“So, have you read all these books?”
The HVAC repairman looked up from the heat pump he was servicing in my home. Around him were the thousand books in my study. He had seen the family library on the main floor that is home to a couple of thousand more. And he had noticed the dozen or so boxes of books still in a storage room in the basement.
The question was one I have been asked a hundred times in my teaching career as students and other guests paid their first visit to my faculty office. I daresay every faculty member—at least in the humanities and social sciences—gets asked the same question regularly.
“Of course not!” I replied, as I always do.
I was raised in northern Ontario among the Christian (or “Plymouth”) Brethren. This little group of English and Irish Protestants recognized no ordination ceremony and no clergy. Each congregation was led by a small group of elders. Some one or two might be supported financially part- or full-time for evangelistic or pastoral service. But even these were not referred to as pastors, but as “commended workers.”
All of us, so we were taught, are saints. We are all called by God to serve in our various walks of life and, according to our spiritual gifts, in our local churches. And each of us was charged with the duty to study the Bible on his or her own and participate in group study on a regular basis.
Members of the Brethren therefore each had a small personal library—and some, not so small—of religious literature: missionary biographies, guides to prayer, hymnbooks, doctrinal works, and, above all, Bible study resources. No matter one’s job, be it pipefitter, insurance representative, or chemistry professor, everyone was responsible to “dig deep into the Word.”
My father set a good example. A surgeon by training, Dad came home at night to read—but only occasionally in the history of medicine and almost never in other sciences. (He kept up with advances in the pertinent surgical fields assiduously, but that was on his "professional" time.) Dad loved history, poetry, and fiction, and his single year of Bible school set him up for a lifetime of poring over various Bible versions (he knew no Hebrew or Greek), concordances, dictionaries, and commentaries to learn the Word of God better. Once in a while, Dad would preach in our local assembly, and his reading of the hundreds of books in his home library was evident.
Mom had an M.A. in English literature, but was almost never caught reading, busy homemaker as she was. I thus inherited bibliophilia from both parents.
In graduate school, I started to buy books in earnest. The Christian Book Distributors mail-order house offered sets of reference works at astonishing prices, and many a time I asked for such as Christmas and birthday presents. I would buy the textbooks required for my courses, naturally, but also most of the books recommended by professors along the way.
By the time I was in doctoral study, however, I realized that I had made something of an idol of my growing library. A fellow student possessed a library that dwarfed mine, but he was not a strong academic performer. One night while visiting at his home, I realized with a start that a big library was no sure sign of a big mind. All it took was . . . money.
Ever after, I purchased much more carefully. As my interests both broadened and deepened—I have never been able to settle on a single subject or even a single discipline—I bought only what I needed, which parsimonious and pragmatic policy in itself was enough to strain the family budget (and whatever grant money I could get). Eventually I constructed a “working library,” as professors do, and for all my circumspection, in my last job it took the shelves of three offices to house it.
Francis Bacon cautioned, however, that acquiring a book doesn’t mean one has to read it. “Some books are to be tasted,” he advised, “others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Books serve different functions, and they should be used accordingly.
Some books are light fun: “airplane” books, in my own parlance, and books I generally read via Kindle. Some books are for reference. Some are collections of scholarly essays only some of which are relevant to my concerns.
Some books make an important point but make it sufficiently in the first 50 pages so that the rest of the book can be safely skimmed, or even ignored. (Many a pop bestseller of this thin sort began as an excellent, pithy magazine article.) And some books, yes, deserve slow reading—and re-reading over the years.
It is said that “the good is the enemy of the best.” When it comes to books, “the ‘started’ can be the enemy of the ‘better.’” A book you have started will keep you, as you persist in reading it, from dropping it to read a better one. And maybe you should indeed drop it to do so.
When I have asked serious students how comfortable they are in dropping a book they have started reading, the common reaction is a kind of sheepish dismay. People literally blush, giggle, and look away. Folks who like to read usually like to finish. Many confess to feeling guilty if they start a book and don’t complete it, as if they are breaking a tacit contract with the author, or disappointing—well, who?
I have amused classrooms of such earnest people by solemnly informing them that there is, in fact, no one to award them a prize when they finish a book. Nor is there anyone to condemn them if they don’t. Startling, perhaps, but then also soothing is the sober truth that no one else cares at all whether you finish a book you start.
So why pound through another hundred or two hundred pages of a book that is no longer rewarding, or only barely so, when you could move on to a book with a much richer return on your reading investment?
Here’s a shocker. Count up the number of books you read last year. Multiply that total by the number of years you have left to age 80 (roughly the Canadian life expectancy figure today). That’s how many books you have left to read.
And it isn’t a big number, is it? You likely could shelve those books on just a couple of bookcases.
So read as well as you can. And if a book isn’t delivering by page 50—or, frankly, by page 20—drop it and move on. Life is short. Wonderful books await you.
I acknowledge that you can’t now put the partly read book on your shelf as a token of accomplishment. (I swear that’s how a lot of readers unconsciously view their home libraries: as trophy cases.) Put it there instead as a tool to which you might return and that for now has served its purpose.
(I also have taught rooms full of readers how to mark up books you own, and record them in a database, so as to harvest and retrieve the good things you found in each of them. That means, among other things, that you can yet profit from books you don't finish. But that lesson will have to wait for another blog post.)
Here, then, my friends, the benediction: If the book you're currently reading isn’t sparking joy (as someone, somewhere has said), or is nonetheless necessary for your work, then move on. No one else will care, I promise you. And you’ll be a happier, smarter, better reader.
