My love of reading

For as long as I can remember I have always loved to read. In fact, when I was a preschooler, from even before I remember, my mother said I used to be full of questions, and she would send me to look in encyclopedias or other books to find the answers. She said I might sit for long moments pondering an upside-down page in a book trying to figure out the mysteries of life.

I had a little picture book that I do remember. It was a prized possession from before I could read, I think. It was the story of when Jesus fed the five thousand people from the few loaves and fishes. As a child, I loved the stories of Jesus.

When I started school at Adrian in 1955 we read the Dick and Jane books. There were also books about Alice and Jerry. Years later I came across what Robert Fulgham wrote about Dick and Jane in a little piece I used to read to our children every August before they started another school year: "And then remember the book about Dick and Jane and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK. Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and sane living" ("All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten," from the Kansas City Times, Sept. 17, 1986).

I didn't go to Kindergarten. I started with the first grade. I got a late start. But not really. Most of what I needed to learn was there in the books. And in the lives of the numerous people that have influenced me along the way.

When I was twelve years old, sometime in 1961 or 1962, thanks to encouragement and inspiration from my Grandma Batt, I read the Book of Mormon all the way through. That was a first reading in what I would now have to list as the one single book that has most influenced my life. It was the early start of what has blossomed into a life-long love affair with the holy scriptures.

By the time I was in high school I recognized my great love for history, particularly American history and Church history. I read B. H. Roberts's book The Missouri Persecutions, which chronicles the unjust treatment, the drivings and the mobbings, of the Latter-day Saints in Missouri during the 1830s, culminating in their expulsion from the state during the winter of 1838–39. The book had a remarkable influence on me.

In my teen-aged years, probably near the end of my senior year of high school, in the spring of 1967, I discovered A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh for the first time. I had done a lot of reading by then, from all the works that were required in my English classes in school to all the stuff I read on my own. It was a delightful discovery. This was still before Walt Disney's people acquired the rights to the Pooh Bear and began marketing them in cartoons and short children's books and such. The original stories came from the pen of a British author in the 1920s.

During my first year of college, 1967–1968, I read The Hobbit and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. Few books have so engaged me or had such a profound impact on me. I cried after I finished reading the final chapter. I felt homesick for a place and a people I had known only in imagination. Other than the scriptures, there are few books that I take the time to reread. There just isn't enough time in my lifetime to read everything out there I might want to read. But I have read the trilogy that comprises The Lord of the Rings three times since that initial reading.

Another book I read a second time was Herman Melville's Moby Dick. I did not appreciate it the first time I read it when I was a sophomore in high school, but so many people insisted it was the great American novel that I had to find out what I missed the first time through. So I read it again the following summer. I still didn't find it. I think if you edited out everything that detailed nineteenth century whaling, perhaps it might make a good short story.

My nomination for the great American novel would have to be Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Even though I love to read, I don't read as much as I might like. I have averaged over the past many years a little more than a book a month, usually twelve to fifteen a year.

Many years ago in a Sunday School class we were discussing the Lord’s admonition: “Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). The teacher invited class members to mention books they had read, beyond the scriptures, that had profoundly influenced their lives. The responses were varied and interesting.

As I contemplate the works, beyond the scriptures, that have had a significant influence on me, or that I thoroughly enjoyed, or that gave me fresh insights into the world, I would have to list (in no particular order) at least the following pretty high on my list:

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
• The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• John Adams, by David McCullough
• 1776, by David McCullough
• Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, by Joseph J. Ellis
• Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, by Stephen E. Ambrose
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin
• April 1865: The Month That Saved America, by Jay Winik
• FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, by Jim Powell
• Truman, by David McCullough
• King Lear, by William Shakespeare
• Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
• Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkein
• The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis
• Approaching Zion, by Hugh Nibley (I pretty much like anything by Brother Nibley, but this represents what I consider the finest collection)
• Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, compiled by Joseph Fielding Smith
• To Draw Closer to God, by Henry B. Eyring
• The Missouri Persecutions, by B. H. Roberts
• Fire of the Covenant: A Novel of the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies, by Gerald N. Lund
• Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
• Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
• Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery
• A Child's Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, by A. A. Milne

This list is undoutedly incomplete. I have probably forgotten as many worthy candidates as I have listed. Compiled at other times, in other seasons, there might well have been other titles added, or even some of these deleted.

In the end, it is worth remembering what the Good Book says: "And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh" (Ecclesiastes 12:12).