Balanced reading will include classics of the past and worthwhile contemporary literature
A free-flowing stream of ideas is essential to a healthy intellectual life. A stream of old ideas, recirculated through one’s consciousness, results in mental (and perhaps even spiritual) stagnation.
To avoid stagnation, the stream must be replenished with fresh thoughts from one’s own experience or the experience of others. Reading books is perhaps the most efficient way to refresh the stream with the experience of others while at the same time gaining perspective, stimulation, and interpretation concerning one’s own experience.
A Personal Inventory. An inspection of one’s own book-reading habits can provide insight into the state of one’s stream—fresh or stagnant. List the books you are reading now. List the books you have read during the past quarter, the past year. Note the types of books. How many were read to kill time? How many to enrich time? Note the quality of the books to which you devoted x number of hours of your life. What range of subjects did you cover?
Consider the depth. What proportion were light and amusing? How many were at a greater, yet still comfortable depth? How many made you tax your mind and stretch your soul? To what extent have your recent reading habits refreshed the stream of thought that is filling the reservoir of your being?
In every generation some public figure restates the truth: “Show me the books a man reads and I will know the man.” Are you willing to have your bookshelf scrutinized? Perhaps you should examine it yourself. Look at the age of the books. See if they are old—passed down from your parents or published during the decade you graduated from college. Perhaps they are all new—newly published and newly written—communicating nothing from generations past.
A careful look at the bookshelf can show which books are bought but not read, and which have been read and reread. What subjects are dusty with neglect? What pages are worn from use? You form your own reading habits; then these habits help form you.
A Balanced Program. There was a day when books were exceedingly rare. The young Abe Lincoln trudged miles across country to borrow a book, then nourished a flickering fire as he read with profound attention.
Today in our culture books are abundant and relatively inexpensive. Yet if knowing how to read we read not, we are no better off than illiterates.
Since World War II the distribution of Scriptures has risen phenomenally. Translations have proliferated. Hundreds of books about The Book are published each year. A discerning reader can find ample spiritual refreshment for his stream of consciousness. Yet persons proud of the heritage of sacrifice and devotion that has provided them with an open Bible and who will defend with vehemence all attacks upon God’s Word, will yet neglect their own reading of it. Every great movement in Christianity has its roots in the discovery or rediscovery of a biblical truth. Our day of so many questions and so few answers needs more searching for God’s truth in the Scriptures. As John Bunyan wrote: “Read, and read again … for a little from God is better than a great deal from men: also what is from men is uncertain, and is often lost and tumbled over and over by men; but what is from God is fixed as a nail in a sure place.”
If the inner life of devotion is to be nourished and the outer life of service is to be guided, good reading habits are essential.
A balanced program will not only include “religious” books but also the great books, the classics, of the past. Such works endure, not because they look good on the shelves, but because they refresh the stream. The human spirit is impoverished if it is tuned only to the thought of the times. But to know what one’s predecessors knew, to feel what they felt, to understand what they understood—this makes the stream run deep. In the classics one confronts the best of the men of the past. The poets, scholars, rulers, mystics, novelists, historians, playwrights, social critics—they all communicate the poverty and richness of their age to our own.
Then there are the current books. Men can say in books what they cannot say in a magazine article, a television interview, or a news story. Much discernment is necessary to sort the good from the bad. But it is worth the effort, for every hour spent reading a poor book is an hour not spent with a great book. A balanced personal reading program will include current works as well as classics and The Book. A program that refreshes the stream will include books outside of one’s own major field of interest. Certainly everyone should read books having to do with the technical aspects of his own work. But to have an adequate window on the world beyond, one must read books that do not directly bear on his own vocation.
A Workable Plan. “Have you read any good books lately?” the question is often answered with: “Not as many as I should. I really ought to read more.” A person can read more and better books if he sincerely wants to. Some simple techniques may help.
If you are out of the habit, pick up an interesting absorbing book—something you can read easily. A novel, a book on your hobby, something you can easily concentrate on will prime the pump and start you reading again.
Never stop a book when it becomes dull or uninteresting. Stop in the midst of a fast-moving narrative, an inspiring exposition, or a revealing insight. Stop when you want to read on, and you will find yourself picking up the book again soon.
Start a new book before you finish the one you are reading. Get involved in the new before you complete the old. Such a “reading chain” will not allow your habit to break.
Use your “sandwich” time for reading. This is the time you spend on the bus, train, or airplane, under the hairdryer or at the barbershop, waiting for the dentist or for your wife to call you to dinner. It is amazing how much reading time can be “made” in this way. Perhaps a bedside book will be read only late at night or early in the morning, while another is carried in a purse or kept in a desk. A third may demand longer periods of concentration and will lie on the study table or beside the living-room easy chair.
Don’t forget to increase your capacity by reading something a little beyond your present depth. Tall souls need deep roots, and a constantly increasing capacity for profound reading can expand the joy of reading.
By all means, read the Bible. Read familiar passages in a new translation for fresh revelations. Read whole books at a time, especially the books you have never read. See the glorious Word of God as a whole, not as a collection of isolated verses and paragraphs.
