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The Books That Shape Us

 Some people do not like to read, but that is usually not their fault. They have never been taught how to read or given the permission to discover what they will love to read. I was fortunate to grow up in a reading household and to have considerable liberty in my reading selections--maybe too much, at times. I did not ask my parents if I could read a book. I simply found one on the shelf that looked interesting and plunged in. I didn’t enjoy school very much, but I loved the school library. The yearly visit of the Scholastic Book Fair was almost as good, and sometimes better, than Christmas, and when my elementary school class was not very interesting I found that I could hide an interesting book inside my textbook, at least, until the kid sitting behind me ratted me out. (I probably learned the book inside a book trick from reading about it… in a book.)

Everyone should enjoy reading because reading is one of the most important ways to grow as a human being, and if you don’t enjoy the discipline, you won’t do it for very long. That does not mean you should enjoy reading anything. Some of us have very eclectic tastes and can be happily occupied with many different types of literature. But just as every one should have a job at some point in their lives that is so unpleasant it clarifies for them the reasons they want to work hard so as not to end up in that kind of career, so everyone should read some books that help them learn what a good book is not and why we ought to be willing to work hard to find the good ones to read and enjoy.

People approach reading in different ways. I remember hearing an interview with John MacArthur several years ago in which he expressed astonishment that anyone would ever want to re-read a book. I was astonished by his astonishment. Have you really enjoyed a book you never want to read again? I might understand if the first taste was so perfect the reader dare not return because of the certainty of disappointment. But my own philosophy of reading was shaped largely by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Mortimer Adler, so my reading life is largely a search for those “great books” that I plan to re-read for the rest of my life. A considerable percentage of my yearly reading is devoted to re-reading books I have read before, and there is a list of books I re-read every year. I don’t consider a book very valuable if I will only profit from reading it once, and there are many books you must read once to discover they were not worth reading at all. But that being said, we cannot afford to be too picky if we enjoy reading and read widely. Some reading should simply be mind candy, the kind of book whose only profit is the entertainment that it brings. Oreos can be enjoyed--and are always best enjoyed dipped in a cup of coffee--but they should not be eaten too frequently or in great proportion compared to the rest of one’s diet. The same is true of the kind of reading that passes the time but does not speak to the soul.

Great books are our teachers, and good books are our companions. Poor books are obstacles we meet along the way. If you are a Christian, there is one book you will love, even if you do not love any other. That, of course, is the Bible. But if you know the value of reading, there will be many others you also find profitable. Books contain the wisdom of the ages, and its foolishness. They allow us to participate in conversations with those wiser than we are and to discover that neither publication nor the passage of time can make a poor thinker or bad writer (which are actually the same thing) into a good one. We dare not trust our own wisdom or the very limited pool of people each of us knows. We love our friends and associates, but not many of them are writing books or emails or Facegram posts that will be read one hundred years from now, much less a thousand. No matter how wise and good-natured you may be, you probably do not want me calling to chat at three o’clock in the morning, but Chesterton never seems to mind when I do so.

Life is too short to read everything, and most of what has been written is not worth reading anyway. One must be selective. If you care to depress yourself, you can easily calculate roughly how many books you have left to read in whatever is left of your lifetime. We do not want to waste too many of those, so I prefer to continue conversing with the authors I know will not disappoint me and the works that still have much to teach me no matter how many times I have read them. We should never grow tired of visiting Narnia or trudging through Middle Earth on the way to Mordor. We need to be regularly reminded not merely of Christian and Christiana’s story, but that their story is our story, and that other saints have walked the path our feet are following today. We have much still to learn in the school of Calvin and the Puritans and Bavinck and Schaeffer. There are more questions to ask Aristotle and Plato, and we need to hear more stories about the history of God’s providence in the events of this world. We can do all of this simply by picking up a book and reading it well.

We are not reading for entertainment, though we should find it entertaining. We read because we are incomplete, ignorant, and cold-hearted, and it is the stories and truths we find in great books (and some good ones) that teach, shape, equip, and sustain us. They are instruments in the Redeemer’s hand. I do not spend so much of my life reading books because I enjoy it, I enjoy so much of my life because I spend it reading. --JME