You have dreams that need waking, aspirations of which you are unaware, mental landscapes that will escape your notice unless someone outside your acquaintance introduces you to them. That someone is waiting to take you to new places this summer, giving you hours of enlightening entertainment, for about the price of a large pizza.
Of whom are we speaking? Authors of course, those strange people who spend months, even years, in research and writing isolation so that you and I can travel new worlds in our imaginations.
Recreational reading does several beneficial things. Our brains need rest from the daily grind. Light reading helps us escape. Most of us never travel to other cultures and cannot travel to other times. Good storytellers also take us places impossible to visit, expanding our horizons and understanding of human nature along the way.
And if you think you don’t have time to read, consider: the average American spends 608 hours per year on social media, and 1642 hours on TV. According to author Charles Chu, who did the math, we can read 200 books in 417 hours![1]
Books are better than movies too. The pace and length of a good novel or memoir replace the storytelling rush job that is a movie with time and space to imagine the world on the page, see the multiple motives and connections a movie doesn’t have time to develop, and strengthen our understanding in the process.
Good books, even if they aren’t overtly Christian, also strengthen our faith and stimulate our dreams. They help us see ourselves as we are and feed aspirations of what we might become.
A book is an investment of your time, so it is important to find a genre’ that you enjoy. If you aren’t sure where to start it helps to read reviews from trusted sources like World Magazine or Focus on the Family. Here are a few on my shelves broken down by genre’. In honor of the 74th anniversary of D-Day we’ll begin with WWII.
WWII, nonfiction – D-Day: The Climactic Battle of WWII, by Stephen Ambrose; Citizen Soldiers, also by Ambrose; Jimmy Stewart: Bomber Pilot, by Starr Smith; Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand; The Generals: Patton, Marshall and MacArthur and the Winning of WWII, by Winston Groom (author of Forest Gump); The Lost Airman: A True Story of Escape from Nazi Occupied France, by Seth Meyerwitz and Peter F. Stevens; A Man Called Intrepid: True Story of the Hero Whose Spy Network and Secret Diplomacy Changed the Course of History, by William Stevenson; Silent Running: My Years on a WWII Attack Submarine, by James F. Calvert.
Historical Fiction – The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, and A Hole in Texas, by Herman Wouk; The Hornblower series, by C.S. Forester. The Aubrey / Maturin series, by Patrick O’Brian (caution, strong language).
Biography / Memoir – Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World, by Eric Metaxas; Sailor and Fidler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author, by Herman Wouk; God and Churchill, by Wallace Henley and Jonathon Sandys; West with the Night, by Beryl Markham; The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, and Charles Lindbergh and the Epic Age of Flight, by Winston Groom.
Mysteries and Thrillers – The Last Days series by Joel C. Rosenberg; The Testament, by John Grisham; Sydney Chambers, series by James Runcie; The Brother Cadfael Mysteries, series by Ellis Peters; Blink, by Ted Dekker.
Nothing here that suits your fancy? Find something that does, dig in and wake up your dreams.
[1] https://qz.com/895101/in-the-time-you-spend-on-social-media-each-year-you-could-read-200-books/
dane skelton 