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On My Shelf: Life and Books with Nadya Williams
On My Shelf helps you get to know various writers through a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their lives as readers.
I asked Nadya Williams—an editor and the author of multiple books, including Christians Reading Classics: An Introduction to Greco-Roman Classics from Homer to Boethius—about what’s on her bedside table, her favorite fiction, the books she regularly revisits, and more.
What’s on your nightstand right now?
I’m a chaotic and eclectic reader—plus I’m now a books editor and host a podcast on classic books. As a result, I usually have multiple books going at once, with business and pleasure reading all mixed up.
At the moment, I’m part of the way through Julia Ioffe’s Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy. Ioffe’s family’s story is not too different from my own, plus she’s almost exactly my age, and her family left Russia a year before my family did. So it’s been fascinating to read this exploration of how the Soviet experiment that ostensibly “liberated” women from domestic servitude has produced a century of dysfunctional gender relationships that have only gotten worse under Putin’s rule.
Also reading Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, T. P. Wiseman’s The Lost History of Roman Theatre, James Romm’s Demosthenes (part of the magnificent series of biographies that Romm edits for Yale University Press), and Mara van der Lugt’s Begetting—this last one yet another title in the string of recent books using secular frameworks to ask whether it’s ethical or good to have children. It turns out that without a theological framework of personhood, the answers get . . . muddled.
Oh, and I just finished Mark Danielewski’s newest novel, Tom’s Crossing, which clocked in at 1,228 pages! The editor who had asked me to review it warned, “Please don’t drop it. It could be fatal.”
What are your favorite fiction books?
Oh, goodness—too many to count, but I’ll try! I adore C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, which is based on the one Roman novel to survive in full, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass.
A couple of years ago, I came across Eugene Vodolazkin and binge-read all his novels. Laurus is particularly stunning, and I also think back to his newest novel, A History of the Island. I have a soft spot for The Aviator—the protagonist grew up on my childhood street!
I love Susanna Clarke’s novels—Piranesi especially. And everything by Leif Enger and Wendell Berry. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength has been living rent-free in my head for a few years now.
Finally, parenting is a great excuse to revisit books I loved as a kid with my own kids now—like James Fenimore Cooper or Jack London, whom I had previously only read in Russian. Turns out they’re quite good in their original language!
What biographies or autobiographies have most influenced you and why?
As a mother and a believer, I keep returning to the first autobiography written by a Christian woman (who was also a nursing mother)—that of Perpetua, who was martyred in AD 203 and kept a journal of her thoughts and visions in prison, awaiting execution. Her convictions and love for her baby, for her church, for God, are so powerful. And the way she writes about these convictions is unwavering, undoubting—and all of this in the sort of circumstances none of us would ever wish to experience.
Parenting is a great excuse to revisit books I loved as a kid with my own kids now.
On a more modern side of things, Eric Miller’s biography of Christopher Lasch is magnificent—Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch. Lasch was not a believer, but Miller shows that he was asking the kinds of questions that we should all be asking about the state of our society: what various aspects of modernity (and especially modernity in America) are doing to our potential for flourishing. And Lasch was deeply committed to intellectual honesty, to following ideas through to where they led. This is hard to do, and something that I think about a lot both with regard to ideas more generally and in connection with theology specifically.
Because of my childhood connection to Russia, I do a fair amount of reading about it. I found two recent memoirs that were published posthumously particularly moving—Victoria Amelina’s Looking at Women, Looking at War and Alexei Navalny’s memoir, Patriot.
Last but not least, Carolyn Weber’s spiritual memoir, Surprised by Oxford, is an absolute delight. It made me think back to my own conversion, and some of the questions that I was asking—and the people who took the time to answer them. Among them was Dan, whom I ended up marrying. So I guess I can relate also to this aspect of Weber’s story—she too married the man who played a central role in leading her to Christ.
What are some books you regularly reread and why?
It’s an occupational requirement that I regularly reread Greek and Roman staples. When I was in academia, I was regularly teaching them. Now, I’m coming back to them as part of writing projects and personal reflection. What makes these classics truly classic is their ability to speak to human experience across time and space.
