I must confess that I feel like a

Welcome to the finale in our series on inspiration! I hope that you’ve all enjoyed reading this month’s series as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. It really was a challenge picking out my top ten inspirations to discuss for this series, but I think we came up with a pretty comprehensive list. Please let me know if you start reading or watching any of the things I recommended this past month—I’d love to know if you get inspiration out of the same things as me.

For today, I want to talk about a book I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about a lot over the years. I’ve read it five times, I think, and I still have it nearby all the time just in case I decide I’d like to read it again. It’s one of those books that never takes me long to read, and that I know I’ll have to read again every two or three years.

Monster

Frank Peretti

If you’ve been reading Too Many Books to Count for a while, then you’ll have heard this name before. But today, we’re talking about it as a form of inspiration.

See, Monster is about sasquatch, but it’s not written in the way you’d think.

Peretti is one of the masters of writing horror fiction that maintains a clean standpoint, so if you’re like me and you need your books clean, then Peretti’s work is definitely inspiring. But Monster, for me, is one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read.

Why?

Because it took a legend we’re all familiar with, a species we all know the name of and all know doesn’t exist, and made a story about it in modern day Earth—a story that could actually be plausible, and makes you really want to believe there’s more out there than we know.

This is the kind of story I love writing. I love exploring the unknown in the legend, and I love turning those legends on their head.

Trouble is, I’m nowhere near as good at it as Peretti—but that’s why I keep reading this book.

The story isn’t complicated. There’s nothing incredibly groundbreaking about this novel. But it’s written so profoundly well that I have never once been pulled from the story, never for even a second started to wonder if this was just a story, never got pulled out of the world Peretti created.

There’s something to be said for an author who can do that.

Ted Dekker calls it the fictive bubble. Don’t let your readers escape that bubble. Most of the time, we pop it ourselves.

Peretti has never popped it in anything he’s written, but Monster is the one that resonates with me, the book I read over and over, and the story I want to be real.

What about you? What’s your number 1 inspirational book?

Don’t forget to check back in next Tuesday to find out what we’ll be chatting about through August!

[love]

{Rani Divine}