For the Love of Books

When I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, a neighbor gave me a book called Let Me Hold You Longer by Karen Kingsbury.

And it was the saddest book I ever read. The book begins like this:

Long ago you came to me,
a miracle of firsts:
First smiles and teeth and baby steps,
a sunbeam on the burst.
But one day you will move away
and leave to me your past,
And I will be left thinking of
a lifetime of your lasts . . .

As happy as I am for my children, all of whom are growing up so fast before my very eyes, there’s a piece of me that wants to keep them little.

I look ahead and dream of days
that haven’t come to pass.
But as I do, I sometimes miss
today’s sweet, precious lasts . . .

I’m not crying.
You’re crying.

I’ve watched you grow and barely noticed
seasons as they pass.
f I could freeze the hands of time,
I’d hold on to your lasts.

And so while I let them choose their own bedtimes, drive away in the car, meet friends, and bring home first paychecks, I have retained this one thing, this one small thing that we usually do with very young children. I am doing this thing with my last, almost-grown child.

We READ ALOUD every night.

Why the read-aloud?

In early 2019, I read a book called The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction. By that time, my youngest daughter, 11 years old, could read very well on her own. She didn’t need to choose a book off the shelf anymore and drink a cup of milk while I read to her. That wasn’t the point.

The book lauded the benefits of reading aloud to children. Without a phone, TV, or music playing, we simply spend 30-45 minutes reading aloud every night before bed. This precious time cannot be underestimated, and I’m not saying that my daughter loves every book I choose or even loves that I call her down to read every night at 8:30, but she does it faithfully and without complaining, and I’m praying that one day she will understand that all those words we shared together were a good thing.

Reading aloud to children is like planting a seed that will grow and flourish over time. It may not bear fruit right away, but with patience and persistence, it can yield a rich harvest of knowledge, imagination, and understanding.—Meghan Cox Gurdon

I love that my kids are independent, deep thinkers. All of them tend to choose creativity over conformity, a choice that sometimes brings more pain than pleasure. We do need to let go. But we don’t have to let everything go.

“The single biggest predictor of high academic achievement is reading to children. Not flash cards, not workbooks, not fancy preschools, not blinking toys or computers, but mom or dad taking the time every day or nigh (orboth!) to sit and read them wonderful books.” (teachergoals on Instagram)

But hey—it’s all about choices, really. How do I want to spend my time? What can I do to get the biggest return on my investment? You can always make more money, but nobody has yet figured out how to make more time. Once you exchange that time for something, it is gone forever. And I know how I feel after 10 minutes of doom-scrolling versus 10 minutes of reading.

No contest.

Nobody is telling you you have to read a whole book or even read for an hour straight. You can read a couple of paragraphs and call it a day. Progress is progress, after all.

According to Meme creator, Tank Sinatra, (when he was a guest on the podcast 3Books), “reading is the number one thing you can do to have a better life.”

I don’t know about that…but WHAT IF???

HOW BOOKS SAVED DEMOCRACY

There’s a book by Molly Guptill Manning called When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II. In the early 1940s, books helped soldiers understand the cultural values they were fighting for. They faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books. Here, on the front lines, they squirreled away books from home in their pockets and backpacks and found solace, inspiration, and entertainment between the pages of beloved classics like The Great Gatsby and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

It’s hard to imagine a world where soldiers clamored for books rather than video games. Reading has fallen out of favor in recent years, as digital entertainment has increased in popularity. But if you were a civilian in the 1940s, you would have clamored to donate your gently used books to the men serving our country.

These books had enormous value because they held the ideas and ideals that made democracy worth the fight.

Hitler worked to strengthen Fascism by destroying the written word. But the American Library Association fought back. They had no intention in allowing Hitler to succeed with his war of ideas. They urged all Americans to…READ MORE.

Read It …AGAIN

I think it’s interesting how the same book can affect us differently depending on what’s happening in our own life. For example, I first read The Diary of Anne Frank as a thirteen year old, the same age Anne was when she and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam. I understood her curiosity about her changing body and the tumultuous relationship she had with her mother. While waves of grief still wash over me when I think about Anne Frank, my heart aches in a new way for Anne’s mother, Ethel. She was a highly educated Jewish woman plunged into the fathomless loneliness of the Annex. Ethel endured a complicated relationship with her daughter, and Anne’s emotional writings evolve and fluctuate throughout the months in the Annex. We don’t have Ethel’s diary, but now I wonder if silent tears poured down her face on nights when Anne rebuffed her. I imagine the connection she craved with her daughters. Did she ever hold them and tell them she wished she could give them more?

