Hey, there, guess what! It’s September! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I still get that little tingle of excitement when I turn the calendar to September, just remembering all the years of excitement and anticipation at the beginning of a new school year! Yeah, I know, and yes, I am a little old for that, but some things don’t change.
One thing that never changes is my love for reading. My son and daughter were reading at the age of three. Their love for the written word is limitless, and they have passed that on to many others, including my granddaughters. Lucas wears a shirt that reads, “So many books; so little time!” And Lacy loves this from Kenko Yoshida;
“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations—such is a pleasure beyond compare.”
When we began our ministry to Sierra Leone, West Africa, we brought our two younger girls. They weren’t three—they were about 11 or 12. They didn’t speak English. They didn’t read. We soon began working to change both of those situations. One thing they probably had nightmares about was my unswerving determination that they should read. They can probably repeat the mantra I used. “You must learn to read. If you can read, you can do anything in this world. If you can’t read, it doesn’t matter what else you can do.” But they love me anyway. I must be a soul mate to Dr. Seuss, who said, “The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go!”
Jane Austen wrote in Pride and Prejudice,
“I declare after all, there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
And I suppose that would include listening to books on tape, or reading on a computer or Kindle, but somehow there is nothing like the heft of a good book in one’s hands, the crisp pages that whisper to you as you turn them, the amazing, great things you are introduced to - as Jane might say, “It’s all too wonderful!”
On the other hand, in Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare declares that “Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.” And, of course, we have that rascal Mark Twain describing classics (not knowing that we would long consider his books classics themselves) as “a book which people praise and don’t read.”
Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash
Since my husband and I don’t have TV, that has not been a big time-waster in our lives. We have always read, either quietly or aloud, to one another. However, I do have to fear for the other time-waster—the one everyone carries in his hand—which can replace TV. I wish everyone carried a book like that. I kind of like what that great saint and philosopher, Groucho Marx, said,
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
Of course, the great science fiction writer Ray Bradbury really says it all when he comments,
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
So as my team and I are working to get my Down Home on the Farm book #5, A Job for Dancer, ready to go to press, I think a lot about books. About how so many people have written so many billions of words over thousands of years which have taught me, encouraged me, opened my mind to worlds beyond my own. Yes, Dancer is a children’s book. I hope that the adults who read my books to children like them as well as the children do. I love C. S. Lewis and he wrote children’s books as well. I leave you with his thought on children’s books:
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
So, let’s all just settle down and read, shall we?
~ Lura (Katy) Houk