Need another reason?

A story from the famed basketball coach George Raveling resonates with me about an invaluable lesson from his grandmother who had raised him.

“Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?” she asked him when he was a young boy.

“I don’t know, grandma, he said.

“Because they knew the slaves wouldn’t open them,” she said.

There was a reason it was illegal to teach slaves to read.There is a reason that every totalitarian regime has burned and banned books.

George came to see reading as a moral duty. To not read, to remain ignorant, was not only to be weak–it was to ignore the people who had fought so hard, who had struggled at such great cost to read and to provide for future generations the right and the ability to do so.

It is worth pointing out today that money is still hidden in the pages of books, though not because someone put it there in order to keep it from us. Books are a very rich source of information. With every book we read, we get to learn.

The more we read, the more we know about different people, their behavior and experiences, different places, different cultures and facts that otherwise we would not have know. We can walk in someone else’s shoes.

There are ideas on how to get better at something, on how we can extricate ourselves from the cycles of mediocrity.

I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

from John Adams in The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

General James Mattis has pointed out that if you haven’t read widely, you are functionally illiterate. And we are all functionally illiterate about many things!

P.S. You may have heard the quote that “No man steps in the same river twice,” by Heraclitus. We can apply it aptly to re-reading! The books are the same, but we’ve changed, the world has changed, and thus all is changed. That’s why I have so many books–some have been read many times and others are just waiting to be re-read!