Learning to read well is more like cooking a steak than you might imagine. In both cases it won’t really matter how hard you try, the tools you use, or even how gifted you might be, if you haven’t started with great ingredients. Just like a dollar-store patty done to a perfect medium-rare is as inedible as ever, a kid who rips through the same 10 Captain Underpants comics each night isn’t any more of a reader than he was back before he learned his ABCs.
It starts with good ingredients. There’s more than a million books published in English each year, and it’s a task to hunt down the very few good ones. Secular libraries and bookstores won’t help – they’re the ones pushing trash on our kids. There are a lot of conservative and Christian review sites, but too often they’re reviewing what’s popular, whether it’s good or not.
RP’s Recommended Reads is focussed only on what’s awesome. We’ve got hundreds of suggestions, covering all ages and interests. Some are important and even life-changing, while others are simply light-hearted entertainment. Both sorts are good, it’s just the former is like meat – we need it in our diet – while the second is akin to candy, which can be a delight and a joy, but we’ll get unhealthy fast if we turn it into our major food group. When we do pass along a chocolate-brownie-with-a-dollop-of-moosetracks-ice-cream-on-top suggestion, you can be it’s going to be amazing, and you shouldn’t be surprised if it also happens to have some vitamins packed in there somewhere too.
Even among the best books, some of are still going to be better than others. That’s why, moving forward, we’re going to give a rating for each book we review, and it isn’t going to be star system, or a one thumb vs. two thumbs up kind of thing. Instead we’re going to divvy them up based on whether they warrant borrowing, buying or giving.
1. Borrow
Some books are worth an investment of time, but don’t warrant a capital investment, or even more time spent rereading them – that makes them a good borrow, but not a buy. These are adventurous, bright, hilarious, and safe – none of that modern-day weird stuff – but they aren’t ever going to be mistaken for a classic. They could be good purchases for a Christian school library, for all the kids who just rip through one book after another and the librarians just can’t keep ahead of ’em. But it’s not good enough for your home library, which should be selective, stocked with the books you want them reading and rereading again.
2. Buy
Here we’re getting into books that are going to be read by multiple members of your family, and it just makes sense to have your own copy then. Or we’re getting into books that really should be read, for whatever reason – maybe to refine the palette, teach what the world’s really like, or just generally make one literate.
3. Give
Finally, we’ve got books that really must be read. We’re talking the kind of novel your spouse doesn’t need to read because you just had to share this great bit and that, until finally by book’s end you’ve read the whole thing to her. It’s the book you want everyone in your company to read so you bought it by the pallet. It’s the book your kids are not allowed to leave the house before they’ve read it. And even if your grandkids are far on the horizon yet, you already know what they’ll be getting from you for at last one of their birthdays. It’s the book you always have a spare copy on hand, in your car glove compartment, just in case you meet someone who hasn’t read it yet. It’s that book. There aren’t a lot of this sort. But we’ve found some, and we’re particularly eager to share these ones with you!
This is the beginnings of what’ll be a bit of a long-term project. We’re going to have to go through all our old reviews and insert this Borrow/Buy/Give rating right near the top. But we think it’ll be worth it. We’ve got all sorts of great books recommended here, and with this, we’ll be able to let you know which are the very best of the best!
