James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is my first book of the year, and it is easily a five-star read. Religion is not a part of my life or my worldview, so when I read a book that’s deeply steeped in spiritual themes (The Brothers Karamazov is a great example) that I don’t relate to but am nevertheless profoundly impacted by, it’s because I gravitate toward the use of the characters’ religious worldviews as a lens through which to understand them rather than as something that intrinsically holds any sort of universal meaning in and of itself.

Go Tell It on the Mountain is about a boy named John Grimes who prepares to attend an evening service at his father’s church on the night of his 14th birthday. The book has a three-part structure that telescopes out from the night of the service in 1935 Harlem to his father and aunt’s childhood in the post-Reconstruction American South. The narrative has a stream for consciousness structure to it that allows us to zoom in and out on various characters, forming a multi-faceted view of the world that shaped them and the way they see each other.

Baldwin was an immensely gifted writer. His language is lyrical and somberly propulsive, and I found myself barreling through the story. There’s incredible complexity of feeling in all the characters; no answers to any of the existential questions they grapple with ever comes easily or without sacrifice. There’s lightness and darkness and every shade in between. I can’t wait to read more of Baldwin’s work, and I hope all the books I read this year give me as much to think about as this one did.