My older son often blames school for killing his love of reading—and that is a tragedy. As parents, during read-aloud time, we have a unique opportunity to share with our kids the books that shaped our own lives. We get to introduce them to the books we loved, and then pray a thousand prayers that they’ll love them too!

(Even now when I go into an antique bookstore, I drink deeply of the lignin and vanilla eeking from the pages of old books. The old Margaret Mitchell Library in the hometown where I grew up had that smell. There, I ran my fingers along the spines on Saturday mornings with my dad. I read Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, and John Steinbeck.)

Those books changed my life.

The Million Word Gap

Research suggests that “young children whose parents read them five books a day enter kindergarten having heard about 1.4 million more words than kids whose parents never read to them.”

That’s a lot of words!

Words that teach children about the world and help them think more deeply about causes that matter.

Of course, we all understand how important it is to read to kids. It’s why programs like Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library exist. Other states have followed suit. The program provides free books to children from birth to age five, with the goal of promoting early childhood literacy and fostering a love of reading.

Public libraries host summer reading programs, and all across the United States “little free libraries” have popped up in public parks, town squares, and neighborhood street corners.

Iceland has a wonderful Christmas tradition in which people give books to one another on Christmas Eve It’s called Jolabokaflod, and people spend the night reading and eating chocolate. To its credit, Iceland is the first country in the world to be recognized for having achieved "full literacy."

Congratulations, Iceland!

Iceland’s close neighbor, Finland, publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world. And Finns purchase more books per capita, too!

How I’d love to visit one of their independent bookstores!

It’s no surprise that the Bible is the most published book of all time. According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the Bible has been printed more than five billion times. Every time you open it, you’ll discover something new within its pages.

There’s lots of books, in fact, that I’ve read more than once. And every single time I learn something new.

I think my favorite thing about books are the conversations they inspire. Even fiction challenges my thinking around hot topics. Race and politics, transgender relationships, work and values, science and religion—I could go on and on—

If you’ve ever longed to write a book, I pray you’ll do it, not because it might sell millions of copies and make you very rich (although I hope it does), or because you might become famous and be asked to speak on stages all over the world (although I hope you do) but because the act of writing and the act of reading are one of the the few things that have the ability to deeply connect people who may never meet in person. A book transcends time and space. It’s why people get so upset and want to censor what we’re allowed to read. People who can think for themselves are the scariest people in the world.

Because they have the ability to change the world.

And isn’t that what we’re all doing here anyway?

My time with my children is fleeting. As much as I’d love to take them on expensive trips and give them the kind of experiences they’ll never forget, I know that the biggest bang for the buck is within the pages of a book. (This, of course, is coming from a person who loved it when the teacher said, “Please read quietly at your desk for the rest of the class.” Also the person who actually bought books at the book fair. Also the person who stayed up late at night with a flashlight under the covers reading books.) 😉

As for all those lasts, the “last time we cuddle with a book” is still many moons away. :) I don’t plan on giving that up anytime soon!

Want More Good Stuff?

Need some ideas for your own read-aloud time?

My favorite read-aloud is the Harry Potter series performed by Jim Dale on Audible.

I also love ALL the David Sedaris books, memoirs read by the author himself. Laugh-out-loud funny!

The Secret Sauce to the Dr. Seuss Success Story

A lot of people know the story of Dr. Seuss and The Cat and the Hat—about how his publisher challenged the author to write a book using just 250 words. Challenge accepted, challenge won! Three years another bet inspired the iconic Green Eggs and Ham, a nifty little book that boasts just fifty different words.

BUT, have you ever wondered how the ordinary Theodore Geisel became the famous Dr. Seuss?

Having grown up collecting Dr. Seuss’s many famous titles (he’s sold nearly 700 million copies), it’s hard to believe that publishers initially spurned Geisel. His first children’s book, And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street, was rejected almost thirty times. It’s a miracle he didn’t just give up and never write anything ever again.

I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but if you’re facing rejection—of any kind—keep in mind that Dr. Seuss, arguably the most famous children’s author of all time, heard the word “no” 27 times!

(For reference, J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected just twelve times. But I’ll save the rejection commentary for a post on another day.)

So…

What happened? Who would take a chance on a guy that had already been rejected by nearly every publisher in town?

Funny story, actually.

One day, Geisel was walking through New York City, manuscript in hand, dejected and forlorn. He was thinking about how when he got home he was going to burn the manuscript to that book. (After all, it was obviously a dead end. Nobody wanted it, so it must be garbage, right?).

