I have a beef I'd like to share and it comes from my having been assigned to read Charles Dickens' Bleak House in 9th grade. I have loved reading ever since the Man in the Big Yellow Hat brought Curious George home with him. I can't remember a time since second grade when I didn't have a book going - usually more than one. I am so addicted that I refuse to be found without reading material. This passion flourishes in spite of whoever decided that a 14 year old would benefit from slogging through 517 pages of satire on the British Chancery. In the days of my recovery from that traumatic experience - when I was I5 and tearing through John Steinbeck, I blamed this act of intellectual aggression on the fact that I was going to school in Wayne County, WV. But this explanation is inadequate. I had several fine, gifted teachers in Junior High and High School. And here, in prosperous, cultivated, evolved Northern Virginia my seventh grader brings home a book by Witla Cather she has to finish by Monday. Cather is one of my favorite authors, and the book, My Antonia, is one I thoroughly enjoyed - when I was 32, not when I was 12. If she had to read a book by Wila Cather, why not assign her Shadows on the Rock, a book that is more simply written and about a girl just her age?

Kids who are 12 or 13 need to be taught to really read. I'm not referring to phonics or whole language (although this is too often the case). I'm talking about picking up a document and really comprehending it. If I were teaching middle schoolers to read I'd assign book a little below their level, and then challenge them to take that work apart - identify the themes, the patterns, plot the narrative arc, gather the wisdom, find the flaws. I'd rather my 12 year old reread Charlotte's Web, and really understand it, than get an A by memorizing and regurgitating Sparknotes, and come away hating Willa Cather novels, and perhaps even reading. If they want to challenge these kids with something a little above their level why not assign something short and simple, but that packs a wallop - like John
Steinbeck's The Pearl, Jonathan Swifts A Modest Proposal, or Yukio Mishima's Patriotism?

This matters. Too many peopie don't like to read. This means too many people don't read the Bible, or don't know how, or don't enjoy it. Since God speaks to us in a book, and Jesus is to he met in this book, how impoverished are the lives of those who carry around their own Bleak House Baggage? How many believe what others tell them the Bible says without finding out for themselves because they have been taught that reading is a bore and a chore?

Certainly Paul describes reading and comprehending the Bible a process that requires work, and an application of requisite skills (II Timothy 2.15). But that process is supposed to be a joy, a balm, an excitement (read Psalm 119 - even if you are in 7th grade).

My plea is that you give reading, especially reading the Bible, a chance. Don't reject the Bible and punish yourself because your lit teacher back in 1974 made you write a term paper on Paradise Lost. How can we learn, how can we grow, how can we change, how can we be pleasing to God if we don't pick up a Bible and read?

Oh, how I love your law. . . how sweet are your words to my taste! Yes, sweeter than honey in my mouth. Psalm 119.97,103