Jan. 1, 2023, column from the Amarillo Globe-News:

Reading books takes you to new places, deeper understanding

(Note: I mention below that I read seven books in 2022, and then I list eight. Sorry! I guess it actually was nine, because from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, I read 365 devotionals in Billy Graham’s “Peace for Each Day,” which my brother David gave to me. –Mike H.)

By Mike Haynes

                For someone who loves to read, I’m a terrible reader.

                What I mean is that I don’t travel through that many books each year, and for two reasons.

First, I subscribe to the newspaper – now the digital version – and go through it every day, and I get a few magazines in the mail. Plus, like many of us, I look at Facebook and go through emails that sometimes lead me to interesting stories or information. So more transitory sources of words steal time from books.

Second, I’m slow. I tend to re-read a sentence or stop and go back to a paragraph to be sure I got the meaning. It takes me longer than most people to finish a book.

I read portions of the Bible, but only once so far have I tried to go through it in a year. It took me seven years to get from Genesis to Revelation. My wife, Kathy, is about to embark on a Bible-in-a-year journey. I hope she does better than I did.

The thing about books is that, with exceptions, you get a deeper understanding of the topic or the emotions or the plot because the author has filled many more pages than a newspaper or magazine story, and the same material covered with video or audio, with exceptions, tends to be more superficial and not as detailed. I got a good idea of the faith of Bono, the rock star of the band U2, from a magazine story that covered 10 pages, including photos and artwork. It made me want to read Bono’s new book, “Surrender,” which has 576 pages.

I keep a list of books that I read each year, and for 2022, my list has seven titles. That’s a paltry number for true bibliophiles. But all of them are books that intrigued me. After seeing the titles or topics, I wanted to know more.

“Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” by Alexander Radishchev, was one of four books I read over three years because Kathy and I had planned since 2019 to take a river cruise in Russia covering that exact route. COVID and the Ukraine war ended those travel plans, but I learned a lot about 1700s Russia – and about human nature – from reading the book.

I’ve admired Christian author Philip Yancey for decades, so I had to read about his life in “Where the Light Fell: A Memoir.” The troubles he lived through as a child with a strict, fundamentalist mother were nothing like my own upbringing, but his reasoning for finally embracing a brand of Christianity that included more love and grace resonated with me.

I read local writer Kim Barlow’s “My Rehab Is Spelled J-E-S-U-S” so I could write a better magazine story about him. The short book opened my eyes to drug addiction and redemption and was special because I had discussed it with the author.

Kathy and I were blessed to visit Scotland in the summer of 2022, which made “Scotland: A Concise History,” by Fitzroy Maclean and Magnus Linklater fascinating to me even though the book is a little dry. More fun was “Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other,” a book written by actors Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish (with Charlotte Rather) about their TV show, “Men in Kilts,” which itself is a spinoff from the historical fantasy series, “Outlander.”

Our friend Mark sent me “Lennon, Dylan, Alice and Jesus: The Spiritual Biography of Rock and Roll,” by evangelist Greg Laurie and Marshall Terrill. As a fan of the Beatles and rock music in general, I was captivated by the faith – or lack of faith – stories of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper and other musicians.

Local professor Mary Dodson’s brief “Critical Race Theory Versus God’s Divine Law: Making a Choice” lays out the progression of socialist and postmodern influences that have led to the CRT philosophy in America. It makes a compelling case for the need to stop the downward spiral of our society.

                And I just finished “A Texan in England,” published by celebrated Texas author J. Frank Dobie in 1944 about his year as a visiting professor at Cambridge. It isn’t one of his best-known works – such as “The Longhorns” – but as a Texan who has visited England, I couldn’t resist reading it.

                When you like to read, it isn’t the act of reading that you like. It’s the facts and the stories and the sensations that the words give you that make you feel good. Reading does take you to new places.

                I hope I surpass seven books in 2023. The first one I plan to finish is “Letter to the American Church,” by Eric Metaxas, which was a gift from my mother-in-law, Peggy. And then there’s the one that we probably should go deeper into than we already have. The Bible has a lot of pages, but all of us should start a trip through it – even slow readers like me.