How Reading Exercised My Mind

Once Upon a Bookworm.

Reading is medication. Ever since I can remember, my sisters and I have been called bookworms. Folks who called us that were sometimes frustrated and sometimes delighted. We didn’t mind. What better things to do with one’s mind than to travel, fantasize, solve mysteries, and dream of love, all in the comforts of home?

We visited the local library regularly (and paid enough overdue fines to pay the librarian’s salary). Mama provided books on a monthly basis as payment for working in her bakery. We acquired an entire set of The Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew mysteries during those years.

During two different occasions, our sister Katharine was bedridden with rheumatic fever. She read to us almost nightly from the Peace Greenfield books by Ruth Alberta Brown. We were crowded into a small sewing room around her hospital bed, but we didn’t mind; the suspense and emotions were worth the cramped space.

Trixie Beldon, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Tuckers, the Happy Hollisters, and the Bobbsey Twins kept us occupied until we moved on to Laura Ingalls, Anne of Green Gables, and books written by Gene Stratton Porter. Long before Laura Ingalls or Anne of Green Gables became known through film or video, we followed their stories from book to book. Sadly to me, my kids hardly know who most of these story people are!

Reading some more

Summer nights found us with windows open and crickets, Katy-Dids, or frogs serenading us outside the windows as we read “one more page” or “one more chapter” until way past our bedtime. Winter nights, when we knew there’d be no school the next day, we’d kept our bed lamps on until the wee hours of the morning.

On another night during a visit with our sister Loretta and her family in Nebraska, I heard Alice sniffling in the bed beside me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, half-closing my book.

She turned the pages in Anne of Green Gables and replied tearfully, “Be quiet. Matthew just died.” The springs on the bed creaked as I laughed and she cried.

Passing it on

Most of my children inherited those same traits: reading into the night. My older kids were into C. S. Lewis, Ted Dekker, Frank Peretti, Jeanette Oke, Lori Wick, and Karen Kingsbury. Many a night  I caught a kid reading in his room when I thought everyone was asleep.

I have a hard time parting with books. The other day I was unpacking boxes of books that I stored during a remodeling project at our house. Most of them are books that my kids have outgrown but I have not.

Some favorite books

Blueberries for Sal, Make Way for Ducklings, Little Mommy, Goodnight Moon, Corduroy, Jenny Wren’s New House, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, The Biggest Bear, Madeline, The Little House, and many more show by their wear that they were kids’ favorites when my gang was smaller. So I put them on the to keep pile.

For some reason, the keepers pile is larger than the give-away pile. And so is the pile of books belonging to my older kids. I’m not always sure what to do with my books. I wish I had a room in our house large enough for bookshelves from ceiling to floor.

Throne reading

At our house, the bathroom was always a place for reading. That is why there is was a basket stationed in one bathroom and the song rack from an old church pew on the wall in another one. I rotated the books according to the seasons, and could tell they were read by throne-sitters. I figured if they were going to read there, I’d make sure there was good stuff to dwell upon while taking up throne space.

While I believe (and practice) good care of books, I don’t mind when a cover is loose or a few pages are wrinkled and worn. It tells me this book is a friend.

The bait of a new book

One day my sister-in-law introduced me to an author of the 1900s, G.H. Henty. I called the man who was re-publishing the books and asked him for a recommendation of the best one in the series of historical fiction. He didn’t hesitate and gave me the one he thought was best. I purchased a copy of In Freedom’s Cause (in paperback) and read a few pages. It was over my head in details and frankly, just not my kind of story.

Then I purposefully placed the book on an end table in the living room. That evening, just as I had hoped, one of my tweens picked it up and started to read.

“That’s my book, Tim,” I said.  “Please don’t read it until I have a chance to finish the book.”

[There were certain rules in our house. One of them was that the first reading of Readers Digest or Guideposts was mine. That was because once the magazines were taken upstairs to a bedroom, I’d never see them again. One year for Christmas, Jason asked for his own subscription to Readers Digest because he was tired of waiting to read Drama in Real Life until his mom was finished with the magazine! That is why Tim understood exactly why I asked him not to read the book until I finished the last page.]

“This is not your kind of book, Mama,” he replied. “You don’t want to read it.”

“Yes, I do,” I replied, not admitting that I only wanted to read it to pique his interest.

“You haven’t even read the first page, have you?” he asked.

“Sure I have. I’ve read most of the first chapter.” Then I described the characters in the book to him. I didn’t tell him I only read those pages so I could tell him I did.

and they are hooked

Eighteen books and many moons later, Tim still claims In Freedom’s Cause as his favorite book by G.H. Henty. He now has a hard copy to replace the paperback he received years ago.

“I have read this book so much, I can pick it up and open it to any place, and I know exactly where I am in the book,” he told me.

When my oldest, Ben, first read Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti, he begged me to read one of the books. I did so, because he asked. I was up until three o’clock in the morning, trying to find my way through numerous plots, suspense and mystery. Since then I’ve read more than one, even though this style is not my favorite. The tendency of modern authors to write stories with numerous characters involved in several different story plots makes more challenging reading for me. I’m probably giving away my age, but the books I grew up with had one character and story plot, so I tend to enjoy books which follow that pattern.

When my kids were small, I read to them practically every day. As they grew older, they read to younger siblings. It was a great way to kill two birds with one stone: homework read out loud and a younger sibling being entertained.

The benefits of reading

I believe reading helps with concentration, comprehension, spelling, and increasing vocabulary. In fact, one year we asked our second grader to be excused from a play at his school. During practice for the play, he was allowed to go the library, where he read. Spelling test results were proof positive of the benefits of reading. Whereas I normally spent thirty minutes each evening going over spelling words with him with little success, things changed during that period of his life. His ‘sentence’ to the library resulted in an A in spelling with less effort than it had taken to pass with a low C.

So these days, even though I’m over 70, you’ll often find me with my nose in a book, oblivious to my surroundings. Sometimes I read a favorite. Other times I am engrossed in one I’ve never read before. Call it escape, imagination, or whatever you will; reading is still good for my mind.

Sir Richard Steele said, “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”

The way I see it, I’ve got my own exercise gym for the mind right here in my house.