Books Are My Friends

Cicero said, "A room without books is like a body without a soul." If that's true, I've been gorging myself for years en route to a massive soul.  Whenever I'm in close proximity to books, new or used, I cannot help myself. Something otherworldly takes over in second hand stores, coffee shops, wherever books are sold, and I find myself examining spines, perusing covers, scanning tables of contents, and, more often than not, purchasing. Occasionally, I read electronic editions, but nothing can replace the mystery and lure of a shelf lined with volume after volume, beckoning to me to unlock their secrets with the key of my mind. I confess that almost as much as I enjoy reading books, I love the smell and feel of them, and all the secrets in me conjured up by them. I cannot well articulate this lure of literature, but perhaps it's because it is impossible not to think while reading, and equally difficult not to feel. The barren spans in my life are inevitably periods when I'm not reading. 

Books are my friends and I number among my companions all types of literature, but the genre to which I'm most drawn is biography. This is no accident. One of my earliest childhood memories is of spending summers with my mother in the library at Trinity Baptist Church in Port Arthur. As church librarian, hers was a labor of love, but my experience was anything but work. I thrilled to the rhythm and rhyme of poetry, the uncertainty of mystery, the harrowing escapes of adventure, and my favorite immersion was into the juvenile section and a special edition of biographies written for children. Those orange felt covered hardbacks contained living documents about real American heroes: Walt Disney, Lou Gehrig, Daniel Boone, George Washington Carver, and others. I quickly developed an insatiable appetite for "story." I did not know then, but believe strongly now that I am compelled to inhale biography because narrative is always God-breathed. Created in the image of God who lives in perpetual relationship with himself, we are fashioned for relationship. This explains why it is one another's story that grips us and changes our own. My story is altered in some way by every story I encounter, for better or for worse. 

From where I'm sitting my gaze falls on the following biographies and autobiographies on my shelves: Bonhoeffer, Mandela, Franklin, Buechner, Tillich, Livingston, Einstein, Rockefeller, Wesley, St. Francis, Whitier, Tozer, Dinesen, Lewis, Marshall, Merton, Bush, Hemingway, L'Amour, to name only a few. Through ink on vellum these have been my mentors, teachers, confidantes, comrades, and friends. I suppose this is not so much because of what I have learned about them, but for what they have helped me discover about myself.