"A wide gap separates a reader who simply consumes books from a reader who diligently seeks wisdom."
Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books
Tony Reinke
★★★★★
Available for purchase here, and probably several other places as well!
I used to love to read and I would literally devour books as a young girl. But when I hit high school and college I felt like I just couldn't find the time to sit down and read. Recently I had felt a conviction to read more books, but for fear of not knowing where to begin, I decided to pick up Tony Reinke's Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books.
The book is separated into two parts - the first part focuses primarily on the theology behind reading and why reading plays (or should play) a central role in the life of a Christian. The second part zeroes in on practical application and how to go about deconstructing and digesting a book. I found that while this book was a great introduction to reading and therefore quite suitable for early teenagers and high school students, it would also serve an older audience quite well in that it is able to refocus and reintroduce one to the importance of reading with a purpose. We live in such a fast-paced society, and I'm finding that more often than not I read my news online, skim through articles and move on to subsequent paragraphs without allowing myself to react to the one previous, etc. etc. While I'm a huge advocate for social media and the web, I find myself wondering how many of us are now trained to read a mere 140 characters in a sitting until we move on to something else, rather than sitting down with a lengthier volume and really sinking our teeth into the text. I fear that this age of information-overload is disabling our attention spans and causing us to place less and less significance on reading.
Lit! helped me reflect on my own current reading habits (or lack thereof) and evaluate what I needed to start changing in order to make time to read and develop the discipline to read. It also helped me make some immediate changes that I am already reaping the benefits of! For instance, in chapter seven, Reinke talks about reading priorities. He shares what his six priorities are, and then encourages the reader to create a list of their own priorities. Inspired by Reinke's, I decided to follow suit and I came up with five major literary groups for my own reading "diet," if you will:
1. Reading Scripture
2. Reading books that teach me about Christ, and help me better understand Scripture
3. Reading Christian Lifestyle books (i.e. books such as Lit! that help me evaluate my spiritual life and initiate changes that need to be made)
4. Reading books that help me pursue vocational excellence; and
5. Reading books simply for leisure
These reading priorities have helped me in choosing which books to read, which books to read at a later time in my life, and which books not to read. One of the points Reinke makes throughout Lit! is the fact that every time you choose to read a book - any book - you are at the same time choosing to reject every other book ever written. Just thinking from that perspective encourages me to be wise in choosing what to read, and to read with a purpose in mind - to be a reader who is diligently seeking wisdom.
Lit! is packed with so many useful application points, and I agreed with almost the entirety of Reinke's book. He also wrote it with so much humor and love, that I found it to be a really easy, light read and I found myself rather excited to pick it up. There are a few other practical things I've been doing since reading this book, and I will definitely be blogging about these in the future. But for now, I will just say that this book is fantastic and this review is so lackluster! I would encourage anyone interested in this book to further check it out on Goodreads or Amazon because I can't seem to properly sum up the excellence that is this book.
