An Invitation to the Wonders of Reading

I am not a natural reader, but I became one.

I suppose that’s true of everyone. No one comes out of the womb ready to read. But it took me longer than most. It wasn’t until college that I fell in love with reading.

It all started with a book. The title is unimportant, but it changed me. It seemed to have chosen me and sent me on a quest to read more, deeper, wider. Books have been provoking such transformations for centuries. Consider the famous garden scene when Augustine cries out to God or the universe or some Other Thing. Then, he hears little children chant, “Tolle lege, tolle lege”—take and read, take and read. He rushes to his friend’s house, finds the epistle to the Romans, and starts reading. This radical reading changed him. Alter the details, and this is true of all Christians, who are people of the book—the Word made flesh and the words from God.

My journey to reading was similar though less dramatic than Augustine’s. For me, like Augustine, it was a religious book. I wanted to be prepared for ministry. It was a narrow slice of the beauty of words and spirituality of reading. But as I’ve grown, I’ve opened up to the rich spectrum that reading does and can take. I used to think theology was the way to maturity. Now, I see I was deformed if I only read theology and neglect poetry, memoir, or fiction—like going to the gym and only hitting chests and biceps. God met me through books, and words changed me.

I needed a book like World of Wonders: A Spirituality of Reading by Jeff Crosby to open up the wide, wonderful world of reading. A longtime book seller and current president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, Crosby is one acquainted with books. His new book joins a chorus of recent books on the power of reading: Reading for the Love of God by Jessica Hooten Wilson, Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs, On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior.

Through short and accessible chapters, Crosby makes a case for the inspiration that comes through reading. In Part 1, he lays the foundation—the why and what of reading, from stories to scripture. In Part 2, he welcomes us to the wide, wild, wonderful world of reading. Here, he provides the forms that reading can take—fiction, poetry, diverse voices, memoir. Part 3 describes the power of reading across seasons of life and faith. This final section details how reading in family life, grief and loss, doubt and fear, and through the liturgical years has shaped him.

In large part testimony, Crosby weaves in stories to make his points. It’s less “here’s why reading is good” and more “here’s how reading is good.” He surveys his life and the life of others to show how reading shapes the spiritual journey. He gives a close read of Ted Kooser’s poem “Estate Sale” to highlight the power of paying attention and his own care of words. Or he tells the story of his mother’s health decline and the books that became a ballast as her mortal life was ending. It’s less a spirituality of reading and more of how the spirit works when and as we read. As testimony, it doesn’t lay out arguments to read or strategies of reading; it shows how reading has and can change you.

One unique feature of the book is that the end of each chapter includes 15 books for further reading. As someone whose love language is books, I appreciated this addition. There’s a certain amount of affection that swells in my heart when someone suggests a book to me and it’s just what I needed or wanted. Here, Crosby provides the reader with more wonders to explore.

As a lover of books, his writing style is full of references and encouragement from others. He draws multiple dialogue partners in to make his points: from Eugene Peterson and Frederick Buechner to C.S. Lewis and Philip Yancey. It can be overwhelming at times—quotes upon quotes. It’s what I do when I write and teach, too—I want to pull as many people into the conversation as possible. “Oh—that makes me think of them who said this.” Crosby is a purveyor of books—it’s to be expected that he would reference his loves.

There’s nothing necessarily new in Crosby’s book, but it is a delightful orchestration. For example, Reading Black Books by Claude Atcho encourages reading diverse sources, or Reading for the Love of God by Hooten Wilson details the formative role of reading. The synthesized nature is not a knock or limitation on the book. It is to say that Worlds of Wonder is a sort of distilled wisdom.

So often, we need the democracy of the dead in seasons of disruption. Reading provides a stabilizing effect. Drawing on Thomas Pynchon, Alan Jacobs says our personal density is tied to our temporal bandwidth—the more and further back and better we read, the more stable, steadfast, dense we become. We can become substantial people by reading—not shallow people tossed by every new innovation or idea, or anxious people changing with every fad. Reading also expands our imaginative bandwidth—thinking with others can help us relate to and love those who are different than us.

Today, I teach college students. I’m known as the professor who makes students read a lot. (I think it’s rather modest, to be honest). My students, most coming from a culture of declining reading rates, don’t like to read. As such, I get the most anxious near the end of September and February: these are the dates when books are due for next semester. If all goes well, these books will become catalysts of transformation. Sometimes, the same students who loathed reading to begin graduate with a new passion for reading. They’ve tasted its work.

As I think about my younger, non-reading self, I wonder if this book would convince me to read. Would it make me fall in love with reading? I’m not sure. I don’t know if Crosby thinks his book will make people become readers. It’s his journey, a memoir of sorts, of how good books formed him. But the story can be an invitation:

Tolle lege—take and read, and take and read some more.

Image Credit: Joseph Thors, “Landscape with Cottage and Figure by a Windmill” (c. 1870) via Wikimedia.