Great books are our teachers, and good books are our companions. Poor books are obstacles we meet along the way. If you are a Christian, there is one book you will love, even if you do not love any other. That, of course, is the Bible. But if you know the value of reading, there will be many others you also find profitable. Books contain the wisdom of the ages, and its foolishness. They allow us to participate in conversations with those wiser than we are and to discover that neither publication nor the passage of time can make a poor thinker or bad writer (which are actually the same thing) into a good one.

Some people do not like to read, but that is usually not their fault. They have never been taught how to read or given the permission to discover what they will love to read. I was fortunate to grow up in a reading household and to have considerable liberty in my reading selections–maybe too much, at times. I did not ask my parents if I could read a book. I simply found one on the shelf that looked interesting and plunged in. I didn’t enjoy school very much, but I loved the school library. The yearly visit of the Scholastic Book Fair was almost as good, and sometimes better, than Christmas, and when my elementary school class was not very interesting I found that I could hide an interesting book inside my textbook, at least, until the kid sitting behind me ratted me out. (I probably learned the book inside a book trick from reading about it… in a book.)

Everyone should enjoy reading because reading is one of the most important ways to grow as a human being, and if you don’t enjoy the discipline, you won’t do it for very long. That does not mean you should enjoy reading anything. Some of us have very eclectic tastes and can be happily occupied with many different types of literature. But just as every one should have a job at some point in their lives that is so unpleasant it clarifies for them the reasons they want to work hard so as not to end up in that kind of career, so everyone should read some books that help them learn what a good book is not and why we ought to be willing to work hard to find the good ones to read and enjoy.

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