At this point, I am pretty well settled into my life as a perpetual student. I am working on my second Master’s and first Doctorate degree and I hope that at the time that I have finished, I will have spent a total of 37 months getting these degrees. If you like math like I do or just know how upper education works, you’ll understand that those numbers do not exactly add up. I credit this to the amount that I have read. I would call myself a voracious reader and I think most who know me would agree with this description of myself.
In my life, I have read a lot of books. I enjoy cleverly crafted phrases, dialogue that brings tears, and characters that cause real change. Of the hundreds of books that I have read, there is one that I would encourage everyone to start with first. The book that I am going to recommend here is one that I found fairly early in my life and I wish I would have found it earlier. It is the book that changed my life and I will be eternally grateful for it the rest of my life.
To be fair, I have read a lot of boring books. I enjoy learning about boring things. I think most of them are important and enrich life. When something is boring, it often means that it is worth learning for the sake of helping yourself and those around you.
The reason that I like boring books is because I actually love all GOOD books (I do add the adjective “good” as a means of giving at least some bar for books to get over. There are plenty of books out there that are trash). I do credit my love of books to my 4th grade teacher. He was a crazy democrat that believed in global warming (I did not realize this in 4th grade), and he liked the broncos (which may have been his greatest fault). I vaguely remember cracking open our history, science, or math book a handful of times the WHOLE YEAR. He basically just taught the class literature (starting with Great Expectation by Dickens and Banner in the Sky by James Ramsey Ullman) and sentence diagramming. As a teacher now, I could not recommend what he did for other teachers to do, but I can recommend the results.
The results that he inspired in the class was a love of learning. He inspired me to love to read. He made reading actually COOL. This love changed my life and I have been blessed (my wife may say cursed because of how much time reading takes me away from her) by him.
Why do I write all this? What does this have to do with the first book that you should read? What all this has to do with is because I found this first book in his class. If you have stuck with me so far, here you go…
The first book you should ever read is the book that causes you to fall in love with reading.
It doesn’t have to be a great book, a classical, or the bible. Those are all good books and you should read your bible even if you hate to read. I have heard it said that leaders are readers and Christians are re-readers. You have to start somewhere though. It is always better to start in a downhill sprint than with your feet stuck in concrete. So start with the book that will inspire you to read. Once you build up some momentum, you can tackle some boulder of a book.