Books to Read In a Dark Night of the Soul

What I read when the light goes out 🕯️

“Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.”

—Flannery O'Connor

When I was little, I often found myself awake in the middle of the night. My bedroom window looked out through the darkly swaying branches of a maple tree. From there I could see our neighbours’ rooftops, grassy yards, and the fluorescent glow of an empty parking lot across the road. In the solitude of darkness, I’d seek out my nighttime familiars—the moon, the stars, the lone lights left on in someone’s home. I wasn’t afraid of the dark—beholding my usually bustling street at rest filled me with companionable reverence, as though the world were letting me in on one of its most beautiful secrets.

“The moon and stars seemed suddenly flat, the streetlights shone with a chemical pallor. The quiet that fell around me was simply another reminder of how alone I really was in the world. … The pain of meaninglessness fused every layer of my being—body, mind, soul—into an unendurable knot. That was my first dark night of the soul. For many long months, it was impossible to see anything beyond the vacant shadows.”

But one night, at 16, in the depths of my first major depression, I returned to the window, hoping for even a whisper of that old, friendly awe. Instead, I found only silence. The moon and stars seemed flat, the streetlights shone with a chemical pallor. The quiet that fell around me was simply another reminder of how alone I really was in the world.

Until that time in my life, despite whatever sorrows, God’s presence had always seemed to surround me—strange and warm and unmistakable. Now, though, it seemed that presence was not only gone, but had never really been there in the first place. The pain of meaninglessness fused every layer of my being—body, mind, soul—into an unendurable knot. For many long months, it was impossible to see anything beyond the vacant shadows.

For many long months, it was impossible to see anything beyond the vacant shadows. That was my first dark night of the soul.

That was my first dark night of the soul. It was exacerbated, I’m sure, by serious clinical depression, which itself was exacerbated by interpersonal circumstances beyond my control. Regardless, that long, lonely season infected my faith with a darkness I’d never previously known. It was terrifying. And beautiful. And harrowing. And, ultimately, it was transformative—but that’s another story for another day, if ever.

What I want to say is this: dark nights happen to us all. Or most of us, anyway. Mother Theresa had one that lasted much of her adult life, so did St. Silouan, and even Christ experienced a sense of abandonment in his final hours. Dark nights, I believe, are part of the fullness of the human experience, and they are also a part of faith—even “strong” faith (whatever that means—I’ve never had it. Probably because I don’t lift weights enough).

I’m talking about this today because some of us are asking hard questions right now. Of ourselves, of God, our world, our so-called civilizations. For some people, the losses are stacking up. For some people, hope feels like a ghost. They wait for God, but can’t hear Him through the silence.

Where can we go when neither prayer, nor church, nor Scriptures seem to touch the pain?

I’ll tell you one of the places I go: books. Good ones. Honest ones. Beautiful ones.

Call me a heretic, but I’ve found God—and myself, and the barely visible bud of new-growth hope—in books just as much as I have in church or prayer.

So today, I want to share a few of the books I return to when the lights go out. I’ll share my own, and I’m also sharing an editable spreadsheet so members of this community can add their own.

Check out the spreadsheet here!

This is not when you’ve had a “bad day.” I’m not talking about what to read when church seems difficult because the lead singer’s voice is a bit more nasally than you would prefer, or because your priest’s announcements after church are too long-winded (hi, Fr. Y).

I’m talking about books for when the bottom drops out—out of your faith, of your life, of any discernible reason for anything at all. When you can't remember what or why you believed in the first place.

These are books for when the new moon has grown very, very old, and the last star pointing the way just burned out.

Most of them aren’t overtly spiritual or theological. They’re not trying to fix anything. Sometimes the best we can do is stumble our way back toward truth through the side doors of beauty, or wry humour, or a very simple story told well.

So here we are…

11 Books to Read During a Dark Night of the Soul

NOTE: Works that may deal a bit more intensely with mental health matters than my readers would typically expect of my work are marked with an asterisk (*).¹

• Bauby, Jean-Dominique. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death. 1997.
  
