I am so glad God gave us His Word in a written format! We have a real, legitimate reason to teach our children to read. If our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, one of our chief goals in homeschooling is to enable our children to read His Word so they learn how to glorify and enjoy Him.
We love to read. We love books. We endeavor to instill in our children that same love of reading, and it thrills me to see them curled up on the couch, drinking in the substance of a truly good and worthwhile book.
Books enrich the vocabulary, give an intuitive grasp of grammar, and model correct spelling What dedicated reader doesn’t know a misspelled when she sees it?
Books exercise our imaginations, our attention spans, our narrative abilities, and our reasoning skills.
Books can broaden our perspective, helping us to better understand and apply the Golden Rule.
Books can show us life through someone else’s eyes, help us understand how others think and feel, and thus teach us how to prefer others above ourselves in our daily lives.
Books can foster fellowship through reading aloud or book discussions, or they can preserve a busy mother’s sanity (quiet reading).
Shhh! Don’t tell, but we even work a little “brain candy” into our book diet. We all enjoy Calvin & Hobbes for the uniquely 6-year-old perspective that Bill Watterson remembers well enough to convey to his readers. I suspect that our younger crowd sees the humor a little differently than do the big people in our household. There are jokes that go over the little kids’ heads. What goes under mine?
We love The Far Side because, well, if I have to explain then you’re probably just not a Far Side person.
Dilbert. Peanuts. Garfield. Many of our early readers cut their teeth on this fare. These all have a place in our carefully chosen collection. God has a sense of humor, and so should we. Look what he did to the Philistines in I Samuel 5-6. The Philistines might not have been laughing, but I’ll bet God was.
We think of books as our companions, and try to choose them with the same care that Proverbs exhorts us to use with our human companions.
I don’t think I could ever narrow my favorites to 20 books. Our house is a half-finished construction zone with one bathroom and only the barest essentials of furniture: 2 beds, 5 dressers, dining table & chairs, and 2 sofas…but we have 3 large bookcases (7′ x 4′), overflowing, with a constantly rotating selection of our best and dearest friends. We just purchased 2 more bookcases so a few more friends will be joining us in the house. Maybe we’ll put them behind the couch.
Ahhh. Books.

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