A Love Affair with Reading

Reading opened me up to new worlds, new thoughts and new experiences. And it made me realize my struggles were common.

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

A man in an electric wheelchair coasted down the sidewalk with one arm full of books and his other hand operating the steering component. Seeing that outside a library this week made my heart glad. With so many entertainment or educational options available right now, books are still a thing. 

If you are a reader of this newsletter, this isn’t news to you. But every once in a while, we need to be reminded of our love affair with reading. Here’s my story.

It began when I was young; maybe for different reasons than most others. I was a painfully shy, overweight kid who ran and hid when the doorbell rang. I also played baseball by myself in the front yard using ghost runners (because I didn’t have any friends and we lived out in the sticks) long before ghost runners were cool.

But I always had books. 

In grade school, I had Benvenuto (an adorable dragon). I’m so happy I didn’t learn about Book 2 in the series because Benvenuto looks completely different on that cover and it would have upset me because it didn’t match the vision in my head (the one from the cover of Book 1). Also, Benvenuto gets captured in that second book and ends as a carnival sideshow. Not cool. 

I also had the “Weekly Reader.” I’d circle the books I wanted and Mom would order them for me. I have no idea how she afforded them since she was a single mother, but God bless her for the sacrifices she made. I ordered a ton of top-10 NFL books (Top 10 All-Time Quarterbacks, Top 10 All-Time Running Backs, etc.) I ate those stories up. 

A few years later, I progressed to sports biographies, like “Fighting Back” by Rocky Bleier (who played for my favorite NFL team) and “Brian’s Song.” 

My grandmother used to take us to a thrift store in South Omaha, and I made a beeline for the books. Every time we went, they had a different selection, and it was glorious! I examined each book on every shelf, usually for sports books, and Grandma forked over the dime for each one. Or maybe I used some of my allowance. I don’t remember. 

In high school, I encountered two teachers who fed my reading habit. In Mr. Martin’s English Lit class, we read some of the classics: “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Outsiders,” etc. And in Mr. Faiman’s Media Lit and Composition class, we studied all sorts of media, including movies and music. In both cases, my teachers taught me how to think critically about a piece of work and showed me it was OK to allow for some subjectivity. 

Here’s what one former student of Mr. Faiman’s said about his class: “During a session on ‘Shakespeare,’ we were studying, ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ Rather than just read the poem, he stopped several times to ask why the words were assembled this way? What was the meaning of the paragraph?” I found this to be so helpful, and it was one of many reasons I fell in love with the written word.

A year or so after I graduated from high school, I got a letter from Mr. Martin. He encouraged me to write, saying I had a gift. I never forgot that. And I had a chance to thank him a few years ago at a book signing. We both had books for sale. How cool is that?

I took an elective poetry class in college, even though I was a business major. I hated my business classes (don’t ask me why I didn’t change my major; I have no idea!), but couldn’t wait for my poetry class. I can’t remember my professor’s name, but she was a kind, gentle soul – pretty much what you would expect from a poetry professor. Finding buried treasure in poetry was exciting for me. So I began writing my own poems – angsty stuff about not being good enough to get the girl. I was Dawson’s Creek before Dawson. 

One of the other classes I took in college, which was mandatory because it was a Jesuit school, was religion. I had no knowledge of the Bible at this point in my life, so I struggled to understand anything in this class. Many, if not most, of the other students had gone to Catholic high schools, so I felt like I was out on an island. But I remember reading a book titled Jesus by someone named Senior for that class. It intrigued me, not enough to explore it any further, but enough to awaken me to the idea of thinking beyond this natural world.

Also during college, I went through a John Saul and Clive Cussler phase. A girl I knew was into Saul, so I read a novel or two he penned, but just couldn’t get into them. Cussler’s “Raise the Titanic” caught my attention and drew me into the story. I read a few more Dirk Pitt (the main character in many of Cussler’s novels) novels, but then I stopped reading for a while as my life took a detour into music.

I read nothing during the next five to seven years following college. But words still mattered to me. My poetry progressed to writing song lyrics – more angsty stuff about not being good enough to get the girl. I even recorded ten songs on a cassette. I was a below-average guitar player and had no formal training in writing songs, but that didn’t stop me. Writing those words/lyrics gave me the outlet I needed at the time.

Seven years after college, I became a Christian. And it changed everything, including my reading habits. I flailed for the first few years on my own until I started asking questions of Christians who were far more spiritually mature. They started pointing me toward books. I devoured them, marking them up as I went. 

A few years later, I got a postcard in the mail for an upcoming Christian writers’ conference. Editors would be in attendance and actively seeking manuscripts. More importantly for me, professional writers would lead workshops. I took one of those workshops by a novelist named Nancy Moser. She talked about her journey into writing for the Christian market, namely novels, and I was hooked. 

I bought and read all of her Mustard Seed Series novels, and they are still among my favorites. Just fantastic! Then I purchased and read every stand-alone novel she released. I’d listen to that continuing workshop she taught at that conference (I had purchased the audio tapes) and nearly wore them out. With each listen, my confidence grew. Maybe I could become a writer too.

But before I could ever gain any traction as a fiction writer, I met an editor at a conference a couple of years later and started writing sports features for his magazine. That eventually led to features and profiles for other magazines and newspapers. But that didn’t stop me from diving into the deep end of Christian fiction. 

During Moser’s class, she had mentioned The Mitford Series by Jan Karon. I was hooked from the first chapter of the 14-book series. As I said in the first essay of Common Grounds: “When I pull out a Jan Karon novel and lose myself in the fictional town of Mitford, I realize I’m just a younger version of Father Tim [the main character]. I don’t live in a small town. I’m not in my sixties. I’m not Episcopalian. I’m certainly not a priest, but yet, I identify with him, and identifying with him makes me feel less alone.”

I think that’s what reading did for me as a whole. It opened me up to new worlds, new thoughts and new experiences. And it made me realize my struggles were common. Just understanding that was helpful. 

As I’ve been thinking about writing this essay, I’ve been wondering which way reading trends skew, especially since the pandemic. The statistics vary, but these numbers on BookRiot encouraged me: “According to an analysis conducted by the PEW Research Center and updated in January of 2022, 30% of Americans have read an ebook within the last year, up from 25% in 2019, while 75% of adult Americans have read a book in the past year in any format, which is a statistic that hasn’t varied much since 2019.”

The journalist in me knows people will often try to make themselves look good, especially if they are asked a question like, “Did you read any books last year?” But even if they didn’t tell the truth, it means 75 percent of adult Americans have read a book in the past year, think they should have read one or want people to know they read one. I’ll take that. However it shakes out, even the ones who aren’t telling the truth might pick up a book this year. 

For the Christian, one of the best things he or she can do is to read the Christian classics: “Mere Christianity,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Knowing God,” “Orthodoxy,” “Fox’s Book of Martyrs,” “The Screwtape Letters,” “Paradise Lost,” “The Chronicles of Narnia” and so many others (here’s a list of 50 to get you started). Sure, some of the material is dense reading, but if you’ll mine a little, you’ll find gold. And you’ll feel like you’re standing with Christians (throughout the ages, in some cases) who have read and digested the same material. Talk about feeling less alone!

Reading is fuel for the battle of life. It offers insights, nudges, challenges, understanding, instruction and so much more. It’s the reason my to-be-read pile continues to grow. I’ll probably end up buying more books over the course of my life than I can read, but that’s not a bad thing. Maybe my heir(s) will benefit from the collection. 

I’d love to hear about your love affair with reading. How did it begin? How did it grow? What books have meant the most to you?