s true. Well, Kendra, thank you. I’ll close it up here, but thank you for being a game host and and really for for generating this idea. So I think it was like popping a quarter in the machine and be like, Alright, let’s see how that long this thing can go, but thanks for doing that and and as always, thanks thanks everybody for listening to Gospelbound.