There's an essayist whose writings I've enjoyed named Will Hoyt. In one of his essays he writes about how he learned to read. Nothing there about how old he was when he learned the alphabet. Nothing about "Bob Books" or other series used to teach kindergarteners. Nothing about techniques at all. Instead, he writes about hiking. He says that it wasn't until he learned how to really hike—how to pace himself, what to look for, conserving energy and expending attention, looking up and looking down, appreciating the direction of sunlight and the flow of a day's heat on the climb, anticipating inclines and flatter lines, experiencing the same hill in different ways on different days—that he learned how to move through a book. It was after becoming an experienced hiker, he said, that he learned how to relate to an author too. So by this account, it wasn't until he was an adult that he learned how to read.
I like to hike when I can, but I'm no hiker like Will Hoyt is. But I get what he's saying. I understand, intuitively, that reading—at least as it's been understood in Western culture until recently—is about more than processing information inscribed in words, sentences, and paragraphs. But it took me a long time to learn that, too. And I had to learn it in my own way. Reading is a work, a relationship, an adventure, a discipline, and a gift. And it's also an environment, in its way.
I think my first glimmer of all of this came from growing up in a house full of books. My father enjoyed reading and always had a book or two in the briefcase he took to work. But my mother was the lover of books. At any used books sale she could find she'd buy all kinds and sorts of them. And she read most of them. When I was a toddler she bought a metal hanging system and unfinished wooden boards (which she carefully sanded and stained) so she could install shelves in our little living room wall. I watched her. She took down and put up those same shelves in every house she lived in from then on--for six decades and five houses. And more were added, room by room. Bookshelves became images of access to a larger world.
I suppose a screen can work like those shelves, but it's different. Maybe there's a trace of that difference in how I decide whether to buy a digital book for my iPad or a physical book for my own shelves. I tend to make the decision by how I think I'm going to relate to what's inside. It's not perfect, but that's pretty much how I do it. If I think my relationship to the words will be instrumental, meaning there's some information I need that I'll simply process and use, I'll buy a digitized copy. It's so much more convenient. However, if I think I might savor something, read and reread parts of it, argue with an author or consider her ideas in a way that's different than just processing words, I'll likely buy a physical book. I'll hold it in my hand. I'll catch my breath a bit before I decide whether I'm going to write in it or not. I'll put it on a shelf alongside other books (not just thumbnails of title pages on a screen). But I might be a fossil in this. I doubt my children make the same distinction—at least not yet.
Yet I still think there's something to a physical book, even if there are some advantages to screens. Words on a page and words on a screen just aren't the same things, and the way we approach the information within them is different—even if they influence each other. Not better or worse. Just different.
When my family recently faced the inevitable challenge of deciding what to do with my mother's massive library, we ended up filling six medium sized Home Depot packing boxes with just cookbooks. Just cookbooks—and my mother, to be honest, didn't really cook! I mean, she made meals—and sometimes quite carefully. But she didn't cook in the way Will Hoyt hikes, or the way she read. Yet she still had all those cookbooks. I wondered why. I was tempted to think it wasteful. I chuckled and thought how quaint (and burdensome) those boxes feel in time when all I need to do to get a recipe for an Ethiopian dessert is go to Google or search the New York Times cooking section online. Cookbooks are passe, I figured. I don't want any of them. And so we packed them up, commiserating about why she had so many in the first place.
After a while, though, I began to realize that these cookbooks weren't shelved in her kitchen to be used—even if a few of them were used now and then. They were there as windows, thoughts, connections, blurred lines between place and adventure. They were living reminders that her experience of life is not the only experience of life. And they were symbols of possibility. To see the spine of a glossy pictured volume that reads Soups of the Orient next to a paperback Heart Healthy Lunches is a kind of invitation to a hike, I guess: what to pack and what to look for. Maybe one of the volumes would get pulled off the shelf on a lark, for a looksee, or inspire an experiment the next time some friends came by. Maybe the old, stained and breaking Betty Crocker in the same line of vision as Keto Forever helped keep the present moment in perspective—and gave depth to time.* Maybe all those cookbooks were more alive for her than I thought when I'd chuckle over them on visits. We read our shelves as much as we read the books on them.
Maybe all of this is why I'll look up a passage of scripture on my iPad or iPhone if I need it quickly for some reason, but I'll never read scripture from a screen when I'm leading worship. I hold a bound Bible in my hand, to remind worshippers that the passage I'm reading is part of a diverse library of revelation. And maybe all of this is why every once in a while I'll start a book and actually finish it—when for a reason that still has some mystery in it, it becomes something more than a source of information I can pick up and put down. When it becomes a conversation partner.
Maybe hiking is how we learn to do it. Or perusing and sightseeing. Or conversation. Or discipline. Or study. Or worship.
Take up and read.
* I made up those titles (except for the Betty Crocker), as the boxes have been donated to the local public library, but I think you get the point.
