I like reading. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I have a long list of books I want to read, but I wonder when I’ll ever get a chance to do so, and I’m sure many other books will be added to the list.
I have two categories of authors—classical and contemporary. Classical authors are all dead. Contemporary authors are for the most part still alive.
Most of my reading over the past five or 10 years has been classical books. I tend to go on binges of favorite authors. It started with Jules Verne. Around the World in Eighty Days has always been one of my favorite books. For a while I had to read everything he wrote. He wrote great stories, although sometimes he tended to describe things too much, especially in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Then a friend gave me some books by George MacDonald. I had to read everything he wrote. I think this year I completed reading all of his fiction. A few years ago I read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. I wondered why I hadn’t read more by him. So I began my quest to read all of his stuff. I still have a long way to go, mainly because his books tend to be long, and he wrote so many. I’ve read about seven of them. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are also among my favorites. Other authors are on my list of books to read.
Until recently my contemporary authors included Frank Peretti. If anyone would have told me about an author who was as good as Peretti, I would have thought, “Yeah, right.” Now I’m rethinking this attitude. Actually I wonder if it’s a good thing to have favorites, especially if it doesn’t allow others into my circle. A few years ago, I opened the door to try someone new. It began with Randy Alcorn, and that was good. Then more recently Ted Dekker. He’s had books out for a while now, but I hadn’t heard of him until about a half year ago, and now he’s my latest binge. The first I read was his Circle Trilogy, which was like reading C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy for the first time when I was enthralled with the imagination of a new world and a great story. Recently I read Robert Whitlow’s The List, and that was good.
The point of all this is that I’m learning and growing. All these writers have something to offer, both in the realm of imagination and enjoyment of a good story and in learning about how I fit in the plan of God. These people aren’t in competition. They complement each other, even though I might like one writer’s style above another, and some stories are just more interesting to me. Other readers might like other authors more, and that’s okay. For me, I just want to enjoy what I read, whoever it is, and try to learn from it.
I think I will have a series of blogs about some of the authors I’ve read, and this is somewhat of an introduction.
