Before Thanksgiving break, I generally encourage our students at Herbert W. Armstrong College to use the time off to catch up on reading assignments. In fact, one great challenge we face as teachers is in helping students develop a love for reading. As the late Prof. Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, students have simply “lost the practice of and the taste for reading.”

Bloom wrote that in 1987. Today, a generation later, we are reminded almost daily of America’s growing distaste for reading. Consider the staggering decline in circulation figures for most major newspapers. In just six months, during 2009, the average weekday circulation of 379 newspapers plummeted by 10.6 percent.

It would be easy to blame this disturbing trend on technology alone. It is true that many Internet users now rely on electronic editions of newspapers and magazines for their news. But as the Autumn 2009 print edition of Wilson Quarterly pointed out, most people don’t really read information on their computer screen. They jump from paragraph to paragraph, skip from one page to the next, and are often sidetracked by links and eye-catching advertisements.

“It is particularly hard to hold readers’ attention online because of all the temptations dangled before them,” the journal noted. For most, surfing the Internet is not reading—it’s skimming.

Books, on the other hand, are perhaps the safest bet when it comes to focusing our attention on actual study. But as with newspapers, many Americans seem to be losing their taste for book reading. According to a 2004 survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, between 1982 and 2002, there was a 10 percent decline in literary reading—defined as novels, short stories, plays and poems. At present, less than half of American adults read literature. While the decline is prevalent in all age groups, it is sharpest among those ages 18 to 24.

We have paid a heavy price for this aversion to reading. The more our interest wanes, the less informed we become—and the more we lose all sense of historical context. Without context, we are left with a culturally superficial society that lacks any real sense of purpose or hope.

For young people, the damage is especially tragic. “[T]he failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency,” Bloom asserted, “the belief that the here and now is all there is” (emphasis mine throughout). It is, indeed, fatal. Without vision, God warns, people perish (Proverbs 29:18). If our only hope is in the here and now, Paul wrote, we will end up “most miserable” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

But take heart! The way out of this miserable state of hopelessness is well within our reach!

Get Understanding

Proverbs 3:13 says, “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.” Wisdom and understanding are available to all, but we must be willing to go get it!

That requires diligent study.

This is why, when he was traveling abroad, the Apostle Paul advised his young assistant in the simplest and most straightforward way: “Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine” (1 Timothy 4:13).

Abraham Lincoln offered similar encouragement to a young man interested in becoming a lawyer. “Get books and read and study them carefully,” Lincoln said. “Work, work, work, is the main thing.”

Lincoln, of course, is famous for being self-taught. He had precious little formal education. But his appetite for anything printed was insatiable. While boarding with a family as a 19-year-old teenager, Ida Tarbell relates in her biography, Lincoln read until midnight every night, filling his notebook with voluminous notes, in order to get through the books of the house before he had to return home.

According to his law partner, William Herndon, Lincoln always traveled with copies of the Bible and Aesop’s Fables—and he read from them both over and over again. “These two volumes,” Herndon wrote, “furnished him with the many figures of speech and parables which he used with such happy effect in his later and public utterances.”

Perhaps more than any other single influence, it was Abraham Lincoln’s library that helped shape his character and generate his ideas.

Now, what about your library?

Don’t get me wrong. We’re proud of our website—no flashing lights or obnoxious ads, no sales pitches, and no gratuitous attempts to attract readers with trashy or trivial content. Just in-depth analysis of world events, as they relate to end-time prophecies, and Bible-based instruction on how God instructs man to live.

Still, though, our overall aim is for you to build your own library of printed works. This is why, even as other news sources downsize or eliminate print editions, we continue to expand our supply of books, booklets, magazines, reprint articles, correspondence courses and newsletters.

And the best part about it? Everything we print is offered free of charge. We even pay for the shipping. It’s all there—you just have to go get it.

If you haven’t yet, what are you waiting for?

If you have, then as millions of Americans fight traffic and spend hours standing in line this holiday weekend, anxiously waiting to purchase the latest technological distraction, why not avoid the hustle and bustle, save lots of money, and spend time catching up on your reading assignments?