For the Love of Books

Dear Book Lover:

Why do we love books so much?

            It sounds like a “duh” question, doesn’t it? After all, what is there not to love about books? Yet there are many people out there who don’t like reading, much less love it, who look at you and me as if we’re a two-headed monster.

            Of course, when we meet someone like that, it’s easy to launch into a lesson about all the benefits of reading, especially fiction: how it activates different parts of the brain, how it increases knowledge, how it improves empathy, how it boosts intelligence…Yada, yada, yada.

            But that doesn’t really get to the core, to the real reason we love books. There are many things which we know are beneficial, but that doesn’t mean we do them. Like exercise. Or obeying the traffic laws. Or doing housework.

            So why do we love books? Why do we choose to read over watching a popular television show or attending a sports event or going to a concert or taking up a hobby? Why do we love books so much?
            I imagine that there are as many answers to that question as there are book lovers in the world. Maybe more, if you are like me and have more than one reason.

            But if I had to pick one, I think the reason I love books—and story in general—boils down to one word: Hope. A good story provides me hope. Hope that good wins in the end, that love will be found, that justice will be served, that wrong will be righted, that my life has significance and suffering has a purpose, that where I live today in the messy, tangled-up middle is not where I will always be. And while I know that I may not see all these things in my lifetime the way many characters do in a book, it reminds me that my story is but one chapter, one scene, one page in God’s story—a story that ends, for all who follow Him, “and they lived happily ever after.”

            And how can you not love something like that?

Dreaming bigger, growing deeper
Chawna Schroeder

,