This summer, building on our lists from the previous years, we’re offering reading recommendations for people to enjoy wherever and whenever they travel. This is the first in a series of posts from our in-house staff and editors. Enjoy.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

BY JAMES BALDWIN

Augustine, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Unamuno, Kafka, Camus… These are all writers whose intensely personal existential struggles—whether they were insatiable yearnings or harrowing fears—have stirred my mind and my soul. To my embarrassment, it was only a few months ago that I realized that another brilliant thinker belonged in this pantheon of achingly honest and keenly perceptive writers: James Baldwin.

Over the years, I had read and valued essays by Baldwin—essays that spoke to the anxieties and injustices of his political milieu and his identity. However, it was not until this year that I finally cracked open his semi-autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. To say I was stunned or floored or overcome would be an understatement. His penetrating psychological insights, his critical but merciful humanity, his genius attention to salient details, his deeply sympathetic and astoundingly rich character development—I could go on and on—all of this was so emotionally exhausting, and yet all of it was beyond compelling. I am sure scholars of literature and existentialism may quibble with my categorization, but, to my mind, this is an existentialist novel to its very core. Nearly every sentence managed, in some way, to reveal the characters’ quests to define and comprehend their unique essences against the backdrop of an existence in a broken world. If there is anything else I can say to recommend this book, it is only this: I regret that it took me so long to read it!