Wrong!

Istead, something magical happened.

Geisel bumped into Mike McClintock, an old friend from his college days at Dartmouth:

McClintock said, "What's that under your arm?"

I said, "A book that no one will publish. I'm lugging it home to burn."

Then I asked Mike, "What are you doing?"

He said, "This morning I was appointed juvenile editor of Vanguard Press, and we happen to be standing in front of my office; would you like to come inside?"

So, we went inside, and he looked at the book and took me to the president of Vanguard Press. Twenty minutes later we were signing contracts.

That's one of the reasons I believe in luck. If I'd been going down the other side of Madison Avenue, I would be in the dry-cleaning business today!

Mulberry Street was published in 1937.

And the rest is history.

Actually…

Geisel took a detour from children’s book writing in the 1940s. With the advent of WWII, like so many comrades, he began writing and drawing editorial cartoons for PM Magazine, then accepted an assignment with the U.S. Army’s documentary division, ultimately winning a couple of Academy Awards for projects he spearheaded during that time.

It wasn’t until 1947 that Geisel returned to children’s books, and he didn’t publish the famous Cat in the Hat until ten years after that.

So, what can we learn from the Dr. Seuss success story?

It’s hard to imagine a world without Dr. Seuss.
But perhaps Dr. Seuss couldn’t imagine a world without Mike McClintock!

The story is a reminder to me that it’s impossible to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps (Read more about that here!).

In the late 1950s, things had shifted, with Geisel’s old friend, McClintock, working on a children’s book of his own. Now, it was Geisel’s turn to encourage his friend. In a letter to McClintock, Geisel wrote, “You’ve hit something there that has more terrific chances of becoming a classic than anything I’ve seen in a hell of a long time. The basic concept of fear, and running away from things, has something to say. The reader grasps it instantaneously, and then it builds, builds builds.”

(You can read A Fly Went By by Mike McClintock here.)

As I re-read Geisel’s words to his friend now, I feel a bit emotional. When someone we admire validates something we hold dear, their words carry immeasurable weight. Those words can literally be the impetus to keep us going when the going gets tough.

A Hand Up

Stories like this are the reason why quotes like “Your network is your net worth” are so popular. It’s also a reminder to me that it’s rare for something wonderful to be created in a vacuum.

Because I am a homemaker and my kids are mostly grown, my opportunities to “put myself out there” aren’t as prolific as I’d like them to be. I have to make a concerted effort. And I’ll be honest, that’s getting harder and harder. It’s easy to stay home and just “do my thing.”

I have to remind myself that nearly every interesting opportunity I’ve ever had has been the result of a connection made on my behalf.

C’mon, people, let’s be more bold about sharing our dreams!

What if Theodore Geisel, embarrassed that he had been rejected so many times, had passed his friend on the street and decided not to tell him what had happened? What if he had tried to spin a tale to make himself sound more successful than he actually was? What if the two had just shared a cursory fist-bump and walked on?

These are Dartmouth guys, after all. It’s hard to imagine two ivy league men sharing a moment of vulnerability on a busy New York street corner.

In telling the truth, Geisel received a priceless gift.

Some Christians might call it a “God thing.”
Bystanders would probably chalk the whole exchange up to coincidence.
Geisel, himself, said he was just plain “lucky.”

But the reality is that people like to feel helpful.

McClintock’s position in 1937 gave him a unique vantage. Years later, the tide had shifted, and now Geisel was the man with all the influence. Geisel could make things happen for McClintock. And he did, ultimately editing A Fly Went By and inviting McClintock to write for his Beginner Books series for children.

“The need to be needed is one of our fundamental desires. We want to feel significant in the eyes of others, even if it is only one other person. We want to feel like we play an important role, whether in an organization, family, or life of another. The need to be needed is rooted in our need for a sense of contribution to something beyond ourselves.”

— Steve Rose, PhD,

The Need to be Needed

The Need to be Needed theory makes it sound like helping out a friend is a selfish thing. I don’t think so, though. I think that’s the beauty of helping someone else get what they want. In doing so, we get the very thing our own soul craves: validation.

In this season, I find more time available to me—time I can use to help others get what they want.

When mission and purpose intersect with position and influence, you get to experience the joy of generosity.

Maybe right now you wish you had a hand-up for a dream you’re carrying. Don’t burn it down just yet. In the meantime, maybe you can be the bridge for someone else’s dream.

To be fair, sometimes that’s more fulfilling anyway.

