Why I like long books.

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough for me.”
–C.S. Lewis

A common complaint I’ve heard is that some books are just “too long and drawn out,” or that they “move too slowly.”  The modern mind is conditioned to not like things like long books.  Long books take a lot of time to read, and some folks don’t want to take a long time to do anything.  Many just want to get straight to the action and see what happens next in the story.   I hope someone who feels that way will read this. 

First of all, it’s not enough to just state the problem and then come off like someone above it all: that doesn’t help anyone read better, and it only creates elitist book-snobs on the other side.  The fact is I can relate well to people who don’t like long books, because I was once one of them. 

When I first got into reading a Dickens novel was way too daunting.  So I was fortunate to find short stories in the beginning.  When you find a great short story, there’s really nothing else like it (I highly recommend anything by Washington Irving).  You get a complete story, and ones like Irving’s will take you out of your own time and plant you firmly in another.  But the thing they lack is time with the characters and the setting.  And I guess I read several before I started to long to know characters and places better.  And for me this was the perfect build up into the world of long novels.  But even then I had to train myself to stick with it.  I often found much of them boring and tiresome, and still just wanted it all to get to the point.  But like anything else in life, if one sticks with it, things change. 

Good things that are worthy of our time take time.  If you ever hear a good concert violinist, you can be sure there were countless hours of playing scales over and over again that went on for years before the musician became proficient.  At first holding the instrument would’ve been awkward.  The bow made a scratching, screeching sound as it was dragged across the strings.  But then one day, after much practice, a nice, smooth tone emerged that was hiding somewhere inside the violin.  The wood came alive it seemed.  Things the student didn’t think possible started happening.  And a musician was born. 

It’s really no different with reading.  When I look through my reading logs I see many novels that are a blur.  I can’t remember details and some entire plots are lost.  But it was all part of my education: it was all time well spent on the page: learning how to learn; learning how to use my imagination; learning how to get to know characters and why it matters.  And then one day, like the violinist would have felt with the violin, I felt like I knew was I was doing with a book in my hand.  It wasn’t just some way to kill time but it was like traveling and getting outside myself. 

Some people will tell you that anything that takes time to learn to like probably isn’t any good to begin with.  I disagree.  Give a child a drink of the finest wine and he’ll spit it out.  Offer him a piece of cheap candy and a steak prepared by the best chef and he’ll choose the candy.  It’s not snobbery to suggest that some things really are better than other things.  At some point, if we are honest, we really do know there is a difference.  And the better things are higher because they call us to come up higher, to go beyond where we currently are.  That is how we grow.   

This is what it’s been like for me reading long books. 

Go ahead and grab that big novel that’s been calling to you from the shelf.  Don’t feel guilty about taking the rest of the year reading it.  Go slow.  Take a week to read once chapter if you have to.  If you do you’ll get to know the characters and the places like you were actually there.  And those people and places will go with you long after the book is over.  That’s the truly beautiful part. 

Audiobooks

Are audiobooks the same as real books?   I think so.  But I’ve not always felt that way, and you may not either.  When a person starts getting seriously into reading, it seems like a default mode to prefer “real” books over audiobooks, to view real books as superior, etc.  I did this myself and have heard others almost apologize for liking audiobooks.  You may even feel guilty or inferior in some way for liking audiobooks, or you may look down your nose at them.  Nonsense all.  Here’s my take on it, and as always your mileage may vary. 

Once upon a time all books were audiobooks.  Oral tradition was the way things were passed down and around.  This was the way it was for a very long time and it worked pretty well.  We’re all wired up as listeners, and we all seem to love having stories told to us.  And that’s all audiobooks are: stories being told to us.  In the end it’s all about the story, message, or thing the writer is trying to convey anyway: that is the point of making books.  And us getting the story is the point of reading them. 

Modern people think themselves great multi-taskers, but we are not.  When I first go into audiobooks I’d try to listen as I drove my car and would miss entire passages and have to start over.  Or I’d try to listen as I did some mindless routine at work, but still I’d miss a lot.  I had to train myself to multi-task.  So the first dozen or so audiobooks are a blur to me.   But one has to start somewhere, and somewhere along the way it all clicked and became like real reading.  At this point I can get just as much out of an audiobook as a real book, sometimes even more with a good reader.  But it did take time and training. 

