ON READING GOOD BOOKS

(January 22, 2019)

            No matter how busy I am, I try to start each day reading a verse or two of scripture and enjoying a short devotional thought.  Today’s inspired verse constituted what has long been a favorite commandment:  “Study and learn, and become acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues, and people” (D&C 90:15).  The thought that accompanied the scriptural injunction to read “all good books” posited that “[r]eading ‘out of the best books’ stretches our mental muscles and expands our horizons.  It takes us out of our mundane worlds and lets us travel as far as our imaginations and the picture painting words of the authors can carry us” (T. S. Monson).

The notion that reading can prove to be an escape “out of our mundane worlds” in turn led me to recite to myself two much-beloved lines from Emily Dickinson:  “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away.” I then remembered that last week I found myself in sub-Saharan Africa; this week I spent time in rural Idaho and Cambridge, England. But physically I never left my home or car.  How did I manage that trick?

One of my long-term goals, often attempted but not always realized, is to read a good book a week. During the first three weeks of 2019 I managed to work my way through four such books.  Before I share their titles and what I learned, I wish to cite another quote about reading that I first encountered in high school.  Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

As a result of my profession, I “taste” many books each week, reading sections or chapters of manuals, textbooks, and scholarly articles on a regular basis.  Just this morning I tasted parts of Phil Jackson’s Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success, the story of a legendary basketball coach.  Over the last year or so I’ve “swallowed” twenty or so novels by Alexander McCall Smith, including the first eighteen books in his series known as the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, set in Botswana.   (I finished The House of Unexpected Sisters just last week.)  Although I have never physically traveled to Africa, I feel as though I have been there many times through McCall Smith’s tales of life in Gaborone and the surrounding Kalahari countryside.

The books that in the first three weeks of 2019 I have “chewed and digested,” meaning that I have read “with diligence and attention,” are these:  Saundra McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation; J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy; and Tara Westover’s Educated: A Memoir.  The tie that binds this trio together is the notion that an inspired teacher or mentor can help first-generation students (those whose parents never attended college) become something far better than they ever hoped to be as children or teenagers.  McGuire provides case study after case study adducing evidence that teaching students how to learn is the key to helping them be successful in the classroom.  Likewise I was inspired when I read how J. D. Vance overcame a hillbilly childhood of poverty, abuse, drugs, and violence to graduate from Yale Law School and how Tara Westover overcame being prevented from attending grade school and high school by parents who were religious zealots and anti-government isolationists and went on to graduate with a doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge.

Reading good books is a choice not to do other things, such as participating in adrenaline-producing video games, wasting time following social media, or binge watching Netflix series.  Reading good books is an opportunity to travel to places one cannot otherwise afford, to experience cultures and perspectives that are foreign to our own.  Reading good books is a commandment with a promise, a promise that we can ameliorate ourselves; improve our minds; increase our intellect; and taste, swallow, and digest things that can nourish our spirits and help us understand the human condition. George R. R. Martin perhaps captured best the point I wish to make: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.”