We Also Read to Heal

If we’re not taught to loathe reading from an early age, we soon find many reasons to read, including learning and enjoyment.

The first book I remember not buying was a thin paperback at the grocery store. It promised to explain how weather works, and I wanted to learn. I asked my parents to buy it for me, but they bought me a book about Native Americans instead. I cried. Then I read it and learned some things, but not about the weather.

The first book I remember buying for myself was a Hardy Boys book, The Arctic Patrol Mystery. A classmate loved the series and encouraged me to try it. In Kmart’s book section I chose the one with an airplane on the cover. The blue hardback cost less than two dollars. I eventually read the entire original series, all 58 mysteries.

Then as now, I enjoyed some of the books I read to learn, and I learned from many of the books I devoured for entertainment and escape. In The Arctic Patrol Mystery I learned about Iceland.

I also read to feel—not always to feel good. Last year I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s brilliant 2005 biography of Abraham Lincoln and his contemporaries, Team of Rivals. I learned plenty but also felt, among other things: recurring awe at the magnitude of Lincoln’s and others’ burdens and the imperfect grace with which they bore them; mounting sorrow and horror at the carnage of war and the tragedy of Lincoln’s murder; and deep frustration at how badly some things went after Lincoln, the price of which we still pay today.

I also read for connections, not just to connect with the author or observe connections between humans, but also to examine the connections between ideas, places, and events on one hand and human lives on the other. In December I finished re-reading a personal favorite, Vasily Grossman’s thick masterpiece, Life and Fate, an epic historical novel about freedom, tyranny, World War II, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. It has wit, human goodness, and moments of joy amid its dark themes.

I read to be a better teacher—of writing at conferences and scripture in Sunday School—and to improve my marketing and coding skills, with which I win my daily bread and fund my book habit.

I read to be a better writer. I just started the next in a stack of Chaim Potok novels. I’ll enjoy it, but I’m also studying Potok’s ability to write a quintessentially Jewish novel which speaks powerfully to Gentiles. What he does brilliantly, perhaps I can learn to do adequately with my own faith and culture.

Speaking of faith, I read to connect my mind and heart to God. I read scripture almost daily. Last year I read Secrets in the Dark, a book of beautiful, profound sermons by the late Frederick Beuchner, and a book on the New Testament by an old, splendid teacher of mine.

Beyond and between all that seriousness, I still read for entertainment and escape, though I have less to escape than some. Last year I reread novels by Tom Clancy and Jane Austen, among others.

Some read science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction for escape, and I’ve enjoyed my share. Others read these genres to think and feel. Stories about other worlds, times, and species can explore difficult questions about humanity, government, and even faith in ways which may be unwelcome in more realistic writing.

Among the many reasons to read, I recently encountered one I hadn’t thought about in a while: we can read to heal.

Celebrated kidlit author Katherine Paterson told a writers’ conference in Provo last year, “Books can be a rehearsal for the hard things we’ll meet in life.” She also said she was working on her last novel, in which someone named Bertie bargains with God.

I’ve been watching for it, so I noticed she has a new book out, and it’s not that. It’s nonfiction with a long title: Jella Lepman and Her Library of Dreams: The Woman Who Rescued a Generation of Children and Founded the World’s Largest Children’s Library.

Jella Lepman was a German Jew who fled the Nazis. She returned to Germany after World War II on a mission to help young people who had endured the horrors of war to heal and recover some sense of childhood by reading books. She amassed a roving library of 4,000 children’s books, which eventually found a home in Munich and has since grown past 600,000 volumes.

We all, not just the children of war, need to heal sometimes, if not continually. Which books can help which readers with which wounds, I cannot say. We discover them for ourselves, often as we read for other reasons but find ourselves healing too.

It comes down to this: books can only do these good things for us when we read them.

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Links are for illustration only. No affiliate income is involved. Image credit: ChatGPT.

This column originally appeared in the American Fork Citizen and the Lehi Free Press in April 2025. Reprinted by permission.

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From the Author

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If you’re interested in my published fiction, check out my two award-winning collections at 60 East Press.