It’s amazing how memories of a book that you read can become heavily associated with the place or places where you read it. I thought it’d be fun to make a short list of some of the books I’ve read that have strong ties to places and moments in my history and memory.

“An Intimate History of Humanity” by Theodore Zeldin

When my seminary buddy Brad Younger was at one of his billets in San Diego as a Navy Chaplain, I visited him one Independence Day weekend, and I randomly picked up and read on this book at a few cafes on Coronado Island during the vacation.

“If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him” by Sheldon Kopp

This book was given me at one point in time by my Aunt Margaret with a pretty good endorsement that I would like it. For whatever reason, I didn’t pick it up and get into it until a few years later. I went to Princeton, New Jersey, to visit another of my seminary friends, Rob Hoch, one fall weekend, who was a doctoral student at Princeton Theological Seminary. When Rob and I weren’t in town at a local coffee shop or playing tennis under yellow and orange leaved trees or scrounging up some grub somewhere, he was working on a paper, and so I was reading. Kopp’s book is on how therapists help people to find answers to their personal issues, not as miracle workers, but as companions in one’s journey into and through therapy. The seeds for one’s recovery lie within each person’s life, Kopp suggested. I particularly loved this trip to visit Rob because I got to spend time in the Princeton Theological Seminary bookstore, where I discovered a treasure trove of books by Donald Capps, a pastoral care forefather, and a shame researcher and theologian.

“Resurrection” by Leo Tolstoy

When I was in my second-to-last semester at Golden Gate Theological Seminary, for whatever reason, I ended up dropping my classwork for a few days after opening this book and being sucked into it. I could not put it down. This explains why I will forever associate this book with locking myself in my dorm room for three days as I read it, foregoing classes, hygiene breaks, and other normal routines. Undoubetdly, I was deeply impacted by the book because I saw some of myself in its main protagonist, Dmitri Nekhlyudov, who both loved and used a woman in his life as a lover, only to discover later she was imprisoned under horrific circumstances, and he is indicted by his perceived association with her demise. This is a book I probably cried more in than most, but at that time, I was struggling with my own place in a relationship with a girl I was seeing.

“Till We Have Faces” by C.S. Lewis

In another of the most stirring and beautiful books I have ever read, I was introduced to this novel through a class at the university as a student. Within the retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, one sister, Psyche, marvelous in beauty, is in her youth betrothed and taken away to a god. The other, Orual, disfigured and embittered, grows up to become queen of her domain, but she spends her life without love, frustrated at the silence of the gods, until the end of her life. And where did I read this? The bulk of it was read sitting in the east room of the Frontier restaurant which sits across from the main UNM campus. When I needed to leave the restaurant because the afternoon became evening and then night, I then went home and completed it sitting on a recliner in the front room of our family’s home. Another book about identity, meaning and worth, I finished the final pages of the book through tear-blurred eyes. I still recall the evening sky outside of the Frontier to the north and west which was colored in yellows and oranges as the fall sun dropped toward the horizon. The Frontier was largely empty that afternoon until after it was dark outside. I completed this book realizing it was probably Lewis’ masterwork for the mature human heart.