Day 8 – A book you love and one you didn’t

Day 8 – A book you love and one you didn’t

The first part of this question is easy – the book I love the most is the Bible. It’s one that I can read many times and keep coming back to as I learn more every time I read it. This year I’m reading it from cover-to-cover, something that I have done several times in the past. But rather than doing daily reading, or following some reading plan (as many in our church are doing this year), I’m reading in large blocks of time once a week or so. I only read when I have enough time to do either an entire book (or a large section of one for things like the Psalms). One of the things that I noted recently when reading in the Kings was a statement about a particular king, when it said of him that he died “to no one’s regret.” I thought, what a statement about someone’s life that he died in such a fashion. And thus what a challenge to me to make sure that is not something that anyone would say about me at the end of my life.

But about a book I didn’t love – I have to go back to my senior year of high school (1965-66). I was in the college prep group and was taking world literature. Our challenge for the year was to read as many books from a list that we were given as we could. Being the overachiever that I was, I read every one of the books (there were about 50 of them). They were of several genre, by authors from many countries, and include both short and long, plays and novels, older writings and fairly new ones. The one of the list that was absolutely the most boring book I have ever read was a biography of Queen Victoria. It was (appropriately) a black book of several hundred pages and covered the minutia of her long life. As instructed, I did read the entire thing, but it claimed a place in my memory of one that I would never read except under those circumstances for a class and certainly one that I did not love.