Recent years have brought scholarly attention to the reading habits of religious people. Ethnographies of Bible study groups, examinations of readers of religious fiction and non-fiction, and explorations of the development of religious print culture in the United States have reminded us of the power of words and readers in the making of religious Americans. Smith, an associate professor of American studies and literature, expands that scholarship with her work on popular religious books and the people who read them in the twentieth century. Specifically, Smith ties much of this scholarship together to argue that in the twentieth century, many readers approached religious literature with concerns about applicability. They wanted to know how what they read could impact their lives in positive ways. In so doing, they ignored the questions literary critics want to ask about authorship or provenance and blurred the lines between sacred and secular in participating in making religious works commodities and not just theologies.

Smith breaks the long twentieth century into five periods spanning the late nineteenth century until the millennium. In each of these periods she is interested in not just laying out the content and analyzing popular religious literature but also attempting to get to the voices of readers who consumed this literature. She is particularly interested in emphasizing works that were largely popular among audiences but also disparaged by intellectual and theological elites of the various times. Smith examines Charles Sheldon's In His Steps, Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, among other works. By mining archival data of readers' letters to authors, literary magazines, contemporary news reports, advertising of the times, and even reviews on Amazon.com (obviously for more contemporary readers), Smith presents a picture of religious reading that transcends denominational and even religious boundaries to suggest that while historical situations and theological leanings heavily shape readers, there have been moments of homogeneity in the concerns that have driven some people to religious works.

That concern has been on taking the books one is reading and applying it to one's personal life. Even though one's religious leaders might have criticized or even condemned a work, readers still found these texts (and others like them) powerful and meaningful. In fact, readers appeared to ignore questions of philosophical cohesion or theological correctness altogether. It was not that good theology was a secondary concern; it appears it often was not a concern at all. Publishers apparently recognized this abandonment of theological correctness and elitism and actively worked to market books in those ways. Practicality and readability became the buzzwords instead of theological faithfulness or erudition.

Many elements commend Smith's work. She handles these works and the readers she encounters through print or through face-to-face conversations with respect. While it might be easy to critique the works in the book from a variety of literary or philosophical perspectives, Smith is more concerned with helping her readers understand the power that these books had in people's lives. Instead of listening solely to the voices of elites, she encourages readers to listen to the people “on-the-ground” who found these works spiritually enlightening or uplifting. What Would Jesus Read? also reminds scholars who study nineteenth and twentieth-century literature that there are a variety of sources that can be investigated to get at the thoughts and experiences of readers. We are not just left to what elites say or what the authors themselves have written.

It might be easy to argue for the inclusion of other works that Smith does not address that may have had a larger readership or had a more significant longer lasting impact. Instead scholars should recognize that Smith's work is broadening the conversation of religious reading, not offering the definitive word on it. Particularly important is her emphasis on the preference for personal application and focus on therapeutic concerns religious readers had in the twentieth century across religious groups and denominations. Such a focus takes us away from concentration on theology, rationale, and cohesiveness and puts it on emotion, consumerism, and lived religion.

One omission that is significant, however, is fundamentalism. Smith does admit that she minimizes discussion of evangelicalism because of a growing sense in scholarship that evangelical is often presented as the default religious identity of Americans in studies of religious history and literature. While we could point to a variety of studies that would support Smith's contention, it stills seems like a sizable lacuna in an otherwise fascinating book. Obviously, Smith cannot cover everything, but she has opened up the possibility for interesting examinations of fundamentalist print culture from the reader response side. How did fundamentalists respond to their own developing print culture? How did they respond to the works that Smith examines? These paths of inquiry and others seem to be a good way to build on Smith's work to get a fuller sense of how readers consumed religious books in the twentieth century.