I'll be honest. I'm not much for non-fiction books. My wife loves books about leadership and how to better yourself, but I'm usually only after a good story. Nevertheless, every now and then I find myself cracking open a book that has some ideas on how I can be a better version of myself. And in the case of these three books, I actually listened. Here are three books that legitimately caused me to rethink my life.
The Enchanted Hour – Meghan Cox Gurdon
I finished reading this book just four months away from my wife’s due date for our first child, a little girl. I loved the message the author left for us, although I think there’s a simpler and more obvious moral behind all the anecdotes, experiments, and studies that she references.
The linguistic advantages of reading to your children make sense to me. If you read to your kids, they’ll know more words, be familiar with a wider range of cultural subjects, and they’ll probably end up using a more complex vocabulary. That’s all well and good, but whether my daughter (and whoever comes next) uses the word ‘frivolous’ regularly in conversation or not is of little consequence to me. I certainly want my children to speak thoughtfully and carefully, but my primary goal is for them to become good people. And I think that’s what the author doesn’t touch on enough. Many of the referenced experiments in this book look very similar. Each time, there’s a group of kids. Some are read stories, and others are given the same material in a different way. Every time, the author proudly shows us, the kids who have more human involvement in the process do better. A kid who is read a story will show more brain activity than a kid who watches the same story on TV. The author attributes this to the magic of reading time, which I suppose is correct. But the magic of reading time is not a mystery – it’s love. Throughout this book, I saw parents who held their children in their arms and spent time with them. When parents made a regular commitment to reading with their children, they found that they spent more time with them – and that the children benefited as a result. The author gets into the science of this over the course of the book: how spoken word lights up a child’s brain, how pictures help them make connections, and so on and so forth. But the heart of it, I think, has to do with love. When you spend time with your kid, you love them. When you love your kid, they learn that they are loved. And when a person is loved, they become capable of amazing things.
I loved reading this book, and it was an informative and engaging read. I will read to my children as often as I can, in part because of this book but also in part because I love books and want to impart that same love to my kids. But I know that the true value in reading to them will not be so much the reading as it will be the transmission of one simple message from me to them: I love you.
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up – Marie Kondo
In January 2019, a small Japanese woman swept the globe. It was the month that the Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo was released, and Jenna and I were one of the millions of people who watched it. Basically, Marie Kondo is a Japanese Mary Poppins. She’s a quirky, lovable, whimsical woman who came into a new family’s house every episode and helped them clean out their lives. There’s something oddly entrancing about the way she gets down on the floor and starts folding up clothes, self-narrating with a smile. Jenna and I loved it.
Our friend Melina lent me the book that Marie Kondo published before this show – the book that sold well enough to merit the release of a Netflix program. I never imagined I’d ever willingly read a book on how to clean up, but here I was.
As far as self-help books go, I’ve actually changed as a result of reading it, which is more than many books can say. Marie Kondo’s way of folding clothes is efficient, neat, and it looks great. She goes over it in her book, and after I finished it, I went through my drawers and re-folded all of my clothes the Kondo way. They’re still like that, which shows how much it actually works.
She has a lot of ideas on how to tidy up certain spaces in your home, like that drawer in your kitchen filled with all sorts of random junk. That drawer is still messy for me, but it was nice of her to try. The one thing I disagreed with was her opinion on books. She says to keep your books in a BOX in the back of your closet. EXCUSE ME? How am I supposed to flaunt my massive literary intellect if I’m hiding my books away?
There’s also a bit of a spiritual component in here that Christians should be wary of. She doesn’t ask you to pray to your clothes or anything, but here and there in the book she equates the cleaning of your space to a spiritual cleansing. It wasn’t anything that made me uncomfortable – obviously her and I have different perspectives on what spirituality means, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn a thing or two about organization.
I’d actually highly recommend this book, whether you have a messy house or not. And if you’re not much of a book person, give her show a shot first to test the waters!
Be Our Guest – Theodore Kinni
I’ve always admired people who had the courage to underline or highlight lines in their books. I’ve always been too nervous to do it. I don’t want those highlights ruining the book or distracting from the reading experience. I like keeping my books in good shape. But with “Be Our Guest”, I couldn’t keep from scribbling all over it. There’s so much good stuff in here about making your environment one that people will want to come back to. The lesson that’s stuck with me the most since reading this has been as follows: “It’s the little whispers that speak to an audience...if the little wows are delivered consistently and continuously, they add up to a big WOW!” When I’m telling a Bible story to our students in kid’s church, or teaching a literature lesson in an eighth-grade classroom, or helping out at a young adults event, I think often about those words. What little things can I add to my performance/atmosphere/etc. that will come together and really capture the attention of the people in mind? If you’re looking to take your community to the next level – whether that community is a church, classroom, coffee shop, or car dealership – this book will really show you how to do it with the level of excellence that Disney puts into their theme parks. This was a highly informative read.
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