The Life of A Reader

I wouldn’t have ever said I love reading. I read a lot as a kid. I read all the Little House books, and every Archie comic I could find, and Harriet the Spy and Ronia the Robber’s Daughter and Catherine Called Birdy and various other things I’ll never remember. I always won all the reading contests that school would hold over the summer. As I grew older, I put the books down and instead became fascinated with Meyers-Briggs and the Enneagram. I spent all my time on message boards, voraciously going through every post (even the ones that were years-old) and printing out all the free materials I could get. Still, I was reading.

At 19, I was essentially a lapsed Christian. That year I read Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis several times, and The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom twice. It was not because I loved reading; it was because these are wonderful books. I wasn’t reading my Bible, as I felt it was shameless to read things I had no intention of obeying. But, being without the Bible, I settled for the next best thing: books written by human beings who were shaped by the Bible. On vacation later in that year, I read God’s Secret Agent by Sammy Tippit, a memoir of a missionary to people behind the iron curtain, and I would say that was the beginning of me becoming an un-lapsed Christian.

At 23, I became a member of a church for the first time since I was 16, and my small group’s first book study was on Radical by David Platt. If you’ve read Radical, then you know there is not a better book in the world for a believer who is anxious to please God after, what felt like, a lifetime of mistakes.

I have come to accept that I actually do read a lot, and I carry the burden of this in my mannerisms. When you read a lot, you build up a large vocabulary that many people don’t understand. You also become familiar with lots of words that you only know by reading, not hearing. Thus you don’t really know how to pronounce things. You end up in this strange situation where you know lots of big words but, unfortunately, can barely speak English. Alas. Such is the life of a reader.

I don’t really ‘love reading.’ But, I’ve read over a hundred books in this past year. There are always several books I’m reading on-and-off simultaneously. I discovered at 26 (a few months ago) that I actually like reading poetry. I used to say poetry is pretentious and boring. Am I now pretentious and boring?

I read a lot of books, and I’m a Christian. The older I get, the more I filter everything through the lens of Biblical reality, which is to say, the world as it really is. Reading has become different over the years. Once you’re looking for it, you can see the truth of God’s word in everything. You can see it in books written by John Piper and David Platt and R. C. Sproul, and in books by Karl Marx and Charles Darwin and George Orwell. Sometimes it is by seeing the counterfeit that you can better understand the Real. Some books explain moral law, and some books reflect the darkness you tumble into when you transgress it.

But all this is to say, it is possible that I do, in fact, like reading. I spend so much time reading that it’s becoming a problem. I used to say I need to watch less TV; I have now entered the very real stage of my life where I need to spend less time reading. But like all addictions, I must first try to justify myself so I can continue in my behavior. That’s where this blog comes in. I hope it will be of some interest to you, if you want to read reviews written by a Christian.