Seek:

Librivox.org has been a wonderful thing, but not all the readers there are good ones.  In fact some of them are terrible.  This is a shame because it takes a good reader to make a good audiobook.  Without good reading, good listening is very hard.  So if you get a crummy reader, don’t give up; move on to another work and try again.  At this point I’ve listened to so many books there I now have favorite readers and try to seek them out.  Your local library will have lots of professional quality recordings, and sites like Audible.com are great too.   Do yourself a favor and take advantage of these resources. 

Mix it up:

After a while I discovered I liked certain things on audio while other things just didn’t work.  For example, I love Charles Dickens on audio.  With a good reader his stories are better than me sitting down with his books.   I don’t know why but it’s true.  I love George MacDonald via audio as well.   I have a lot of CS Lewis on audio and a lot on paper.  Tolkien on audio is great: the recordings Rob Inglis has done are gold.  Give me Narnia on audio any day, especially with Jeremy Northam reading: the guy is amazing.   H. Rider Haggard on audio is a treat too.   The list goes on. 

But poetry doesn’t work on audio for me.  It ruins the form and flow of it.  I also don’t like the New Testament on audio, but love the Old Testament.   Go figure.  Modern autobiographies go well on audio for me (Eric Clapton’s was great).  I like Louis L’Amour any way I can get him.  And some works I’ll take either way.  It just depends.  But the main point is to find what works for you and use it. 

Lastly, audiobooks are great for people who don’t think they have time to read.  Nonsense.  Everyone, with the exception of a few (and that’s probably not you), has a little time to read everyday.  If you have a commute of at least 15 minutes, you could be doing audiobooks.  If you have a commute of 30 to 45 minutes, you could be doing serious audiobooks.  Rather than listening to pop music, talk radio that will only make you angry or afraid, or listening to the news of today that’s forgotten tomorrow, give an audiobook a try.   You could use your lunch break to unwind and get some listening in, or listen while you exercise.  You can train yourself to read or listen in small doses.  It doesn’t seem natural at first but neither does walking.  You’ll get used to it.  

A few years ago I discovered that I’d basically forgotten how to write in cursive.  So I would listen to audiobooks on my lunch break and practice cursive.  I’d just pick out words I was hearing and write them down.  It worked beautifully, and now I only write in cursive.   You can do whatever works best for you.  

Thoughts on Kindle, e-reading, etc.

A couple years ago I got an iPhone, and one of the first things I did with it was download the free Kindle app.  I decided I'd give myself a year to read a few books in the format before deciding to invest in a real Kindle or other e-reader.  I also downloaded the Nook app and put some stuff on the iBooks app.  I never warmed up to the Nook, and I found the iBooks format classier than all three, but ended up getting used to the Kindle, in large part because it's tied up with Amazon and it's so easy to get the books I want. 

I guess I read four or five books on my iPhone in 2012.   I quickly got used to the small screen and after a while didn't even notice.  But I was still on the fence as to whether I wanted to spring for a real Kindle.  And did I really need one more device to keep up with, keep charged, etc.?  My wife settled it for me by getting me a Kindle Paperwhite this past Christmas.  So after using this technology for a while, and thinking through some of the issues that arise around the subject, I'd like to share some thoughts on the matter. 

First, it seems natural for people to be skeptical of new things (not always a bad thing in itself).  There were those in history who believed the invention of the written word was a bad thing.  Some believed it would destroy the culture where stories and histories were passed down via oral tradition.   And I suppose it did do that, and I'm sure some aspects of community living were lost that were truly beautiful.  But since I'm grateful for books, I'd also say the world is a better place because of the written word.  It's neat to think of living in the past, in some old village where storytellers gathered the people around a fire and held an audience captive for hours with their tales of old.  But given the choice, I'd rather have my books.  I'm never interested in new things just for the sake of newness, but sometimes new things really are an improvement. 

I'm often asked if I like real books or Kindle books better.  I've thought about this and I have to answer that question with a question: Why do I have to choose?  Both are available, both are good things, and they each have their place in my reading life. 

I like my paper books: I like to write my name in calligraphy on the inside cover, the date when I got the book, and sometimes where I got it or who gave it to me as a gift, etc.  I like to highlight passages, underline sentences, draw boxes around words, and record my own thoughts in the margins.  Sometimes I'll check out a book from the library and find such things.  It's like hidden treasure when I run across another reader's thoughts.  I usually take the time to answer with my own thoughts and hope that someone will run across it one day and keep it going.  This is wonderful stuff if you love books.  But of course some people shudder at the thought of writing in books.  We're all different. 

