Why We Must Read Books

Books are vital in cultivating wisdom—not only for the truths they contain, but also for the way they help us think. In our distracted age, books give us perspective, focus, and space to reflect. Reading books—a wide variety, from different eras and places and worldviews, both fiction and nonfiction—keeps our anachronism and self-centeredness in check. They educate us, help us make connections across disciplines, and open up the world.
 
Books Help Us Connect, Explore, Think Well

When we read books, we are stepping into another’s shoes. We are entering the author’s world, giving our attention to the author’s perspective for an extended time. This last part is key. It’s hard to develop empathy when you only read a tweet by someone; but a book-length immersion in someone’s world creates the opportunity for understanding. The act of reading a book is literally the act of being “quick to listen, slow to speak.” In literary fiction, we develop empathy by getting inside characters’ minds. We may love or hate them, but to the extent that we listen to and live with them for a time, we can learn from the particularity of their existence. Research shows that literary fiction especially helps readers develop empathy—a better understanding of the complexity of what others are thinking and feeling.
We read to connect, but also to explore. Even though we technically read a book without ever physically going anywhere, we all know the feeling of how a book transports us to other places and other times.
 
There is a growing body of research that shows the powerful ways reading books—long, immersive reading in contrast to the fragmented, quick-scan reading we do online—strengthens our brains’ abilities to think well.
 
Books Confront the Noise
 
At a time when the glut, speed, and tailored-to-you nature of information is making us ever more prone to misinformation and unsound wisdom, reading books offers a powerful antidote. Books confront the “too much information” problem by focusing our attention on one thing for a longer, deeper time. They confront the “too fast” problem by forcing us to sit with one writer’s perspective for long enough to really grapple with it. Books challenge the “too focused on me” problem by putting us in another’s shoes.
 
Books give us solid grounding at a time when everything is up for grabs. They offer rubrics to better evaluate the barrage of information we face in today’s world. In a world of snapshots and soundbites, books offer fuller context, and as Andy Crouch writes, “generally speaking, the older the book, the deeper the context.”
 
Books Help us to Change
 
But reading is not merely a defensive act. To read and learn well we must also be teachable, willing to let our guard down enough to be impressionable (but not gullible). When we open a book we should be ready to be changed, open to being convinced, eager to learn something we didn’t know. If you think you know everything, you’ll have no use for books; if you are humble and curious (key foundations for a life of wisdom), you’ll devour them.
 
This is a key, yet countercultural, aspect of reading well. We live in a “death of expertise” world, after all. Our prevailing hermeneutic is suspicion. We are more comfortable proclaiming ourselves experts than we are being swayed or influenced by others. That’s why today’s discourse is at an impasse. We’ve so emphasized “you do you” liberty that expert knowledge, educated consensus, and logic no longer matter. It’s the problem educators face when they so emphasize students “learning to think for themselves” that the teacher’s own credentials and authority to adjudicate right and wrong answers loses any force.
 

Greatest Book

Still, we must put these books in their proper place. It would be folly to build one’s wisdom diet around great books but not also the greatest book, the Bible. Without the reference point of God, the “truth” of books is relative. One reader might find a book true, while another finds it false. There can be no consensus on canon if there is no transcendent reference point for words like good, true, and beautiful. “The only guarantor of communal truth is transcendent truth,” writes David Lyle Jeffrey. “Without intellectually accountable access to the Greater Book, very many lesser, yet still very great, expressions of truth may go without understanding.”
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

 

The Words under the Words

The words you choose can change the decisions people make. Psychologists call the mechanics of this choice “framing.” They’ve found, for example, that more people will decide to have a surgery if they are told that the “survival rate is 90%” than if they are told that the “mortality rate is 10%.” They’ve also found that having to pay a “surcharge” for using a credit card rankles people more than if they were simply told they would get a “discount” for using cash. They’ve even found that people enjoy meat labeled “75% lean” more than they do the same meat labeled “25% fat.” Framing, it seems, extends all the way to taste buds.

Think about more than just the straightforward definition of the words you use. Think about the connotations of those words as well—the ideas they might evoke, the reactions they might elicit, the images and emotions they could stir up.

--- Patrick Barry, Good with Words: Writing and Editing, 2019.

Discomfort of Growth

Writer Alice Walker on the discomfort of growth:

"Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before.

Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant.

But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be... for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed."

How To Read A Book

Read the title. Define every word in the title; look up any unknown words. Think about what the title promises for the book. Look at the table of contents. This is your “menu” for the book. What can you tell about its contents and structure from the TOC?

