What’s your favorite Bible verse? The answer for each of us probably varies over the course of our lives, and possibly also changes according to the circumstances.
I was once part of a group exercise where each person was asked to share a treasured line of Scripture. After many edifying and consoling moments (and some of “neither do I condemn you,” natch), a clever fellow brought the house down with an unexpected fave: “Luke 7:34: The Son of Man has come eating and drinking; and you say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”
It wasn’t me; I don’t have that kind of comic timing. But a different verse was on my mind this summer for various reasons, and not just because we were working on this Fall Books issue. It is the last line from the Gospel of John:
But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
No one ever picks this banger of a closing line, perhaps because it is so obviously a closing line, and maybe also because it is so stylistically inelegant. But it offers a startling image nonetheless, like Jorge Luis Borges’s microfiction story “On Exactitude in Science,” about a map so gigantic it became the same size as the world it charted. John’s coda is also a kind of implicit call to discipleship: This story doesn’t end here.
Even in a postliterate age, we are immersed in a world of books to a far greater degree than the ancients. Scholars estimate that the Library of Alexandria held around half a million scrolls at its peak, but last year in the United States alone, more than four million books were published. I know what you’re thinking: Self-published books don’t count. But even if that were true (it’s not: Leaves of Grass was self-published; so was Andy Weir’s The Martian), traditional publishers released over 640,000 books last year. As the literary editor of America, I get the seasonal lists from publishers large and small, and they do make one wonder if and when all those books will indeed fill the entire world.
Is anyone reading them? Rose Horowitch raised that question this summer in The Atlantic in “The End of Reading Is Here,” and Jessica Hooten Wilson responds in the Last Take in these pages. Ms. Hooten Wilson notes that while Ms. Horowitch calls books an “essential source of knowledge, memory, wisdom, and morality” for everyone, the stakes are even higher for those literally called the People of the Book. When the evidence sometimes suggests that the church is vanishing (we have a book review about that, too), can we afford to stop reading when our sacred texts seem at times like the only thing we share?
In addition to Ms. Hooten Wilson’s own bravura closing line—“As for me and my house, we will keep the books”—the contents of this issue might reveal where our sentiments lie: with the old-school writers and readers. Our book reviews in these pages have their own biblical resonances, including takes on a book of poems called Erase Genesis and a novel called Brother Epistles, and of course we also cover those things that are inevitable in life: popes and taxes. And our feature story from Stephanie Saldaña on following in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi begins at a familiar place for a bookworm. Before Saldaña laces up the boots, she opens St. Francis’ beautiful short book Testament.
I had my own chance to change the theme of this issue from books to travelogue this spring, when I flew to Norway to visit the home and haunts of Sigrid Undset. The prolific Norwegian author was the winner of the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature and a favorite author of countless readers who possessed the sitzfleisch—a great German word that literally means “sitting meat”—to power through historical epics that can top 1,000 pages, including her justly famous medieval trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter. Our former editor in chief Drew Christiansen, S.J., put the trilogy “near the top of my all-time favorite list”; longtime America contributor Father Robert E. Lauder called it “the greatest Catholic novel ever written.”
Undset lived for many years in Lillehammer in southeastern Norway, a town now full of people so impossibly fit and outdoorsy that I became convinced after a few days that the local Scripture was the R.E.I. catalog: Behold, the Son of Man came hiking and kayaking, swaddled in dry-fit kit. But once I entered Undset’s study, I knew I had found a kindred spirit: This was a woman who read, and who never wasn’t reading. Wall after wall of books, in Norwegian, Danish, English, Latin, German, French, Old Norse and Old Icelandic; she even had a complete set of the Catholic Encyclopedia in English, published from 1907 to 1912. One of its editors? America’s first editor in chief, John J. Wynne, S.J.
Oh, and if you’re wondering what books, pace Borges and St. John, would fill the entire world? Try lugging Kristin Lavransdatter all over Norway.
This article appears in October 2026.
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