Books Were My Friends, and My Shelter
When I was a kid, books were my friends. Sometimes my only friends. And when I was reading, my father left me alone. A book was shelter.Share on X
When I was young, books were my friends. Sometimes they were my only friends. But they were more than company. They were protection.
I grew up with an angry and spiteful father in a house where the rule was that children should be seen and not heard.
They said it to me many times. So I learned to be quiet, and the quietest thing a child can do is read. When I had a book open, they left me alone, because a reading child is a silent child, and silence was what they wanted. The book kept me safe by keeping me quiet.
That’s not the reason anyone hands a kid a book, but it’s the reason reading saved me.
My mother was a reader too, and that mattered.
There were books everywhere in our house. When my parents passed away, the social worker mentioned one detail about my mother that stuck with me. She had a quarter of a storage unit filled with books. Most of them probably hadn’t been read in decades. She kept every book she ever owned. I come by it naturally. The love of reading was the one good inheritance from a hard childhood, and it’s lasted my whole life.
Watch: "Read Across America" - Lyric Video, Caleb Dirnberger
What Read Across America Day Is For
Read Across America Day falls on March 2, and it exists to get children reading and to celebrate the act of reading itself. Schools and libraries build events around it, and the core idea is simple and correct. Putting books in front of children changes their lives.
The literacy argument is the obvious one. Kids who read do better in school and in life. That’s true and worth repeating. But there’s a quieter truth underneath it that I know firsthand. For some children, a book is an escape, a companion, and sometimes a shield. You never know which kid is reaching for a book because they love stories and which one is reaching for it because it’s the safest place they have. Both kids need the book.
The day that gets it to them is doing more good than it knows.
Reading Now, With Older Eyes
I still love to read, even now. But I read less than I used to, and the reason is plain. My eyes aren’t what they were. Glasses, age, the simple fact that print gets harder to manage over time. Reading became a little tougher, the way it does for a lot of lifelong readers eventually.
So I adapted. I picked up audiobooks, and they help enormously, the same stories arriving through a different door. I also keep a collection of several thousand books on my e-reader, and I bring my tablet everywhere. A waiting room, a trip, any stretch of dead time becomes reading time. The format changed. The habit didn’t. Anyone who fears that aging or failing eyes means the end of their reading life should hear this: the book finds another way in.
The Books I Loved as a Kid Do Not Always Hold Up
The books you loved at fifteen aren’t always the books you love at sixty. Taste grows. Discovering you have outgrown a favorite is a sign your reading got sharper.Share on X
Here’s something a lifetime of reading taught me that surprised me. The books I loved as a child don’t always survive a reread.
Take Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.
I read it several times as a teenager and loved it. I read it now and I don’t. The book changes direction in the middle and goes wishy-washy, and it reads like Heinlein was working through some things on the page that didn’t belong in the story. And here’s a heresy for you. Everyone praises the rereleased edition that restores the editor’s cuts. I hate the extended version.
The editor who made those original cuts was smart and cut the right things. The shorter book is the better book.
Macroscope by Piers Anthony is another one. I read it three or four times and thought it was fantastic. Rereading it now, I see the problems. He set an entire space-based civilization just a few years in the future, in the 1990s. That was obviously ridiculous even when he wrote it. The book wanders into astrology and a dozen other things that have nothing to do with the story, and it’s twice as long as it needed to be.
Loving it once and seeing through it now proves my reading got sharper, and there’s no betrayal of my younger self in that. Outgrowing a favorite is one of the quiet rewards of a long reading life.
One set survived, and I want to talk about it, because it’s the counter-example to everything I just said.
I grew up on Dr. Seuss. My school ran a Scholastic book club, and every few weeks a thin newsprint order form came around the classroom. You circled what you wanted, handed the sheet to the teacher, and then waited. Weeks. There was a day the box finally arrived and the teacher opened it at the front of the room and called your name, and you went up and got your books.
