I absolutely love to read, but it took practice.

I used to hate reading… it took too much time, was highly noninteractive, barely held my attention, and seemed completely and totally pointless.  Being a computer programmer and hacker enthusiast, I’m often doing 10 or 15 different things all at once on my computer, several of them involving learning.  I was always learning though, always ready to try a new software application or work with a new programming language.  Learning is the core of a computer geek.  It’s what we do.  Well, that and then apply that learning into circumventing computer problems (or sometimes security).

So, to me learning meant scanning thousands of web-pages a day, pulling the few and far between crucial points of information, and then using it to accomplish the task at hand.  Geeks search through things, we don’t read through them.  If we can locate what we need by finding a keyword, then we work just towards that single point of information, gather it, and dispose of the rest.  Electronic information is completely and easily destroyable, totally worthless to store if it’s already on the Internet.  We know that we can find it again if we need it; we’ll just search with the same methods as we always do.  We’re efficient, clean, and smart when it comes to data harvesting.

But I started to see that I was only looking up information, finding specific facts, using them, and never gleaning the actual purpose of the article or website that I had tooled to my needs.  I wasn’t growing intellectually, and my mind simply knew what it had to and never had a changing or developing thought.  I simply knew the answer to anything I had a question to immediately, in much the same way I would find a quick solution to any problem of information through the Internet.  School wasn’t challenging, not even to the most menial extent.  Life had no questions that needed any intraspective thought.  My brain was the equivalent of an American couch potato.  It just sat, and …

So I picked up a book: “The Irresistible Revolution” by Shane Claiborne.  It’s not the book that saved my mind, hardly, but it’s still a great book.  Would I recommend it to anyone?  Nope.  All books have an audience that’s limited.  But I’d sure as hell recommend it to more people than most.  I loved the book; it challenged me, changed me, forced me to rethink my ideas about life and love, and inspired me to organize and lead a trip to Uganda through my school’s missions program.  It was a good book.  So what?  I went to the store, and picked up another.  Can’t remember the name of it to be honest, and I don’t think I ever even finished it.  But then I bought another, read it, hated it, but finished it.  Picked up another, loved it, lent it to a friend and never saw it again.  Purchased another from a friend’s recommendation, loved it, and have it on my shelf still to this day.  What was happening?  I was training myself to read.  I was disciplining myself to take time out of my horribly hectic day (ask anyone, I don’t have a minute to rest usually) and just sit and read and think and grow.  It was wonderful.  But every habit needs that one experience to seal it, to make it permanent.

While in California for a short spring break vacation, I found a book called “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World,” by John Wood.  Was the title horribly verbose and painful to read?  Yes.  The cover?  Even worse.  Picture this: a tackily dressed 40 year old man, standing next to a yak, loaded down with books, in the middle of a desolate town.  The only reason this interested me was the title; I’m a computer geek, we read these sorts of things on a whim.  We’re always looking to learn more information, so we at least give these sorts of things a chance.

The book changed me, to say the least.  Heck, it was so influential to me that I changed the entire purpose of the trip I was leading to Uganda, both for the team and for myself, changed my goals for the next 3 years of my life, and decided that I would not die without changing the world to the greatest extent I possibly could.  Read this book!  It was this book that set me on the course to love reading for the rest of my life.  Now I find myself with a list of books longer than I can count on back order to read.  I share the books I read, grow and learn from the stories they have, and push myself to re-think, reinvent, and redirect my life over and over again.  It’s absolutely amazing.

So, for this reason, I’m going to post book reviews as often as I finish them to hopefully encourage you to do the same.  Read about what I’ve read, and go and try a few of the books on for yourself.  You’ll fall in love with reading all over again just like I did.  I don’t just hope so, I know you will.  Because within us we all have a desire to have purpose, to grow, and to be the change that we want to see in this world (Ghandi).