Blog 515 – 01.05.2016

When And How I Learned To Love To Read

I am, I suppose, a late bloomer, a slow learner. But I am not alone. Because of an early addiction to TV as a child I did not think I needed to read. I was not very good at it in school and tried to compensate by being a very good watcher and listener. Thanks to some pretty determined teachers and my mother who took time with me I did learn how to read but never really thought much of it or read anymore than I had to till after I graduated high school and during my last year as a teenager.

I spent that year, courtesy of my dear Uncle Sam, in sunny South Vietnam. If you are tempted to say, “Oh, poor baby.” save it, for of all the assignments I had in the Army, Vietnam was the one I enjoyed most. I spent my first four months there waiting on my top secret security clearance to be finalizes so I could work as a teletype repairman for which job the Army had trained me. During those four months I cut grass and picked up trash but mostly hid from the Company First Sergeant reading others soldiers books while they were working. All the good folks back home donated crates and crates of books and had them sent to the GI’s. We had a lot of time on our hands and that is where I learned to love to read.

It is also true that I inherited my love of reading from my parents, who both loved to read. Neither of my parents made in passed the tenth grade with their formal education and so considered themselves uneducated but it was not true. They were both widely read and knowledgeable in so many areas, far more so than many college graduates that I have known. The picture on the blog today is of one of the Chattanooga Library’s Bookmobiles that came to elementary schools every week where we could check out books for two weeks at a time. My mother had a library card and made sure that my brother and I each had a library card so we could check out books for her and ourselves. Anything by Emily Loring or Grace Livingston  Hill would please my mom. I told a friend recently who mentioned Grace Livingston Hill that though I never read one of her books that I think most women who loved her books would love anything by Nicolas Sparks. He writes great love stories but they all have enough teeth in them to make them stories a man can enjoy too. One of His most successful books made into movies, The Notebook, is thought to be just a “Chick flick” but I challenge any guy to read or watch the male lead in that story and deny his manliness and determination to have the woman of his dreams and keep her with him till the very end. It is a wonderful novel, truer than most non-fiction books I am sure. Anything Nicolas Sparks writes is worth the read.

When I first started reading books I only wanted to read good writers so I made a pact between myself and every author that I have ever read. I said and still do, ” If you haven’t got me by the end of chapter three I will close the book.” I have made only rare exceptions to that policy. One of those is with Dean Koontz whose novels often have several characters which take him a while to introduce and set the stage but you always know it will be worth the wait. Unlike many people I love to see movies made from books I have read and am seldom disappointed or use the phrase, “The book was better.” How could anyone possibly take a great book that it took hours and hours to read and put it in a two hour or even four hour movie. My hat is off to screen writers for how well they so often accomplish that impossible task of adapting the book to the screen. But remember the medium I first fell in love with was the small black and white screen in our living room. My first books even before the Bible were Playhouse 90, Topper, Maverick, Bonanza, The Fugitive, and a hundred others I could name and quote as passionately and accurately as any priest or preacher quotes The Scriptures or Rabbi quotes the Law and The Prophets, or Cleric quotes the Koran. I feel it appropriate here to quote again one of my favorite lines from Rufus Wainwright’s song Hallelujah:

“You say I took the name in vain but I don’t even know the name,
And if I did well really what’s it to you?
There’s a blazing light in every word. It doesn’t matter which you heard,
The holy or the broken hallelujah.”

And that is why I love to read to behold the blazing light in every word shining from the One Mind that inspires all minds to think and to write, and to make art, music, and movies, Hallelujah.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White