DOES ANYONE READ BOOKS ANYMORE??

Jim & I both grew up in homes where everybody was a reader. To be fair, it was clearly a time when there were a lot less distractions (we did at least have TV, albeit 3 channels, tops). And it’s possible that we weren’t all reading The Great Books, but both sets of our parents were voracious readers. Most of our siblings still are. One of my brothers is even an English teacher!

In my younger, more idealistic days, I cherished the thought of expanding my own children’s horizons by reading to them (a lot) from a very early age. Then I found homeschooling & the endless amount of amazing things they could be learning and opportunities that existed. Then reality set in. My sons are not big fans of book learning, I didn’t have the discipline to get the job done, & time went by too fast.

Now we can learn almost anything we need to know in an instant, from a computer we keep in our pockets. We are overrun with ways to entertain ourselves, & busy enough to never just have downtime. Unless we get intentional about it. I’m working on getting back to this myself. I have a stack of books ten deep beside my bed, but the surest way to put myself to sleep is just to open one of those books…

At some point recently our youngest asked me, “Why do we have all these books??” Appalled that he never even thinks about picking up a book, he got me thinking.  I had been tossing the idea of a bookshelf in the shop around in my head, but he gave me the push to see that I should be sharing some of them. Enter the Walnut Lane Lending Library! You won’t find too many of the classics, but if you’re interested in learning about regenerative agriculture, theories about eating, & a host of other things we find interesting, you might want to check something out. We’re just getting this going & I hope to add more as time goes by. We’ve even got a kids section with books written by South Dakota rancher Amada Radke! I’ll have a sign out sheet with the books & you can feel free to borrow; no fees or deadlines.

I hope you’ll take me up on this, or that my rant has at least inspired you to pick up one of your own books! Happy Reading!