Surprised by Books

On December 25, 1974, I received a note from Santa Claus:

Santa's elves ran out of copies of The Lord of the Rings. It's coming soon!

My actual boxed set!

Yes, that year Santa's elves failed to make enough copies of the J.R.R. Tolkien classic. The following weekend on a Friday afternoon, I slid The Hobbit from the boxed set you see to your left and began to read. I did not sleep that night, and when the winter dawn smudged my bedroom window, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas were pursuing a band of Uruk Hai across Rohan. Against my will, I slept briefly Saturday night, The Return of the King on my chest; Samwise and Frodo, exhausted and near death as they journeyed across the plateau of Gorgoroth inside Mordor, slept not at all. Early Sunday afternoon, curled up on an ugly green upholstered chair in a room in our house we called the den, I read Samwise Gamgee’s simple words, contained within the final line of the Lord of the Rings:

He drew a deep breath. “Well, I’m back,” he said.

I closed The Return of the King with a lump in my throat, slid the fourth book reverently back into the boxed set, removed The Hobbit again, opened it and started reading.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

I had been a steady reader until that Christmas weekend in 1974. From that point forward, voracious did not adequately describe my appetite for fantastic stories. I begin to spend hours at a used bookstore called Paperbacks Unlimited in Ferndale, Michigan searching for the same out-of-body experience given to me by J.R.R. Tolkien. I can still feel the anticipation riding the bus to that store. I spent countless hours moving down the two, long aisles designated for science fiction and fantasy, knowing that extraordinary civilizations, creatures and quests awaited me. I would gaze at the cover of a book that had potential, trying to divine if the next magical experience lay within.

(At this point, my teenage daughter says, “OMG, you were so a nerd loser.”)

I kept a journal wherein I recorded each book that I read over the ensuing years, an average of almost eight per month. Not all captivated me like Middle Earth, but some did: McCaffrey, Herbert, Zelazny, Donaldson.

I have been asked about the source of my creativity and ability to write. Without hesitation I answer: reading. I would go so far as to say that a good portion of the credit for my academic success can also be attributed to this magnificent obsession. And I would suggest that this is not just a curious side effect; reading formed the backbone for much classical education. My favorite theologian and one of the most skilled writers of all time, C.S. Lewis, describes the start of his higher education at the hands of his tutor, the Great Knock:

“I arrived at Gastons on a Saturday, and he announced that we would begin Homer on Monday. At nine o’clock [on Monday] we sat down to work in the little upstairs study which soon became so familiar to me...We opened our books at Iliad, Book I. Without a word of introduction Knock read aloud the first twenty lines or so in the 'new' pronunciation, which I had never heard before...It seems an odd method of teaching, but it worked.”

Reading is its own education: history, languages, geography, logic (deductive and inductive reasoning), art, poetry, creativity and more. As a passive physical activity, however, young men are by their natures less inclined to read, and this, in my opinion, carries an academic cost. When the lure of electronic entertainment is factored in, is it any surprise that young men are abandoning higher education? The current mix of male to female students in universities around the country is 43% to 57%.

Our host in this forum is The Reeve, and his goal is to turn the tide. The most beloved tutor your son could ever have is the fire of imagination described above...the good grades simply go along for the ride. My love of books and the wisdom of classical educators inspired the Climber Series, this website and my review of those classics that transported me to extraordinary places in my youth. C.S. Lewis describes the joy found in books:

“And one went back to the book, not to gratify the desire but to reawake it. And in this experience also there was the same surprise and the same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, 'in another dimension.'”

I hope the young readers in your life will be Surprised by Books as well.