Read a book from the outside in. Read the foreword and introduction (if an article, read the first paragraph or two). Read the conclusion or epilogue if there is one (if an article, read the last one or two paragraphs). After all this, ask yourself what the author’s thesis might be. How has the argument been structured?

Read chapters from the outside in. Quickly read the first and last paragraph of each chapter. After doing this and taking the step outlined above, you should have a good idea of the book’s major themes and arguments.

You are now finally ready to read in earnest. Don’t read a history book as if you were reading a novel for light pleasure reading. Read through the chapters actively, taking cues as to which paragraphs are most important from their topic sentences. (Good topic sentences tell you what the paragraph is about.) Not every sentence and paragraph is as important as every other. It is up to you to judge, based on what you know so far about the book’s themes and arguments. If you can, highlight passages that seem to be especially relevant.

Take notes: Many students attempt to take comprehensive notes on the content of a book or article. I advise against this. I suggest that you record your thoughts about the reading rather than simply the details and contents of the reader. What surprised you? What seemed particularly insightful? What seems suspect? What reinforces or counters points made in other readings? This kind of note taking will keep your reading active, and actually will help you remember the contents of the piece better than otherwise.

source: https://courses.bowdoin.edu/writing-guides/reading/how-to-read-a-secondary-source/

Reframe Uncertainty (4): through the lens of God

 Reframe uncertainty through the lens of the certainty of God’s love, and interpret current events from the perspective of promise that is never revoked. What are the images of life you are holding on to that create false narratives? What is God saying that the headlines aren’t declaring? What is anxiety communicating that the Comforter is not responding to?
 
He can answer all your unknowns in a blink but he loves you by giving you a choice of response. If you are allowing uncertainty in the world to determine how useful you are to God, maybe it’s time to rethink who and what is informing your value and worth.
 
We are never too old, experienced, or responsible to need the certainty of our heavenly Father’s love. And never too old, experienced, or responsible to misinterpret silence from God during seasons of uncertainty as unloving. Silence rings as wisdom with the luxury of time and distance. Reframing uncertainty through the lens of being deeply loved and fully known changes the way we translate adversity in beginnings and what I would come to define as a tumultuous middle.
 

- Shelly Miller, Searching for Certainty: Finding God in the Disruptions of Life, 2020.

Reframe Uncertainty (3): Happy Ending with Uncertainty First

Transitioning from the familiarity of captivity to the unknowns of the desert, the exiles were unsure if God was going to make good on his promises. Are we loved or are we damned? Will the Promised Land be worth the long, arduous journey rife with uncertainty? Or will adversity and hardship divert the Israelites from the good God has planned for them? Spoiler alert: There is a happy ending. But happy endings don’t often come without navigating times of uncertainty first.
 
Uncertainty provides rescue from being stuck in the familiar ways of life that keep us from moving forward into the purposes of God. Wandering into the wilderness of the unknown is God’s divine reorientation, from what we know in the present to what God knows about the future. That’s why God chose manna to satisfy the appetite of the Israelites for forty years instead of milk shakes and cheeseburgers. “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions” (Exodus 16:4).
 

- Shelly Miller, Searching for Certainty: Finding God in the Disruptions of Life, 2020.

Reframe Uncertainty (2): Moses in the Time of Uncertainty

Not enough was the cry of the Israelites in response to the fear of uncertainty threaded throughout the Exodus story. I am not enough was Moses’ knee-jerk reaction to God’s request from a burning bush to lead the Israelites out of captivity. Not enough is ultimately our deepest fear when we encounter the wilderness of the unknown as we journey through life. Maybe right now, as you hold this book in your hands, you fear that you won’t have enough time, food, money, influence, approval, friendships, support—you fill in the blank. What is missing in your life that God is not enough for you? What situations are you attempting to solve with self-reliance instead of reliance on God?
 
Three days after God provides a miracle in parting the Red Sea, ushering the Israelites into safety, that miracle in moments of desperation becomes a faded memento forgotten once stomachs begin growling. In the desert, it was as if the whole community had amnesia when their hunger was unsatiated. “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death” (Exodus 16:3).
 
It is scary to open one’s self to the dark of the divine, giving up control that brings an illusion of safety with it. Mystery can make you hesitant to hope, decidedly prone toward doubt, and more anxious for preferred outcomes. Who am I? Why me? Why now? Those were the first questions Moses asked when God tasked him with leading the Israelites out of slavery and into freedom. And they are the same questions that haunt us when uncertainty flares like a burning bush on the sidewalks of suburban life.
 

- Shelly Miller, Searching for Certainty: Finding God in the Disruptions of Life, 2020.