Critics' choices for Christmas.

When a group of Jesuit friends were hanging out in my room recently, one spied a stack of books on my night-stand. "What are you reading these days?" he said, idly picking up a book. My collection included a newish biography of Mother Teresa, a book on mystical prayer, and a new edition of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle.

"Oh brother!" he said. "Don't you read anything fun?"

So sue me. I like spiritual reading, especially the lives of the saints. And I would wager that many readers of Commonweal do also. To be fair, so did my friend, he explained, just not before bedtime.

One of the best new books on the saints is Robert Ellsberg's insightful The Saints' Guide to Happiness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23, 248 pp.), which deserves to be in every Catholic's library. The conceit of his highly readable and well-researched book is this: we know so much about what the saints thought about prayer, poverty, suffering, and so on. What did they have to say about happiness? How, according to the saints, can we be happy? Each chapter takes up a relatively broad topic, for example, "Learning to Let Go," and offers the insights of a handful of saints on the issue.

Ellsberg, editor-in-chief of Orbis Books, is well known for his bestselling All Saints, a large-hearted compendium of saints both traditional (Peter, Paul, Therese) and not-so-traditional (Mozart, Gandhi). In that earlier work, the saints were organized much as they are in a religious ordo: by their feast day (or, for the nontraditional, the date of birth or death). His new book is a kind of narrative version of All Saints, with the chapters drawing together a few holy men and women around a common theme. Not only will the book help you understand how to be happier (which, as Aristotle said, is everyone's aim), it will also introduce you to a marvelous cloud of witnesses who have been praying for your happiness since you were born.

If you're interested, though, in concentrating on just one saint, you might try Lawrence S. Cunningham's Francis of Assisi: Performing the Gospel Life (Eerdmans, $14, 160 pp.), a concise overview of the life of the world's most beloved saint, but with a twist. As Cunningham states in his tart introduction, he is growing tired of treatments of Francis that strip him of his Catholicism, turning his ardent faith into "spirituality lite." In his foreword he sets out his project: "This book," he writes, "will work against that view of Francis ... summed up by the ubiquity of those cast concrete garden statues ... with a bird perched on the saint's shoulder found at everyone's local garden center." Cunningham, a professor of theology at Notre Dame and well known to Commonweal readers for his "Religion Booknotes" column, is also an expert on the lives of the saints and, especially, Francis.

Francis of Assisi is my favorite kind of book: the short study of a saint written by an expert. Sprinkled throughout are some zingers that get to the heart of the matter. By the book's close you see how integral Catholicism (not just a vague sense of religion or faith or spirituality) was for Francis. Likewise, much of Francis's earthly success depended heavily upon the support he enjoyed from bishops and popes. Cunningham's book puts Francis of Assisi back in the church, which is, after all, where he wanted to be.

A fictionalized version of sanctity is a fair description of All We Know of Heaven (Houghton Mifflin, $14, 240 pp.), a novel by Remy Rougeau, a Benedictine monk. His lovely book tells the tale of Brother Antoine, a young Canadian who enters a Trappist monastery in the 1970s to the dismay of his family. That a Benedictine, even a cloistered one, would pen a story about Cistercian life seems inherently risky. (Imagine the letters he'd get if he put a foot wrong!) But Rougeau more than pulls it off: it feels as if he's describing the Trappist community from the inside. In many places his novel is reminiscent of Thomas Merton's journals, which recounted the charming aspects of monastic life (a monk citing the ducks in the chapter of faults for their incessant quacking) also some less charming ones (intransigence, bitterness, and complaining in the community).

Rougeau's writing has the same subtle power as Merton's, and you may find yourself longing to spend some time at the fictional St. Norbert's Abbey. There is one passage that stopped me cold. Immediately after his profession of vows, which moves him deeply, Antoine meditates on the life of a revered older monk, Bernard. "The emotion Antoine felt was broader than gratitude. He was appreciative, yes, but he also wanted to be better than he was: more virtuous, more sympathetic, more responsible to the world. He had an idea of what holiness meant--something like the size and shape of Brother Bernard--and he struggled toward it. He wanted to make that shape his own somehow. He wanted to wish that shape upon the world."

It's a splendid book, and so are the other two. And, pace my Jesuit friend, what better way to end your evenings than by reading about sanctity?

James Martin, SJ, is an associate editor of America magazine. His most recent book is the collection he edited, Awake My Soul: Contemporary Catholics on Traditional Devotions (Loyola, 2004).