Wilson compares two different ways of reading — the Thomas Jefferson way and the C.S. Lewis way. Jefferson famously created his own version of the Bible by cutting out everything he didn’t like from the real Bible. This is one way of being a reader — arrogant, “enlightened,” filled with ego and secular will. Then there is C.S. Lewis, who compared reading to traveling to another country and being willing to mingle with the locals. You come home not full of your own subjective prejudices, but a different person: “You come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before. So with the old literature.” Wilson adds this: “If we are poor readers, an encounter with the Word will not do much to make us his people.”

Because so many book stores and so many college literature departments are run by liberals, it’s assumed that any kind of reading transforms the reader into a liberal or a social justice revolutionary. “Banned Books” weeks never talk about the conservative books that don’t get covered in the liberal media or stocked at left-wing bookstores. Yet as Wilson explores so convincingly, reading can not only make you “woke” but bring you into deeper contact with God — which is to be genuinely woke.