The Love of Literature

Throughout my life I have cultivated a love for reading. Of course, I have my parents to thank for starting me on that path – for who else was going to read to me before I could read to myself, or take me to the library once I could? Some of my fondest memories of early childhood have to do with my parents reading to me. My mother would read me (and my sister after me) the well-known “Berenstain Bears” books over and over again – you know, the family that lived “down a sunny dirt road DEEP in Bear Country”. I still remember the pictures and the stories from those books. My dad also read me bedtime stories out of a book that I actually wish I still had. I still remember most of the stories out of that collection – “Rumpelstiltskin”, “The Elephant and the Bad Baby”, “The Selfish Giant”, and “Nail Soup”, just to name four. “Rumpelstiltskin” was one of my favorites, as was “The Emperor and the Nightingale”. The latter story was, as I remember, the last one in the book and also one of the longest. This is why I often requested it – not only because I liked it, but because it would keep me up just a little while longer. On the other hand, I hated this certain story about a giant turnip, because it was simply the shortest in the volume (one page). To this day I’m convinced my dad deliberately picked it when he wanted me in bed and out of his hair in short order.
I have fond memories, in fact, of many books that used to be on my bookshelf when I was little. A number of them are no longer in my possession, but I still have one, “The Indian in the Cupboard”, which was read to me in part by my dad and which I read for myself in full when I was able. I was so inspired by the fanciful story of a young English boy’s toy men coming to life that I was convinced there must be a way for the same thing to happen to me and my little action figures.
Before I could read, I still loved to go to the library (for years we’d usually go every week in combination with the grocery store) and pick out books for others to read to me. But I usually wasn’t content with that, because I would usually look at books by myself and make up stories to go along with the pictures I saw – and it wasn’t just with children’s books. I would also pick big, thick history books full of pictures I liked and went to town making up the stories behind them.
I don’t quite remember the process of learning how to read. However, I do remember when I first realized I was on my way to this invaluable knowledge. I was in kindergarten and was looking at a book about horses with my teacher. I remember reading certain phrases in the book and impressing my teacher. Of course, this gradually opened up new fields of reading, from kids’ books with more pictures than words to short “chapter books” to longer and more complex works.
It was a marked tendency of mine as young reader to pick a subject or type of book and stick with it for quite some time. From a very early age, even before I could read, I was extremely interested in American Indians; I’m sure I looked at each and every book in the library on the subject (provided it had plenty of good pictures), and I became quite the little expert on people like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and tribes like the Sioux and Cheyenne. My relatives also sent me several books about Indians, nearly all of which I still have.
There was a time when I was interested in fine arts, particularly painting. I got many books on the subject and studied the different famous pictures and their famous artists (my favorite was Van Gogh). A little after that, I became interested in baseball, mainly through the encouragement of my grandfather, whose own father was a professional ballplayer. He sent me a lot of interesting baseball books, and of course I borrowed everything the library had on it. I suppose the art fever had not yet left me at the time, because every weekend I enjoyed trying to draw pictures based on various photographs of famous baseball players found in my books.
When I became a more accomplished reader, I enjoyed reading the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. In this unique series of titles, you could literally decide where the story would go. Every page or so, the book gave you the option to go to this or that page if you would like the character to make a certain decision; or to another page if you preferred an alternate course of action. The fun of it was that even if you took the wrong path, you could always start over again and see the outcome of a different series of decisions.
When I was 12 or so, I liked books in series. I read all the “Hardy Boys” detective stories I could find, and there were other series I enjoyed, including one about different hunting dogs. I also liked silly stories I found in the young adult section of the library. But at some point I became interested in the classics. I believe “Oliver Twist” was one of the first classics I read, and Charles Dickens remains my favorite classic author. I also read “Moby Dick” and “War and Peace” before I was really even ready to grasp their complex subject matter, but I still liked delving into big books like those. There were a few drawbacks to that, however. For one thing, the longer the book was, the more often I had to renew them at the library (sometimes even getting close to the renewal limit). And those were also the days in which such books made perfect “book report books” in school – and I hated book reports.
To this day I prefer classic literature to contemporary, though there are many recent works which I have read and which are worth reading. I suppose I just like the complexity, thoroughness, depth, and timeless nature of the classics – something that is not always found in an average contemporary novel. That said, it is always a good idea to spread out your reading over a wide array – fiction, non-fiction, new, old, poetry, drama, mystery, humor, philosophy, history. The categories are as vast as they are numerous.
I don’t read at the rate I used to. I used to lie around all day and do nothing but read, something I have neither the time nor the desire to do now. I used to read so voraciously that I could get stacks of books and begin checking them off on the “Summer Reading Club” list. But then again, those were also the days in which I read lighter material. Now, when I’m not wading through classics, I have required reading for school – which is hardly something you can blaze through in a day or two. Still, I’m often painfully aware that I could do more reading if I tried, and sometimes I try to take steps to change that.
There is so much that could be said about literature and reading. There are few things more valuable to develop from a young age than a love of books. There is an entire rich world of knowledge and inspiration that would be closed to us if we could not read. Worst of all, without reading we wouldn’t be able to plumb the great depths of God’s Word, the Bible, which is the greatest book ever known to man. My life has certainly been made incalculably richer through reading – for instance, beyond the obvious joys and benefits of a book, reading has instilled in me a love for writing and provided examples of how to do it well. The fact that I love to read has helped me excel in school. I hope that if you do not already love to read, you might give it a try and start to see all of the fascinating things awaiting you in the pages of books.