Sacred Texts

The ChickieNob and I are partway through the third book in The Magicians trilogy. I think those books should be required reading for all high schoolers, especially the second book. I have a quote from it that I carry with me wherever I go, and I couldn’t wait to get to that point in the second book, for the quote to be in context and ChickieNob to understand it.

The Paris Review had a piece about reading Jane Eyre as a sacred text. She explains,

I asked my favorite professor, Stephanie Paulsell, if she would spend a semester teaching me how to pray with Jane Eyre. Throughout the semester, we homed in on what I was searching for, a way to treat things as sacred, things that were not usually considered to be divinely inspired. The plan was that each week I would pull out passages from the novel and reflect on them as prayers, preparing papers that explored the prayers in depth. Then, together, we would pray using the passages.

I don’t formally pray with The Magicians, but I certainly use the books similar to prayer. I mean, what is prayer—a way to make sense of life, right? And like prayer, depending where I am in life at the moment, I get something different out of the pages each time. So I love the idea of naming a book a sacred text, of gathering that understanding of the self and the world around you from its pages.