I like having physical books on my shelves, and I like carrying books around with me.  I have them in my car, in my bag, on my desk, etc.  I like the feel of the paper, the smell of it if it's old.  I like how it yellows and fades over time.  And I like how real books are thoughtfully put together: the spaces in the margins, the artsy fonts on the chapter titles, the fancy numbers some publishers use to number the pages, etc.  I love all this about paper books.  And I like the fact that a physical library can be passed down to the next generation.  It's odd to think of a man passing his e-book library to his children or grandchildren.  It's just not the same. 

So I still love my "real" books.

But I also enjoy my Kindle.  I like old books and that's what I spend most of my time with.  But old books use old words, and the world I live in doesn't use some of those words anymore.  So probably the most helpful thing I've found about e-reading is the built-in dictionary.  If you're reading a book and come across a word you don't know and decide to just skip it, thinking that you'll manage without it, shame on you.  The writer used that particular word for a reason, just as a painter would use a particular color.  You simply will not understand the author's meaning without understanding the words he used (this is especially true in poetry; you'll often lose the entire meaning of the poem by missing the meaning of one word).  It takes time to dig into the dictionary every time you don't understand a word, and the temptation to skip it will be there when this is your only option.  But e-readers completely eliminate this.  Simply hold your finger over a word, and the definition pops up.  And not only the definition but also the origin of the word, etc.  Taking the time to understand words opens up a whole new appreciation for the gift of language and reading.  Plus, the benefits of growing your own vocabulary by doing this are obvious. 

So that's probably my favorite thing about e-reading, the built-in dictionary.  Saves me time, and I just think it's a cool feature. 

Next, many old books are rare, and they can be expensive.  But with a Kindle I can download most of the old books I want to read for free.  When you stop to think of that, it's just insane how many opportunities are available today to the person who wants to read and learn.  I wonder what Charles Dickens would think if he came back to find his life's work available for "free download"?  Or Shakespeare, Jane Austen, et al? 

E-reading gives me these options.  For free. 

I just don't think you have to choose between real books and e-books.  Use both.  Enjoy both.  Learn the benefits of both, and their weaknesses.  Just don't get stuck in either a snobbery of the past or the novelty of the present.   We live in a unique time in history where everything is available to the one who wishes to learn.  Enjoy it.

I don't know if e-readers will stand the test of time.  I don't know if they will replace paper books.  And I don't care.  I just like to read. 

My story

I thought it might be fun share a little about how I became a reader, so here goes:

Lots of times you picture a booklover as someone who learned to read at age three, loved school, grew up in a literary environment (without a TV), and never looked back.   But life is full of surprises and can often leave us scratching our heads as such formulas don’t add up. 

I hated school as a child.  The day my mother dropped me off for kindergarten was one of the saddest of my life.  And I still hated school as I entered my senior year.  I just didn’t get it and could never seem to latch on to the point of it all.  I can still remember a time when I didn’t know how to read, and I guess I was six or seven when I finally got it.  I learned to drag my eyes across words and sound them out, but I had no idea reading could be joyful or fun.  I’m sure the teachers tried, but I don’t really remember.  Those years are a fog in my mind, and I only have a handful of vivid memories of school as a young boy, most of them pretty unpleasant.  Nothing bad happened to me; no one hurt me, abused me, or locked me in a closet.  I just hated being there and it never got better.    

We had some books around our house when I was little, but ours wasn’t really a house of stories and imagination.  My parents read some but I never heard anyone talk about reading as it if could be fun.  It was just something to learn in school, so I did. 

My grades started to tank around fifth grade, and by the time I got to junior high I was regularly failing my classes.  Then came high school, where I failed my freshman year entirely.  I had to either go to summer school or go through grade nine again (not an option), so off to summer school I went.   That’s when I read my first book: True Grit by Charles Portis.  The teacher knew we were all losers and would cheat our way through summer school, so we all got assigned different books to read.  She even told me there was a movie version out of True Grit, and that I could cheat and watch it but that she’d know if I did.  I was already a selfish jerk by that age, but she made me feel just guilty enough to do the right thing.  She was a very kind lady but let me know in no uncertain terms that I’d be failing summer school if I didn’t pass my book report.  So I read True Grit, wrote my paper, and passed summer school. 