Human nature is the same today as it was in the days of Thucydides. And while Thucydides did not have a theology of sin—how could he?—he came pretty close. I appreciate his reflections, as a result, on what war and cruelty to others does to warp our souls, and also on both the strengths and the shortcomings of democracy, especially in times of stress on a nation.
Dorothy Leigh Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey novels are just such a delight, time and again. And every rereading, I discover something new I missed. More than anything else, I identify with Sayers’s unapologetic love of esoteric knowledge. She throws in anything she wants into her novels—the strangest and most obscure facts, untranslated bits of Greek even—and she makes it work. She’s so delightfully funny without trying too hard. Goals!
What books have most profoundly shaped how you serve and lead others for the sake of the gospel?
When I was first exploring Christianity, I read Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. Over the years, I’ve read most of his other books and have appreciated his thoughtful and gentle witness through all of his writing.
It’s not just Keller’s theological insights that have shaped me (e.g., The Prodigal God and The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness) but also his gentleness—combined with not compromising on the gospel. This is hard to do well—to speak truth, even difficult truth, lovingly and in a way that makes the aroma of Christ attractive to others. I think a lot about this kind of witness in my parenting, especially.
What’s one book you wish every pastor would read?
Kelly Kapic’s You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News. So much of the stress of our current moment, including the peddling of AI products even to pastors and churches—right alongside teachers, writers, and members of all kinds of other professions—comes from this transhumanist ideal that having limits is bad, and our lives would be so much better if we could only escape our limits.
But we’re not factory machines that can keep working 24-7, or who could somehow optimize ourselves (or our children) into never “breaking down” enough to need rest. I think pastors, who are perennially on the verge of burnout, need this message no less than their flock, who are also being barraged by these messages of doing more, more, more in every sphere of their lives. Yes, we’re limited. God alone isn’t.
On a related note, one of my favorite books of this year, which I’ve recommended now to several friends, including pastors: Bobby Jamieson’s book on Ecclesiastes, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. Jamieson walks through Ecclesiastes—the book is based on a sermon series he preached during the pandemic—and you can see that he’s preaching to himself as much as to others. Because life under the sun is not easy—yet God gives so much joy too. (Yes, I’m breaking the rules for this assignment and adding a second book recommendation. Sorry not sorry.)
What’s your best piece of writing advice?
Speaking of being limited, I am a homeschooling mom who also juggles part-time responsibilities as an editor and an interim director of a graduate program in creative writing. All of this means that I have little time for writing, and even less of it is uninterrupted. Also, laundry in this house mysteriously reproduces as we sleep. And yet, somehow, things get done!
It’s not just Keller’s theological insights that have shaped me but also his gentleness.
I’ve been thinking a lot about buckets and teaspoons. You can fill the largest of buckets with a teaspoon, but you have to keep going. Some days, I might squeeze in an hour for writing. On occasion, Dan (who is a much more gifted writer than I am!) takes the kids out for a few hours, so I get an at-home writing retreat. But other days, I may only get 15 minutes. Still, over the course of a year, it all adds up.
How has reading Greek-Roman classics changed you?
I first took Latin in high school, as a new immigrant to the United States and, at the time, a secular Jew. And then I started Greek two years later. Something about reading literature written more than two millennia ago was (and still is) incredibly exhilarating! I loved the delight of the puzzle of reading in Greek and Latin—languages that are structured differently than any living languages I know, with words that don’t have to be in one fixed order in a sentence. And I loved the richness of the world of the classics—literature, history, archaeology.
I think God used my love of the classics to bring me to him—it was reading the Gospels in Greek that was the final point that led to my conversion, and I still find reading the New Testament in Greek profoundly moving.
What are you learning about life and following Jesus?
Dan talks a lot about redeeming our time, and it’s been a guiding principle for this busy season of family life for us. Our time is not our own, and we have no idea how much of it we have.
We’ve had a season of many changes over the past two and a half years as a family—I quit my job as a tenured full professor, then Dan got a new job halfway across the country, so we moved from Georgia to Ohio. And this meant also having to find a new church, new community, new friends, and so on. It felt like a lot all at once.
One key lesson we’ve learned from this, which we continue applying together, is the importance of hospitality for fostering spiritually rooted connections and friendships. This was true in Jesus’s ministry, this was true in the early church, and we want to live out this truth now in our own lives.
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