Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Five reasons I loved this book:

1. The setting: Oxford. Ever since I read George Sayer's wonderfully British biography of C. S. Lewis, I've been fascinated by the place. Stone walls covered with ivy, towering spires in the morning sunlight, "New Buildings" so called because they were built in the thirteenth century (and not earlier, like the other buildings), the Bodleian Library's shelves and shelves of ancient books. . . . Oxford is a fascinating place.

2. The book's literary references. Carolyn is a graduate student studying literature, and she has a lot of the same literary tastes I do. She loves Donne, Herbert, Keats, Wordsworth, and the Inklings, and she sprinkles her story with clever references that make the book a delight to read.

3. The book's tone. Carolyn is real. Her search for truth is difficult at times, and she writes honestly about struggles that it caused between herself and her family and some of her friends at Oxford. And yet the book has a fun, conversational feel that makes you think you're across the coffee table from her.

4. One of the chapters is entitled "Sehnsucht."

5. God's remarkable grace. This is a wonderful story of how God brought Carolyn to Himself. Carolyn begins the story as an extremely intelligent agnostic leaving Canada to attend graduate school at Oxford. The last thing she expects is to keep discovering highly intelligent people who find the truths of Christianity to be historically credible, and who have found peace from a relationship with God. Carolyn has all kinds of questions, but it's amazing to see how so many "coincidences" come together to answer these questions and bring her to faith in God. As I read this, I was thankful God's grace in my own life.

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I'm currently enjoying Carolyn Weber's Surprised by Oxford. I love this passage in which she describes her life as an undergraduate student:

Totally idealistic, I was the quintessential student. One of those inspiring or irritating students--depending on how you look at it--who reads everything assigned and then the footnotes too. And the prefaces, and the references, and the epigraphs, and the marginalia. And the wacky, unrelated stuff on the next anthology page. I devoured everything I came across. I loved it all. Even the annoying parts I enjoyed, precisely because they annoyed me and so, often, made me stop and really think. With college, my life opened up more than I could have ever imagined: into art, and history, and philosophy, and argumentation, and statistics, and postcolonial theory. I began to understand my own spot of existence in relation to the history of ideas. I began to see, both scarily and comfortingly, that all I thought had been thought before. I began to see how studying the humanities illuminates humanitas or "what it means to be human." What it means to become human. The decisions and the responsibilities of becoming truly humane.