Why Reading Books Still Matters More Than Ever

Growing up, we were encouraged to read. Chores and play done, we sat down and were grateful. Our mother, a teacher, pressed the point. So, we kids read – a lot.

These days, kids spend lots of time scrolling reels, texting, looking online for entertainment, not reading books so much. But in another time, the discipline of weaving words into sentences, chapters into books, was educational, empowering.

For me, the value of sitting quietly was enormous, life-changing. It gave me worlds to explore beyond my own, taught me to convert words into pictures, turn hay into gold, caused me to imagine other places and times, and things that never were.

Kenneth Roberts’s Revolutionary War books made it real – Arundel, Rabble in Arms, and Northwest Passage. Creative minds like Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and Isaac Asimov swept me out into an imaginary universe, took me where the stars led. James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small lit another fire and fed it.

Reading was my go-to for inspiration, consolation, escape. It was a collection of lands you could travel at your own pace, opening the mind and heart. Reading was not a movie, not force-fed; it was all in your own head. Turning pages, magic mounted, the horizon grew.

The best part of reading - why we must relight that fuse, restart the engine, get young minds to revalue this skill, learn concentration and contemplation, is the loop: The more you learn, the more you want to learn – more you read, more you want to.

When you read something, a process begins. You start to wonder. Wondering, you start to imagine. Following a plot, you guess what will happen, what will not.

When – after reading a gripping chapter – you put it down and gaze around, things are suddenly different. You have perspective, have been somewhere, have learned.

This, I think, is the best part of reading. Taking a story slowly, you absorb, understand the sequence, and in the process gain. Things sink in; you retain.

All this brings me to now. Running for public office, my days involve catching spears, managing laughter – good and bad, frustrations and machinations, absorbing apprehensions, mocked intentions, a world of anxious, angry people.

Still, I am comforted, consoled by old friends, ancient, able authors and lessons they taught in my youth, books that contained timeless refrains, all coming back.

Today, for some reason, Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” got me. His warm guidance on a century-old wind, words that burned bright, still embers. When everything suddenly seems unfair, do not despair – other have been there.

“If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

… If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

…If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

… If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

The more I live, the more I read. Lessons return, never recede. One recalls how others managed worlds fragile and hateful, and reading teaches us to be grateful.