AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Sunday 31 January 2010

I tell my own graduate students the same thing - to invest in books. They are our tools. A mechanic has his set of wrenches; a doctor has his stethoscope; a chef has his cookware. Those of us in ministry, or scholarship (and ideally they are joined at the hip), have our books. When I “require” books for my students, my intent is simple: these are worth not only reading, but owning. Buy them. Build your library. It is your armory. But let’s return to the book as a physical manifestation. Because it’s not just its content - it’s the importance of the book itself. I love the feel of a book, holding it in my hands, smelling the paper and, if old, the dust and age. I love marking it up, highlighting key passages and annotating it along the sides. Which is why I never lend a book - if lost, it would be far more of a loss than the mere price of its replacement. I would lose my engagement with the work, the conversation I had with the author that had been recorded in my written interaction on its pages. Unless engaged again in the same manner, I would never be able to pull it off of the shelf and, in the span of a half-hour or so, reacquaint myself with the entire dialogue and gain from it all that it had bestowed upon its initial reading. James Emery White

A GNT creation ©2007–2011