I’ve been re-reading one of the earliest books I remember cracking open and really loving, and one of the books that got me really into reading for the first time- Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen”. The book’s main theme? A couple of religious young men fight to maintain lives of faith while also trying to figure how to live successfully in the world. The book’s theme, characters and writing grabbed me as a teen- and they remains just as meaningful to me at this point in my life. Either some of the issues dealt with in the book are “timeless”, or I really need to grow up.

I think it’s a casualty of living in an internet world, but I often find it challenging to muster up the focus needed to read a book these days. I suspect this is because I live and work right up against the interweb, and consequently, my information-collecting tools have morphed. I am trained now to only read headlines and short paragraphs and snippets as I dart from web page to web page collecting the relevant information I need to know throughout the work day. My daily conversations with others have also shifted to largely becoming short-burst exchanges facilitated by the text messaging app on my phone. I write a line and send it to someone, and I am off to working on something else until they ping me back with some brief reciprocation and request. Back and forth the little information packets fly, and in the meantime, my mind is flitting about frequenting 4 or 5 other sources of stimulation or information as well. No wonder so many of us moderns develop attention disorders.

Regardless of how conditioned we are to live off of the info-byte now, though- snacking on tweets, posts, blogfeeds and emails- our minds need the meatiness of books to help us wade into the deeper things of life.

Books ground us.

Books make us stay on a mental course for an extended duration. Books engage us at deeper and broader levels within our hearts and souls than web bytes do. Books require personal commitment, personal involvement, and a sort of personal intimacy that data on the web just cannot demand. Books ask us to give them our full time and attention- which is probably why they are usually so rewarding for us as we read them, and when we finish them. Through them, we undergo a journey, and when we have completed reading them, we have been challenged and often changed. Web content is less prone to have that impact on us.

And so I am back reflecting on the fact that I go through phases with reading, and often I find I cannot read “well” unless my mind is at a place it can sit down in a book.

“The Chosen” is probably the first book I read as a teen that I full sat down in, and through which I realized that books are meant to be travelled through. “The Chosen” is also the first book I ever read in which, after I finished it, I wanted to read more by its author. I wanted to read everything else by its author.

Luckily, Chaim Potok had written a sequel to “The Chosen”, which meant I got to hang out with its characters through another phase of their lives. And he ended up writing two books about Asher Lev, another character who faced some of the same issues that Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders dealt with in “The Chosen” and “The Promise”. And then Potok wrote a number of other books that were equally inviting and engaging to me.

Potok taught me how to enter a book and sit down fully into it, and for that lesson, to him as an author I am grateful (besides the worlds his writings led me through).

I am finding I am doubly enjoying re-reading “The Chosen” now, because I am years away from when I first read the book, and I am reading it with fresh eyes. I am seeing new things about the book’s characters and concerns that I didn’t pick up as a teen- because I am at a different place in life now, with different interests and understandings about life now that I didn’t have as a kid then. But I am also realizing as I re-read this book, I am also getting to revisit a little bit of who I was as that teenager then. I am rediscovering what in the book made it so important to me as a young man, because it undoubtedly raises again, as it once raised before, questions and thoughts that were meaningful to me understanding me. I am reminded about what was important to me as a teen, which helped me make the decisions I have to become who I am today.

So, as I read and enjoy this book, I am reminded of the many other moments when I have discovered the space in my mind and the time on my hands to read a good book, and how rewarding reading is.

And I make a toast. “Here’s to less neural nibbling and mental malnutrition.”

Here’s to more reading and less surfing.