  In December 1995, forty-three-year-old Jean-Dominique Bauby, suffered a massive stroke that left him completely and permanently paralyzed, locked in his own body. In the scant year he lives before succumbing to complications from his injuries, Bauby wrote this unforgettable reflection on his life and the human condition using the only part of his body that could move: his left eye. Through his haunting and unforgettable reflections, we are reminded of the ways life’s intrinsic beauty can be magnified through pain and powerlessness.
  

• Brosh, Allie. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened. 2013.*
  
  Hilarious drawings and captions that swerve from humour into despair and back again. Helps me laugh (and cry) at the heaviness and ultimately keep moving.
  

• Edwards, Gareth. The Procrastinator’s Guide to Killing Yourself: Living when life feels unliveable. 2018.*
  
  The tongue-in-cheek title does not do justice to what this book actually is: a poignant, articulate, and realistically hopeful treatise for those struggling to cope with the pain of living.
  

• Frankl, Viktor. Man's Search for Meaning. O.p. 1946.
  
  How does one find meaning in perhaps one of the most cruel and unendurable environments humanity has ever created? Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist, seeks to answer this question while also chronicling his own experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. For Frankl, the meaning of life can be found in every moment of living—life never loses its potential to have meaning, even in the face of suffering, loss, humiliation, and death.
  

• Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. O.p. 1908.
  
  A breath of fresh air and river fun. Sometimes you just need to hear life’s deepest truths from a grumpy badger.

• Haig, Matt. The Midnight Library. 2020.
  
  With the help of an old friend, Nora has the chance to undo all of her life regrets—but is that really the kind of life worth living? This is a novel that helps us explore crippling shame, personal regret, and inadequacy from a new perspective. Plus, there’s a library.
  

• Impastato, David, ed. Upholding Mystery: An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry. 1996.
  
  Sometimes prose and stories and explanations just don’t penetrate—that’s when I pull out the poetry. This is one of my favourite anthologies, along with The Paraclete Poetry Anthology: Selected and New Poems, edited by Phyllis Tickle,

  Scott Cairns
  , and Mark S. Burrows.
  

• Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. O.p. 1929.
  
  While virtually anything by this German poet will do your soul some good, I recommend newcomers to his work start with this short collection of letters he wrote to aspiring poet Franz Xaver Kappus about the difficulties of writing, working, and surviving the complexities of modern life. Well known among writerly types, this book is for anyone—young or old—struggling to become more faithful to their true selves amid the tensions, distractions, and everyday tragedies of an ordinary life. I reread this book about once a year.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

• Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. The Little Prince. O.p. 1943.
  
  With beautiful and timeless illustrations and a seemingly young protagonist, this book looks like a children’s book but it is actually a fairy tale for adults with themes of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss. Written against the backdrop of WWII by French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

• Unnahar, Noor. New Names for Lost Things: Poems. 2021.
  
  From my review on Goodreads: “Many poems left me speechless, several prompted me to send to friends before turning the page, and all of them spoke of the depth of loss, grief, life, memory, love, beauty and rebirth that follow in the wake of war, tragedy, and more ordinary human struggles.”

• Yates, Richard. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. 1962.
  
  Short stories to get lost in and, strangely, remember that you aren’t alone—loneliness is part of what binds us to others in the human experience.

My Books!

My publisher would be happy if I also mentioned one of my own books, Time and Despondency: Regaining the Present in Faith and Life, which I wrote out of my own experiences of despair.

I’d also like to mention the lovely Darkness is as Light devotional by Park End Books, to which I’m a contributor and which is full of entries that help “readers see God with them in suffering, recognize hope in the hardest of experiences” (Publisher’s website).

Got recommendations?

These are just a few books that have accompanied me through dark times over the years. There are many more.

Find them and add your own recommendations in this community spreadsheet I’ve started for members of this community.

Special thanks to

Summer Kinard

,

Quadratus

, Melangell, Hanna, Elizabeth, Katie, and all the other Substackers for submitting early additions after seeing my query in Notes, as well as the members of my weekly writers meetup who shared their recs as well.

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This post has been lightly copy edited by Chat GPT.

1. Personally, when I’m in a “dark night” season, I need to be extra careful with books that get too graphic or specific about mental health struggles, unless there is some kind of hope underlying them. All the books I’ve included in this article are ones I’ve personally found helpful, not distressing, when struggling, even when/if they are pretty direct about how bad things can get, mentally and emotionally. But always read at your own risk.