The Crazy Australian

I didn’t intend to revisit the topic of books (see here and here), but a great post on the DesiringGod.org blog sparked me off again.
The article is full of reasons to read:

Reading is one of the best ways to develop our minds. It can help us to know God and ourselves, gain vicarious experience, increase our perception and imagination, train our minds to think critically and logically, and teach us self-discipline….. Few of us are a Jonathan Edwards, John Owen, J. I. Packer or John Piper, and we would be wise to learn from them.

Check out the rest of the article for more gold reasons.
I agree with it. READ! And read widely.

But is there a ‘good’ way to read and a ‘bad’ way to read?

As school gets harder, there are more and more ideas to grasp. When you have a question and you’re short on energy, time, and sleep, the easiest option is to open a book (or Google) and find the answer.
You learn, which is great, but I wonder if you also learn a bad habit. I suspect I am learning the ability to think critically.

Christians are often criticised for accepting everything fed by ‘them’ (whoever that is). I would like to think I’m not stupid enough to devote my life to something I haven’t checked out, but perhaps the criticism rings true at least in part. When reading, should we accept everything the author says? I suggest, ideally, no.

The answer isn’t to not read. There must be a balance between being humble (i.e. allowing yourself to learn) and being critical. “Test everything”!

An even more radical idea, something that only occurred to me recently, is to not read straight away. If you have an interest or question, think about it yourself first. (I’m usually too lazy, but I’m working on it.)

Ironically, this idea didn’t occur from my own thinking… but from reading an Einstein quote:

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. – Albert Einstein

My last post asked the question “Why read Old Books?”

I think we should. I was convinced of this by a far better word-smith than I: C. S. Lewis.
More than 30 years ago he explained why we ought to read Old Books in an introduction to a Very Old Book:
“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. … This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology”.

(I have extracted my favourite bits. The rest is definitely worth reading (at the link above).)
“Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.”

Why?
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.”

“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. “

So what do I do?
“It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”

I wonder how old an Old Book needs to be, to be an Old Book… (Say that 5 times fast)
The irony is that, when I first read (actually, heard) this, I congratulated myself on having just finished a book written 60 years ago – yet that was actually contempory at the time Lewis wrote this.

I want to dig into some stuff from other centuries, but I have no idea where to start. Does anyone have any suggestions? (actual books are more helpful than authors)

I love reading. I wish I had more time to read because I find books faster than I can read them. New books are published way faster than I can read them: more than 800 are published every day. One every 2 minutes.

Yet recently I have been thinking a lot about Old Books.

Last term I read a lot of C. S. Lewis, whose books, at more than 50 years old, might qualify. They were marvellous! The writing was clear, clever, and challenging; but the best part was that he wrote about things we don’t hear about today.

Then, a few weeks ago, I found a bookshelf in our house with my parents’ Old Books on it, and I’ve been working my way through some of them.

I will discuss this in the next post, but feel free to share your thoughts.