Reading Widely

I used to think reading was for boring people. I now realize that I was the boring one. Far from being a habit of the boring, reading deeply and widely is an art that shapes a life in a beautiful way. You could even say it is a spiritual practice.

When I was young my reading life was very limited. I read what I absolutely had for to school and even then I tried to get away with the cliff notes. School didn’t come easily for me and I didn’t have a good retention rate of what I did read. It wasn’t until college that I began to realize that I had the intellect for hard work. It just took the right instructors to motive me and see in me more than I saw in myself. I started reading things that I thought of as practical and helpful in some way. As a Christian I found myself reading theology and Christian living books. I certainly don’t regret the years I spent pouring over theology books especially, but I see now that I was reading in a utilitarian way…reading to be able to practically use the information in some way. How often do we hear people say, “ When am I ever going to use this?”. I used to ask my history teacher why I needed to know facts about the past. It seemed so pointless. And Latin… that was just absurd. Why would anyone want to study a dead language? Sadly my imagination was not captivated by a reading life at that time and now I feel this desire to catch up on all the great books I missed out on.

It might not seem like it but having a vibrant reading life will improve your overall wellbeing. I have a mentor who likes to say that stories will save the world. I’m beginning to see what she means. Books allow us to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, to travel to foreign lands, to go back in time, to experience tragedy that somehow taps into our own grief and longing. They open up for us a vocabulary that helps us articulate our own lives better and to have our imaginations formed by the good, the true and the beautiful.