How I got my start as a reader

Hint: It involved the difficult work of lying on the sofa for an entire Sunday afternoon.

My reading life began as soon as I was old enough to pedal my bike to the Ottawa Hills Public Library in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was there that I joined the summer book club. I don’t remember much about those early books, except that reading and always having a book (or stack of books) on hand became a part of my life early on. In my strict religious upbringing, TV on Sundays was forbidden, but happily that restriction opened up a different kind of world for me. I discovered the pleasure of stretching out on the sofa and reading a book for an entire afternoon.

It was in high school that I began spending time at the bookstore chain known as Waldenbooks. I must have been one of their best customers. I found myself reading in streaks—gobbling up all of John Updike, then all of Philip Roth, and so on. I remember reading John Steinbeck, Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, Saul Bellow, and more in that same way. One of my favorite novelists at the time was Peter DeVries, mostly because he was raised in the same culture I was and then somehow broke free.

What my parents thought about all this reading I don’t know, but to accommodate my growing collection they bought a large bookcase for my bedroom, which I counted as approval or, more likely, acquiescence. Curiously, they subscribed to The New Yorker magazine—not exactly an obvious choice given their religious views—and so naturally I became a reader too, mostly the short stories and long profiles.

The authors I mentioned previously were all white men, which is embarrassingly clear to me now. But those authors were instrumental in opening my world from the rather narrow religious environment in which I was raised to something much larger. (I can’t resist noting that during my senior year of college I chaired the college’s lecture council and somehow convinced the other members to bring Chaim Potok to campus for a lecture. I even had the pleasure of driving him back and forth to the airport. In our conversations with Potok, we learned that he saw no connection whatsoever between his descriptions of a narrow religious community in New York and our own narrow religious community in the Midwest. But, importantly, we made the connection and read his books with appreciation.)

The highlight of one high school summer was reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I remember it because that summer the neighborhood movie theater showed the 1956 movie version with Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Anita Ekberg, and others, and since the film runs nearly three and a half hours, the theater showed it in two parts on consecutive weeks. A dear friend saw the movie with me, and naturally we debated whether the movie version did justice to the novel. (We gave the movie version mixed reviews.)

Given my interest in reading novels, I probably should have been a college English major. Instead, and mostly because the college had several outstanding faculty members in its philosophy department, I graduated with a philosophy major. Learning to think analytically, I now see, changed the way I read. After years of reading only stories, I began to read non-fiction and to think far more carefully about what I was reading. I remember, for example, taking a required course in symbolic logic and for a brief while trying to break down the arguments in every book I read. (I’m thankful that I was able to break this habit, but it was a good exercise at the time.)

One of my summer jobs while attending college was at a well-known publisher of religious and theological books. I worked half-time in the sales promotion department and half-time in the editorial department. Every Friday afternoon, a man named Casey, from the printing department, walked around with an armload of books, dropping one off at each desk. These were the books we had been working on, and each one was a treat to see and hold. I also got to know some of the editors (and even played on the company softball team), and I saw that most of them had advanced degrees from fine theological schools. So, to be like them and have a career in publishing, I decided to follow their path.

I attended Princeton Theological Seminary after college and was introduced there to still another kind of literature—spiritual writing, though I’m not sure that category does these books justice. For years I have a been a fan of writers like Frederick Buechner (not his novels, but his wonderful memoirs), Anne Lamott (again, not her novels), Eugene Peterson, Barbara Brown Taylor, Marilyn McEntyre, Marilynne Robinson, and more. In Robinson’s case, even her novels, set in the fictional small Iowa town of Gilead—titled Gilead, Lila, and Jack—have left an enduring impression.

Photo: That of course is Princeton Theological Seminary, where I spent three years of my life…reading books on the third floor of Alexander Hall.

I did not pursue a career in publishing, as it turned out, but reading has continued to be a passion throughout my life. And it was my reading that prompted me to become a writer. I wrote lots of short stories in high school and college, and I entered them of course in school contests. And then, in adulthood I have continued to write—short essays, newspaper columns, books reviews, and more. I have even written a few books, soon to total eight of them. But it was my early interest in reading that shaped my life as a writer.

Please leave the name of a book in the comments that has shaped your life.