Reading

I am someone who loves to read. This, however, is not one of my book reviews. Instead, at the moment, I am between books, with the last book I read being "Rescuing Sprite."

There was a time when I read fiction, pretty much exclusively, but, starting a couple of years ago with Bernie Goldberg's book, "Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost It's Mind, and the Other Lost It's Nerve," I discovered that non-fiction books can be really fun to read. Since that time I have read quite a few non-fiction books, both in the field of Politics, and Christianity. For the most part they have been excellent books, and well worth reading.

That's not to say that there is anything wrong with sitting down to a good novel, although it's something that I haven't had much luck trying to do lately, because I've been enjoying non-fiction so much.

When I was in 5th or 6th grade my dad was actually worried because I didn't like to read at all, and he was afraid that maybe I couldn't read very well, and that was the reason. In fact, he worried about it so much that he asked my teacher if she thought that I had a problem. She told him that reading ability was certainly not my problem, because, when I had to read in class, I did just fine, she figured that I just hadn't found anything that I had any interest in reading yet, and she was right. Dad asked her if she thought that it would be ok if he let me read some books by Louis L'Amour, being that I loved Western movies so much (mostly John Wayne by the way) or if it would be bad because they are adult books. She told him that if I wanted to read them, and it would get me reading something, she didn't see a problem with it. So he did.

And that is the story of the beginning of my love affair with reading. I'm not sure how many Louis L'Amour books I have read, but it was quite a few. In fact, I think there's only a fairly small number of his books that I haven't read.

From L'Amour I moved on to John Grisham about the time that he came out with "The Firm" being that "A Time To Kill" was not that popular of a book until after the release of "The Firm" at which time, people became interested in the author's previous book, and it's a good thing, because it's an outstanding book. I still enjoy Grisham as reading one of his books is usually pretty easy, and a nice break from the heavier stuff that I normally prefer.

Speaking of heavier reading, I've also really enjoyed reading novels by Tom Clancy, though I don't usually recommend them to people due to the amount of foul language that litter the pages of his books. But the stories! Oh, the stories that man can tell. Absolutely riveting. In my opinion he is probably one of the best story tellers in the history of American Literature. I'm sure many will disagree, and I admit, there's a lot of authors I haven't read, but I can't imagine that there are too many in Clancy's league.

I've also enjoyed Star Trek novels, and a variety of other sci fi books, and again, they do make for enjoyable reading.

I highly recommend the world of books to people, regardless if you are reading deep and thoughtful non-fiction, or light and easy novels, books open up such a great world to us that wouldn't be available otherwise. From the Bible, all the way down to fun and easy novels, I love books, and I hope you do too.