There is a saying that we don’t read great books only once—we read them as many times as there are versions of ourselves. I have found that to be true.
The Bible will always be the book I have read more than any other. It has been my companion through seminary, ministry, marriage, parenting, grief, joy, and transition. Some passages have comforted me. Others have infuriated me. Still others have forced me to wrestle with God in ways I never expected. But the Bible stands in a category all its own.
Beyond Scripture, however, only a handful of books have earned permanent places beside my chair. These are the books I reach for when I need to remember who I am as a writer, a Christian, and a human being.
Each one speaks to a different part of my soul.
Kitchen Confidential — Anthony Bourdain
I don’t reread Kitchen Confidential because I love food.
I reread it because I love honesty.
Anthony Bourdain wrote with a kind of fearless authenticity that few writers ever achieve. He didn’t seem interested in protecting his reputation. He wasn’t trying to become inspirational. He wasn’t polishing his image for public consumption.
He simply told the truth.
Sometimes that truth was ugly. Sometimes it was hilarious. Sometimes it was painfully vulnerable.
Every time I return to Kitchen Confidential, I find myself becoming a better writer because Bourdain reminds me that readers can smell dishonesty from a mile away. They don’t need perfection. They need authenticity.
As someone who spent decades hiding parts of myself, authenticity has become sacred.
Bourdain’s voice reminds me that the best writing isn’t written from safety.
It’s written from courage.
Perhaps that is why I still mourn his death. I can’t help believing his greatest book was still ahead of him. I wish we could have read what an older, wiser Anthony Bourdain might have written about life, regret, healing, and hope.
The Screwtape Letters — C. S. Lewis
Every time I think I have myself figured out, I reread The Screwtape Letters.
Lewis has an uncanny ability to expose the ways we fool ourselves.
The brilliance of the book isn’t that it describes dramatic evil. Instead, it reveals how ordinary distractions slowly reshape our hearts. Pride. Vanity. Self-righteousness. Busyness. Fear. Comfort.
The enemy rarely destroys us overnight.
He simply persuades us to drift.
Whenever I reread Lewis, I discover a temptation I hadn’t noticed before. Somehow the book changes because I have changed.
As a pastor, I appreciate Lewis’s theology.
As a human being, I appreciate his insight into the human heart.
Few books humble me as consistently as this one.
UnClobber — Colby Martin
There are books you enjoy.
There are books you admire.
Then there are books that give you your life back.
For me, UnClobber was one of those books.
By the time I first read it, I already knew the so-called “clobber passages.” I had preached Scripture for years. I had studied Greek and Hebrew. Yet those verses still carried enormous emotional weight because they had been used to wound countless LGBTQ Christians—including me.
What UnClobber offered wasn’t permission to ignore the Bible.
It offered permission to read it carefully.
Again.
With humility.
With context.
With Jesus at the center.
I reread this book because it reminds me that faith and intellectual honesty belong together. God has never been threatened by sincere questions.
Neither should God’s people be.
Whenever doubt creeps back in—or whenever I hear Scripture used as a weapon—I find myself returning to these pages.
They remind me that grace is always larger than fear.
Safe Harbor
The last book on this list is different.
Because I wrote it.
People sometimes ask whether authors ever reread their own books.
Most don’t.
I do.
Not because I think I’ve written something perfect, but because Safe Harbor reminds me why I started writing in the first place.
Elliott Marek’s journey is fictional.
His loneliness isn’t.
His questions aren’t.
His longing to find a place where people can stop pretending certainly isn’t.
When I reread Safe Harbor, I see pieces of my own life scattered through every chapter. My search for belonging. My exhaustion after years of trying to become who everyone else expected me to be. My hope that grace might actually exist outside the walls we build around ourselves.
The story says things I didn’t yet know how to say directly.
Sometimes fiction reaches places autobiography cannot.
I also reread it because it reminds me that writing is never really about having answers.
It’s about asking better questions.
Even now, I find sentences that make me stop and wonder, Did I really write that?
Occasionally one of my own characters teaches me something I had forgotten.
That’s one of the strangest and most beautiful gifts of writing fiction.
Why I Return
If someone looked only at these four books, they might think they have very little in common.
A chef.
A Christian apologist.
A progressive pastor.
A novel about a broken pastor searching for healing.
But I see the thread that ties them together.
Anthony Bourdain teaches me to tell the truth.
C. S. Lewis teaches me to examine my heart.
Colby Martin teaches me to trust that Scripture can withstand honest questions.
Safe Harbor reminds me that hope is still worth writing about.
Every one of these books calls me toward authenticity.
Every one reminds me that pretending is exhausting and truth, however costly, is ultimately freeing.
That may be why I keep returning to them.
I don’t reread them because I’ve forgotten their stories.
I reread them because, with every passing year, they help me remember my own.
I think these four books also reveal something deeper about me: they are not connected by genre but by a single theme. Each is, in its own way, about refusing to live a lie. Bourdain strips away pretense, Lewis exposes self-deception, Martin dismantles harmful interpretations that obscure grace, and my book, Safe Harbor, imagines what healing looks like after a lifetime of hiding. That common thread is likely why they continue to call me back.
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