Books continued

Books continued….(Please read the previous post first!)

I’ve never been to Europe. It’s on my list of things I want to do before I die. Sometimes I’m envious of the many young people in my classes who have already experienced traveling to other countries numerous times. But I have gone to those places through the books I’ve read. Books are also the closest thing we have to a working time machine. As I’ve already mentioned, I am fascinated with the Civil War, and when I read novels set in that era, I am transported back to another time and place. I truly feel like I’m there. One evening I was totally absorbed in the awesome conclusion of Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels when the phone rang. It was a woman calling from St. Jude’s Hospital. I had agreed to solicit funds for them, and she needed some information. My mind resisted being jerked back to the present, and I couldn’t even remember my address! I was on a battlefield in 1863, and the little town of Bogart did not yet exist.

Some of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met were characters in books. Who can ever forget Atticus Finch or Scarlet O’Hara? Or Amy, Jo, Meg, and Beth? One summer, I read all the books in the Anne of Green Gables series. I remember it as one of my best summers ever. Anne became as real to me as any person I ever met. I know a book is good when I am sad to finish it and miss the people I came to know through its pages.

Biographies have helped me come to know Jackie Kennedy, Robert E. Lee, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. Reading the letters they wrote and the speeches they made is the closest I can come to actually sitting down and talking to these great men and women of history.

I love books with beautiful language. I think of Cold Mountain and Peace Like a River. The latter was the first and perhaps all-time favorite of my book club. Another well-written and favorite book is Kite Runner. Some authors have a real gift for using words that makes prose sound like poetry.

Being southern, I love southern literature. Cold Sassy Tree would rank up there as one of my favorite books of all time. It was set right here in Georgia, just a few miles up the road from where I live. Jan Karon’s Mitford Series books are set in Blowing Rock, NC, and I’ve enjoyed every one of them. Eugenia Price wrote wonderful books about long-ago life on the Golden Isles of Georgia’s coast. I met Terry Kay, writer of To Do Dance with the White Dog, at our local Barnes and Noble and found him friendly and very likable. He lives in our area.


These days, I probably read more nonfiction than fiction. I’m always reading things that relate to the classes I teach, or I read about education in general. I’ve especially enjoyed Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and books by Thomas Sowell. James McPherson probably wrote the best single volume on the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, and I plowed through it one summer. It wasn’t the easiest reading, but I truly enjoyed it and learned a great deal. I also learned much about America’s history from This Rebellious House by Keillor.

Philip Yancey is my favorite writer of Christian books. I can identify with him. He doesn’t try to dodge the hard questions or give pat answers, and has on occasion struggled with doubt. Other Christian authors I enjoy are C.S. Lewis, Francine Rivers, Os Guiness, and Charles Colson.

I’ve never really understood people who don’t like to read, but I have some theories as to why they don’t. I believe some of them are simply lacking in imagination. When they read, all they see are words on a page. No movie runs through their head. The people and places don’t become real to them. Of course, some people don’t read because they never learned how to read – at least not well. Other people, I’m sure, have just never found the right books. My husband was like that. Once he got into the suspense-thriller genre, he was hooked.

I believe some people learned to hate reading in school, where they were forced to read books that bored them to tears, or were too difficult for them to understand. Many well-meaning English teachers have done a terrible disservice to their poorer students by making reading a chore to be endured rather than a pleasure to be enjoyed.

I also think that reading is seen as too passive an activity by people who are very action oriented. Or maybe it is too solitary for the extremely extroverted. My son would probably fit into these last two categories. He proved the experts wrong who say you will teach a child to love reading if you read to them enough when they are young!

Someone once said that the man who doesn’t read is no better off than the man who can’t. How true! And how sad – such a person just does not know what he is missing!