I wanted the Dr. Seuss ones. Not books generally, those, off a list of dozens, every single time the flyer came around. If you’d asked me at eight what made them different I would have had nothing for you. They were incredible and that was the whole of my analysis.
They were wholesome and they were fun, and I don’t think those two words get used together often enough about children’s books. Wholesome on its own sounds like medicine. Fun on its own can be thin. Seuss did both at once, without ever once talking down to whoever was holding the book, and that combination is much harder than either half.
The animated adaptations were good too. That isn’t a sentence I get to write about most things I loved as a child. Usually the screen version is a disappointment you make excuses for. Those held their own.
I didn’t learn this until much later. A publisher handed Theodor Geisel a list of a few hundred words a first-grader could read and told him to make a book out of it, and that’s where The Cat in the Hat came from. Later somebody bet him he couldn’t do it in fifty distinct words, and he wrote Green Eggs and Ham to win the bet.
Neither of those books exists because Geisel had a free hand. They exist because somebody took the easy version away from him.
I spent thirty-three years watching the same thing in technical work. Hand a team all the time and money they want and you get the obvious plan, competently executed, and nobody remembers it. Take the obvious answer off the table and something appears that nobody would have picked from a menu. A raised floor tile buckling under a running computer produced better engineering than any planning session I ever sat through.
I haven’t opened one of those books in decades, and I’m not going to pretend I have. But I think they’d be great for children reading today, and I don’t say that about much from that era.
The word list is still a word list. A five-year-old in 2026 is working with the same vocabulary a five-year-old had in 1957, and a book built to be readable by that child is still readable by that child.
Most of what I loved back then has aged into something I can explain but not recommend. Seuss is the exception, and I think it’s because the thing making those books work was a man with a word list and a deadline having to be clever, and clever lasts longer than fond does.
What I Read Now, and the Authors I Love
My taste settled into a few deep loves. I read a lot of nonfiction now, because I’m curious about the world and want to understand what’s happening around me. Geopolitics and demographics especially, partly because they feed the Enemies of You series I’m writing, of which I’ve released eight of a planned twenty volumes.
In fiction, my favorite author is Mike Resnick, who has since passed away.
He wrote dozens, maybe hundreds, of books, most set in the same far-future universe that shifts and grows over time. He’s a collection of short stories tracing the future of humanity from the day we leave for the stars to the day we’re exterminated by aliens after conquering the whole galaxy. Santiago is the pinnacle of it. I’ve read that series something like forty times, and it never wears out.
I also love Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion saga, the sprawling multiverse where Law and Chaos fight across countless incarnations of one hero, Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, and the rest. The writing is a little stilted in places, but the scope is magnificent. I own the fifteen-volume White Wolf collection that gathers all of it, a cornerstone of my library and not a cheap one. And here’s the contradiction that makes me laugh.
I love well-written romance and I love westerns, which sit at opposite ends of everything, one coded feminine and one masculine. Liking both probably shouldn’t make sense. But it makes perfect sense to me, because I don’t read for the genre. I read for the story. A good story is a good story, and that’s the only category I care about.
How do you spend Read Across America Day?
Read to a child, or get a book into a child’s hands. That’s the point of March 2, and it’s more powerful than it sounds. You won’t always know what that book becomes for that kid. For some it’s a fun afternoon. For some it’s a door out, or a shield, or the start of a lifelong habit that outlasts everything else in their life. Hand over the book and let it do its work.
If you’re a grown reader, use the day to reconnect with the habit. If your eyes are failing, try an audiobook and discover the stories still reach you. If you haven’t read in years, pick one book and start. And if you want a small experiment, reread something you loved as a kid and notice how you’ve changed. You might love it more. You might see through it. Either way, you’ll learn something about the reader you’ve become.
Books were my friends when I had few others, and they’ve stayed my friends for a lifetime. Read Across America Day is a good day to make sure some kid gets the same head start, and to remember that for a certain child somewhere, the book you hand them might be the safest thing they own.