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 not just a story. It 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 is not the reason anyone hands a kid a book, but it is 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 had not been read in decades. She kept every book she ever owned. I come by this honestly. The love of reading was the one good inheritance from a hard childhood, and it has lasted my whole life.
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 is true and worth repeating. But there is a quieter truth underneath it that I know firsthand. For some children, a book is not just an education. It 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 is 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 are not 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 did not. That is worth saying to anyone who fears that aging or failing eyes means the end of their reading life. It does not. The book finds another way in.
The Books I Loved as a Kid Do Not Always Hold Up
The books you loved at fifteen are not 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 is something a lifetime of reading taught me that surprised me. The books I loved as a child do not 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 do not. 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 did not belong in the story. And here is 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, which 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 is twice as long as it needed to be. Loving it once and seeing through it now is not a betrayal of my younger self. It is proof that my reading got sharper. Outgrowing a favorite is one of the quiet rewards of a long reading life.
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 am fascinated by the world and want to understand what is happening around me. Geopolitics and demographics especially, partly because they feed the Enemies of You series I am writing, of which I have 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 has a collection of short stories tracing the future of humanity from the day we leave for the stars to the day we are exterminated by aliens after conquering the whole galaxy. Santiago is the pinnacle of it. I have 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 the whole thing, a cornerstone of my library and not a cheap one. And here is 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 should not make sense. But it makes perfect sense to me, because I do not read for the genre. I read for the story. A good story is a good story, and that is the only category I actually care about.
How to Spend Read Across America Day
Read to a child, or get a book into a child’s hands. That is the whole point of March 2, and it is more powerful than it sounds. You will not always know what that book becomes for that kid. For some it is a fun afternoon. For some it is 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 are 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 have not 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 have changed. You might love it more. You might see through it. Either way, you will learn something about the reader you have become.
Books were my friends when I had few others, and they have 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.