Book Girl: A Journey Through the Treasures & Transforming Power of a Reading Life by Sarah Clarkson.

Book Girl Discussion Question #2: In the introduction, the author identifies what she sees as the top three gifts of reading: it fills our hearts with beauty, gives us strength for the battle, and reminds us that we’re not alone. What gifts have you encountered from the reading life?

Sarah Clarkson actually terms these three desires “the wishes, the hopes that ache in my heart, . . . my prayers for you as this book begins.”

I want your heart to be stocked with beauty.

I want you to know you’re not alone.

I suppose if I were to talk about “book gifts” in the same manner, I would say:

I want you to know more than a single story.

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” ~Chimamanda Ngozi

I don’t agree with everything Ms. Ngozi says in this TED Talk, but I do believe in reading widely, wisely, and promiscuously, as John Milton famously advised.

I want you to see the amazing world that God created, in all of its beauty and brokenness.

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it was not IN them, it only came THROUGH them, and what came through them was longing. These things-the beauty, the memory of our own past- are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune which we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.” ~C. S. Lewis

Even if you are limited in your ability to travel or to communicate with people from all over the world, it is a good thing to be able, through reading, to see all the diversity and splendor and sheer goodness that exists in our world. It’s good even to see the different ways in which our world falls short of what God intended it to be so that we can perhaps in small ways begin to repair and rebuild and redeem what is shattered by sin. Books help us to see more, and know more, and be able to do more.

I want you to be challenged and comforted by the stories of other people.

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face…. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.
~Edward P. Morgan

The books I have read and the people I have known have made me into the person I am, for better or for worse. Of course, the Holy Spirit is making and remaking me also, but He uses books and people to do that work. Sometimes the books I read challenge my thinking or my actions, and sometimes the stories I read comfort and strengthen and encourage me, but always the best books change me and make me better than I was before I read them.

What about you? What gifts do you receive, or want others to receive, from reading?