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to tell you that True Grit grabbed me and I saw the light and became a reader.  Not so.  I read that book because I had to and I never read another book all through high school.  I still don’t really know how I graduated.  The problems of public education are many, and I won’t pretend to have the answers, but I can tell you from experience that many people just coast through and never really learn anything—and certainly don’t earn a diploma.  It’s actually kind of frightening that millions of people just get passed along.  But I’m no victim.  The opportunity for an education was there and I chose not to take it.  If a person doesn’t want to learn there isn’t much that can be taught to him.    

I started reading the Bible in my early twenties, and I probably read four or five books with biblical themes to help me along, but it was still a chore.  Sometimes I’d read a page and not know what I just read; then I’d have to go back and start over again—very frustrating.  And yet at some point I sensed that I wanted to become a reader, and I realized that I wanted to learn new things.  I didn’t like the person I had become, intellectually; I found my thinking cloudy and unfocused and that frustrated me, but I really didn’t know where to begin to make changes.   If you’ve been smart your whole life, made good grades, and always had a “want to” when it comes to learning, you won’t be able to relate.  But there are many people out there who feel as if their best days are gone and that learning is only for the school years.  Many feel stuck and unable to move forward.  This isn’t true but this mindset is very hard to overcome, especially since society in general tends to feed it.  Do well in school, go to college, get a good job, make lots of money = success.  Do poorly in school, don’t go to college, get a job that pays the bills, become stuck = throwing your life away.  I reject this line of thinking entirely, but I used to buy into it—mainly the part about money equaling success.  But that’s not really my purpose here. 

One afternoon when I was about thirty I was cleaning out the garage.  I happened upon one more box of junk to go through and sat down to begin.  There were lots of books and for some reason one of them caught my eye.  It was a seventh grade American Lit book from my wife’s private school days.  I started flipping through it.  There was Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and bits from the Colonial days, but the thing that hit me the most was Benjamin Franklin.  There were bits from Poor Richard’s Almanac and from his Autobiography.  I stayed up late that night (and many following nights) reading from that book and found a mentor in Franklin.  I realized he never had a chance at a formal education and basically educated himself through reading.  Around this same time a certain verse from the Book of Proverbs spoke to me:  “Apply your heart to instruction and your ear to words of knowledge.”   That verse and finding that book was like a Calling on my life, and I’ve never looked back. 

So the dopey kid who hated school ended up a booklover after all—almost by accident it seems.  I started reading then and have just kept doing so (last year’s Reading List has about seventy entries: most of those are classics with a few moderns thrown in).  What I’m going to say next is not bragging but rather what I genuinely consider the Grace of God.  Since finding that old textbook I’ve read hundreds of books, taught myself a little French (2008 project), started reading Latin (2010 project), began Greek (2013 project), developed a deep love of poetry, have written a novel for one of my children, some short stories and poems, but most of all I have started to become the person I longed to be.  As the poet W.B. Yeats once said: “Education is not filling up a pail; it’s the lighting of a fire.”  (Yeats didn’t learn to read till he was nine and went on to become one of the greatest poets of the 20^th century).   Self-education is a way of life for me now, and it’ll take the rest of my life.  C.S. Lewis says somewhere that even the most learned man in any field still remains a novice.  There is no “arriving”; there is only the journey.  That sounds a little like a cheesy inspirational poster but it’s true. 

I say all this to hopefully be encouraging.  If you think you’re stupid, the fact that you long for a better and richer inner life is proof that you’re not.  Stupid people often don’t even know they’re stupid and aren’t smart enough to care anyway.   If you want to learn, you can.  The key is just to begin: pick up a book and don’t stop till you find what moves you.  And don’t listen to book-snobs that try to make you into people like themselves.  They will tell you to read the “right books,” but you should read what you enjoy, especially at first.  A tree will grow and sprout branches naturally, but first a seed must be planted.

Don’t expect the world to care about any of this.  It will continue to measure success by the dollar and education will still be measured by what type of degree one holds.  If you believe any of that you’re probably not reading this anyway.  And don’t think I’m trying to say that books are the cure-all for mankind, because I don’t believe that.  I’m only saying how helpful reading has been for me. 