Anything I can do to help you? Let me know by replying to this email.

WANT MORE GOOD STUFF?

The Extra Terrific Reading Group

Trying to figure out how to be successful is like trying to rescue a cat from a high tree.

Just when we think we’ve got him cornered, the darn thing climbs a little higher, wedges himself between two awkward branches, or worst of all…decides to jump! And suddenly, here we are, literally trying to find a net to break the fall because we know—it’s inevitable—we’re getting back in that tree. There’s always another cat to save.

Ruth Reichl, memoirist and former editor of Gourmet Magazine, knows a lot about success..and failure.

In 2009, Ruth Reichl’s editorship at Gourmet Magazine ended both abruptly and unexpectedly. Reichl was devastated, The end was immediate; even the Christmas issue, already ready to go, was casually tossed aside. But instead of going home and drowning her sorrows, she hit the road on the new Gourmet Today cookbook press tour. Of that time, Reichl recalls, “I really thought I would never get another job.”

Before becoming editor at Gourmet, she had been the food critic for both the L.A. Times and the New York Times, and she had already written the bestselling memoir, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise.

Did she really think she couldn’t get another job?

But that’s what disappointment does to us.

It convinces us of the lie that we’re not good enough, have never been good enough, and certainly won’t ever be good enough to do anything well ever again. We might has well just quit.

Isn’t that what everybody wants us to do anyway?

Every time I sit down at the computer, I feel like I don’t have anything to say. Or I feel like there’s somebody else out there who has already said all the words. Not only that, these other writers who have already said all the words have already said those words better than me.

But I also know that every time I sit down at the computer to write, I am writing with my unique voice. And maybe I’m saying something in a new way or in a way that allows someone to understand an old idea in a different way.

Words became a part of me before I ever realized what they could do, tracing out letters like “C-A-T” and “M-A-T” with my index finger before I ever tried to write one of my own.

But it was in the third grade that I knew I had found my true love.

While other kids were playing tetherball and four-square, made friendship pins, and asked the Magic 8 Ball all their most interesting questions, I was practicing words with my trusty Speak and Spell and playing make-believe with characters that lived in my head, not my class.

My favorite subject was reading. And when the teacher divided us into groups, I wasn’t at all surprised to find myself in the E.T.’s It was 1983, and E.T. was the most popular movie in theaters, so we dubbed ourselves the E.T.’s—The Extra Terrific Reading Group. It was pretentious, we knew, but darned if we cared—WE WERE EXTRA TERRIFIC!

The Extra Terrific Reading Group actually had a lot to do with how I consume books now.

That early start formed the foundation of my education—not only in school but in life. I read books because more than anything I loved to learn.

In the last few months, I have stockpiled all kinds of books: classics from my years studying 18th century literature, youth fiction, children’s books, memoirs, accounts of social justice, Christian living, and even books on community revitalization (I promise it’s a lot more interesting than it sounds).

But while many might scoff at my varied book choices, each and every one helps shape the way I think about the world and the people in it. The books have helped me discover new hobbies and have given me a voice for a wide range of topics—some of which have become stepping stones for opportunities I never would have otherwise had.

When Gourmet Magazine told Reichl it was over, she immediately began work on My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes that Saved My Life: A Cookbook. It’s actually only part cookbook. At 352 pages, it’s mostly memoir.

Why did she write a book when she thought she was finished as both an editor and an expert in cooking?

Because we all have that thing we do that makes us who we are. It’s the thing that can’t be squashed, no matter the failure.

And Ruth Reichl wasn’t finished.

In fact, she took her own advice:

“I’d learned an important lesson: When something frightens me, it is definitely worth doing.”

— Ruth Reichl

Reichl eventually wrote six more books, including my favorite, Tender at the Bone and her most recent, Save Me the Plums, which chronicles her decade-long career at Gourmet.

My favorite quote from that book is:

“The best antidote for sadness, I have always believed, is tackling something that you don’t know how to do.”

— Ruth Reichl, Save Me the Plums

I don’t know what I’m doing much of the time. I’m often frustrated, confused, irritated, dumbfounded, and exhausted.

But I’m not sad.

Learning always brings me joy.

And when it comes to learning, I always start with books.

In periods of deep sadness, what do you turn to to bring you comfort? Is there something you don’t know how to do that you’d like to learn? What’s your first step in figuring how to do it?

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What I’m reading:

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
Following Jesus by Henri J.M. Nouwen
Call of the Wild by Jack London
Between the World and Me by Ta -Nehist Coates
Ida B. by Katherine Hannigan