So there’s my story, some of it anyway; it isn’t typical but it’s how it happened for me. 

The Magic Door

“I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns.  Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land wither worry and vexation can follow you no more.  You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you.  There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks.  Pass your eye down their files.  Choose your man.  And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland.  Surely there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not that familiarity has deadened our sense of it.  Each is a mummified soul embalmed in cere-cloth and natron of leather and printer’s ink.  Each cover of a true book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man.  The personalities of the writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.”  -Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door, opening paragraph.

Perspective: a word those close to me probably hear me say too often.  There’s a fine line between saying a thing so often people stop listening to you and saying it often enough that they finally start listening.  And I’m not sure I’ve found that line, try as I may.  But if you want to become a better reader or get more out of books, the above paragraph is surely some of the best perspective you’ll ever find.  In the very next paragraph he goes on to say how we’d all line up to meet Shakespeare if we heard he’d come back to life.  But we have the best of Shakespeare here now; we have the best of all the writers who’ve ever lived.  We have them on their best behavior, without their mood swings or the irritabilities of daily life.  And we have the best of what they had to say, the very stuff they wanted to leave to the world. 

I used to think how great it would be to go back in time and meet all my literary heroes. But deep down I know I’d find them mere men, people who would rather have me study what they labored to write rather than study them personally.  But such is the nature of the respect we have for our heroes; and we will have heroes, either good ones or bad ones.  I like this bit from George MacDonald’s Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood:

“It has been one of my greatest comforts, when the work of the day was over—dry work if it had not been that I had it to do—to return to my books, and live in the company of those who were greater than myself, and had had a higher work in life than mine.  The master used to say that a man was fit company for any man whom he could understand, and therefore I hope often that someday, in some future condition of existence, I may look upon the faces of Milton and Bacon and Shakespeare, whose writings have given me so much strength and hope throughout my life here.” 

I have that same hope and think of it often.  And I also hope that this might have given you some new perspective on your books—the very ones you pass by on the shelf every day in your home.  Get one down—preferably an old one with these thoughts fresh on your mind—and picture a world much different than the one you live in, and how the writer likely sat in an old chair that creaked as he reached to dip pen into ink.  He may have lived in a crowded city where he could hear the wagon wheels and busy chatter of the street through the window of his room.  Or he might’ve been lucky enough to live in the countryside where fresh air poured through his window as he wrote.  Or think of how he stayed up nights writing by candlelight near the hearth as the fire crackled.  And think of the fire alive in that writer’s heart, and the hope that somewhere, someday, someone would find what he wrote, and be as moved by the reading as he was by the writing.  Make a new friend.  And don’t just seek to be entertained: seek to be taught and stretched and made into something better than you currently are.  This is part of the power of going through the Magic Door. 

All that might sound goofy if you don’t love books, and I’ll risk coming off as a little goofy.  But there was a time in my life when I knew I wanted to love books—truth be told it was more like I was being called to do so—and I was deeply moved by such ideas.  I’ll spend some time in future posts trying to explain that further and the difference it’s made.  Till then, happy reading. 

New

Welcome:

If you enjoy reading, used to enjoy reading, or somehow think you should enjoy reading, this blog might be something you’ll be interested in.  Books are amazing things; the written word is magical and has the power to deeply touch people.  And reading is a privilege—an often overlooked benefit that much of mankind never got the opportunity to experience. 

Purpose:

The point of this blog is to share some of what reading and good books have done in my life.  I find that people who love books tend to like being around others who feel the same.  I enjoy going to someone’s home and looking over their bookshelves, especially if they love the books and don’t just have them there as decoration pieces.  I love the conversations that happen in such moments.  I get new insights on another person’s reading, and I get introduced to new authors and always walk away with something helpful.  I hope this blog will be that for you.  Your participation is welcome and would be greatly valued. 

Name:

“Through the Magic Door” is a wonderful book about reading by Arthur Conan Doyle—not only a great writer, but a man who deeply loved books.  It’s not only a cool title—one worthy of borrowing for my blog name—but it’s a work any booklover will enjoy. 

Etc:

I probably won’t be posting all that frequently.  Blogs that are too busy get overwhelming and can quickly become repetitive.  I don’t want that for this blog, but rather I hope to post things worthy of contemplation, and in the end, application.  Blogs also have lifespans.  I don’t know how long this one will last.  We shall see.